Comedy and Realism

Miss G. B. Stern’s adroit modern comedy, Oleander River (Macmillan, $2.50), includes among its minor characters a minor novelist, Ellis Coverley, who is a sort of Warwick Deeping; and you may believe that he is not there to be admired or tenderly dealt with. ‘He had written,’ we are told, ‘forty-two novels, and there was not a pin to choose between them. He could relate quite a good romantic story (but only one) laced with quotations and whimsical allusion, and brought it invariably to a sad ending which was nearly happy, or a happy ending which was almost sad. He was, in fact, a most respectable merchant of dope.’

Some of these light barbed shafts float back and land disconcertingly close to the sender. For ‘romantic’ read ‘ironic’; for old-fashioned quotation and allusion substitute their fashionable present equivalent, the knowing patter of the self-exiled sophisticate whose chief occupation is exhibiting his semi-secret Weltschmerz through the transparent veil of a crooked smile and a quip à la mode; let the rest stand about as it is; and the cartoon is not too remote from the skillful and popular author of Oleander River itself in the several years since she abandoned glow for glitter.

Miss Stern has not, of course, put forty-two brightly indistinguishable ironic comedies behind her, but at the present rate she is bound to get there. The really great difference between her and her Ellis Coverley is that he is merely an earnest, sentimental fellow doing his best — a harmless ass consistently getting out the ridiculous utmost that is in him. If it had ever been in him to write The Matriarch, as it was once in Miss Stern, we could find more virtue in the implacable satire with which he is bludgeoned every time he raises his fatuous head.

Centrally, Oleander River is the story of a very young girl who loves the father of the boy who loves her. Its chief comic effects are the self-pitying outcries of the boy’s wounded egoism when he finds out (a) that his own doctrinaire modernism about sex has helped drive the girl to a cheap and senseless adventure in the arms of a casual stranger (he had confidently expected her to fall into his own); (b) that his chief importance to her all along has been that of her one strong social link with his father; and (c) that this enigmatic father whom he has patronized for his outworn, hidebound, squeamish notions about sex has really been all the time the modern emancipated man of the two.

Twenty-year-old Piers Rae is, in short, one more specimen of the blindly sentimental egoist in the young and vociferous stage of selfdelusion. What he wants is to eat every kind of cake there is, yet have it still. And therein he has a trifle of likeness to his creator, whose pattern of irony gives her at once all the popular appeal of specializing in brilliant snobbery and all the credit of seeing through it. The whole deft performance is rather like a first-class exhibition of figure-skating, and it becomes as dreamlike the instant you emerge from it into the climate of reality.

On these graceful arabesques no novel of 1937 turns quite so withering a blast of reality as Slogum House, by Mari Sandoz (Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50). Here, in a frontier chronicle not for the sensitive, are all the brutal realities achieved in a long lifetime by a large and primitive clan whose leading spirits, when not actuated by mere cowardice, dishonesty, or vengefulness, are driven by the three grander vices of lechery, cruelty, and greed. Ruedy Slogum, titular head of the clan, is a gentle soul without guile, but he is trapped at eighteen by Regula Haber, called Gulla, daughter of a sodden Ohio family of river rats, and from that moment he has no more to say about anything important to him than the webbed fly has about the doings of the spider.

Gulla, after some false starts, spins her permanent web in the Niobrara valley of Nebraska. She uses her sons to rustle cattle and steal everything that anyone leaves loose within a night’s ride. She turns her two pretty daughters into prostitutes to catch the favor of a sheriff, a judge, and other men whose opposition would endanger her ambitious plans. The talents of her less ravishing older daughter, an accomplished cook, she uses to help draw the transient cowboys and freighters for whose dollars she has turned Slogum House into a tavern that includes a brothel.

From first to last her only philosophy is that hard winters make fat coyotes, and she is always the coyote. Young, middle-aged, and old, she is one of the most horrible and at the same time one of the most real human creatures in literature.

Slogum House is more than a chronicle of violence, chicanery, and lust. Probably the most exhaustive fictional presentation there ever was of the seamy side of frontier life, it is a slice of authentic American history from the later sod-house and homesteading era down to the first election of Franklin Roosevelt. It has its idyllic characters and interludes, and some of these touch the heart almost as powerfully as its uncompromising horrors and obscenities smite the stomach. Throughout, even in the passages where it becomes hurried and anecdotal and the other passages where it weakens its strongest effects by trying to repeat them, it is a narrative of altogether extraordinary power — power to excite, to infuriate, to sicken, to compensate, but above all to hold.

There are readers whom it will gratify beyond any American novel of its time, and there are others whom it will merely appall. The only reader impossible to imagine is the one who can turn its pages unswayed by some extreme of emotion almost as violent as the actions and passions it records.