America in Fiction

IF the relation between American novels and American life has never been a satisfactory one, the blame does not lie wholly with the novels. As long as the national ethos rated failure chief of crimes and doubt chief of sins, and classified novels as ‘summer fiction,’ if is difficult to see what else could be looked for. There have been indications, however, that our naivete might be giving way to adolescent self-consciousness; and the material reverses of the last five years apparently tend to hasten the process, though the most exuberant optimist would hesitate to prophesy that maturity is just around the corner, or that the riddles of the Virgin and the Dynamo are likely to be solved in our time.

Meanwhile it is interesting that such a novel as Green Light, by Lloyd Douglas (Honghton Mifflin, $2.30), should undertake to deal at all with the problems of general futility and personal failure. Characters and setting are staples of the feuilleton: beautiful society girl, orphaned and penniless; brilliant young surgeon, quixotically shouldering responsibility for his superior’s fatal mistake; saintly Dean llarcourt feeding a hungry flock; erring, golden-hearted Sonia Duquesne; and a red setter whose intelligence and discrimination indicate its tragic end to the least suspicious reader.

Mr. Douglas is himself a clergyman, who has now, according to his publishers, renounced his pulpit in order to reach a wider public with the message that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. His sincerity is so patent that one would like to accept his message with a better grace. However eagerly one may agree with his estimate of the individual’s place in the ‘ Long Parade,’ however earnestly one may believe that orthodox churches transmit a heritage whose value is still unrecognized, there is a flavor of spiritual Fascism in Mr. Douglas’s solution of his puppets’ problems that not only underlines their lifelessness but alienates the reader. Failure is no crime to Mr. Douglas, but doubt, one suspects, is still a sin.

The preaching in Berry Fleming’sSiesta, (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50) is confined to the legitimate efforts of the Reverend Riley All and the brethren of the Tabernickle during a summer of drought in a small Alabama town. Mr. Fleming accepts failure and futility as the common lot with a casual lightness that might, equally well indicate personal security or the attitude of the well-brought-up when they find themselves obliged to refer to private disaster in general conversation. His relation to his narrative is that of a silent Balieff, lifting the curtain on the inhabitants of Georgetown at whatever moments he thinks will best enable us to seize for ourselves some fleeting aspect of life. It is apparently not so much life that, interests him as the process of imprisoning reality for an instant under his net. The immobilizing pin and cork are discarded, since they would destroy the object of his quest ; they would, of course, also oblige Mr. Fleming to admit by implication that be expected to be taken seriously. Whatever dictates his choice of method, for brief instants we come into something approaching real contact with Austin Toombs undone mentally and physically by the lotus, and Pavinovsky, who has left celebrity behind in New York to be reduced day by day to his childhood status of the shoemaker’s son; with Mattie Small, colored, whose business requires her to live near the unsavory canal and to move often; with Susan Tannahdl, behind whom the ghost of the immortal Miss Wilberforce seems to hover. The echo of South Wind at times distracts the reader’s attention from the essential qualities of Mr. Fleming’s observation, but it is on the whole an agreeable distraction, and the novel may be commended to readers who are inclined to shy off the conscientiously ‘regional.’

Edna Fcrber’s latest, Come and Get It (Doubleday, Doran, $2,30), is both regional novel and family chronicle the saga of a Wisconsin lumber barony, compiled with all Miss Ferber s talent for richness of local color and abundance of detail.

Barney Glasgow, as we meet him coming down his magnificently carpeted black walnut, staircase to breakfast in the autumn of 1907, is a shining figure of success. He has risen from shanty boy to millionaire; he has married well by the standards of Butte des Morts, for the waspish impeccable Emma Louise is his late employer’s daughter and heiress; his son Bernie, personally antipathetic, is nevertheless following dutifully in his father’s footsteps; the scope of his financial enterprises is broadening from year to year in spite of the socialistic susceptibility of T. R.’s administration to certain methods of founding a fortune. The only weak spot is his personal life, and that he intends to complete through Lotta Lindbeck, the eighteen-year-old granddaughter of the Swedish lumberjack who had been bis earliest friend. Barney’s plans for Lotta represent to him romance; to Lotta, hard and lovely, they represent her chance in life. Waiting on drummers in the Iron Ridge Hotel has taught her a good girl’s market value, and she intends to get all she can for herself if possible without depreciation. Barney’s death in a boating accident is an anticlimax in disaster compared to his discovery that Bernie has outdistanced him with Lotta, in whose clear mind an old man and money weigh lightly against a young man and matrimony — with the prospect of the money to come.

At this point Lotta takes over the book: rejected by Butte des Morts, she lays successful siege to New York, London, and Paris. Not until 1929 cheeks tier triumph does she discover that her cosmopolitan children are in love with Butte des Morts and the life it stands for. Their ardent trust in America’s future is the climax to which 500 pages have led; futility and failure are vehemently denied, yet we close the book with the feeling that something very important has eluded us. Is it because Miss Ferber has corrected the tendency of chronicle to sprawl by imposing too rigid a form, too neat a tying-up of bowknots? Or are we all suffering from a confusion between physical resources and spiritual riches? Or could it be that, in all this profusion of fact, reality has escaped again ?

MARIAN VAILLANT