First Person Singular
During the last two decades I notice that men have written rather pessimistically about the United States while the women have held to a more spirited and optimistic view: Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck against Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Willa Cather, and Edna Ferber. In Show Boat (from which, with the help of Jerome Kern, came the most appealing American opera in existence), in So Big, and in Cimarron, Miss Ferber has stressed with genuine feeling the exuberance, the fearlessness, and the roving instinct which make us what we are.
Her new novel, Saratoga Trunk (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50), is a romance in two acts, the first laid in New Orleans of the eighties, the second in Saratoga of the same vintage. The leading lady, Clio Dulaine, is the daughter of a New Orleans aristocrat and his French mistress. Brought up in Paris, she aims to have her revenge on the society that exiled her mother, and she has a picturesque ally in Clint Maroon, a six-foot Texas gambler whose father has been cleaned by the railroad barons and who is now gunning on his own. Her bodyguard consists of two: Kaka, her dark maid, cook, and confidante, and Cupide, the Negro dwarf and groom. So attended, Clio invades first New Orleans and then the United States Hotel in Saratoga.
The theme — as Colonel Maroon, now a millionaire, proclaims it in his opening interview with the press — is honestly American. For he has no false pride about how he got his millions and doesn’t forget the scars his kind left on this country. But it is the development of this story that troubles me: in it I miss Edna Ferber’s homely knowledge of city and country; I think she lost the chance to play up our special brand of integrity, and at the end I am left wondering if the author really cares deeply for any of the people in this book.
The novel wears too much make-up: Clio is play-acting too often, Clint is too stagey a Texan, and the millionaires at Saratoga are comedians — not people of power. Despite Mrs. Bellop’s breezy candor, despite the delectable food and the charming clothes, despite Clio’s Parisian turn of phrase, there is throughout an unmistakable trace of musical comedy in this prose.
The publishers have called Mrs. Appleyard’s Year (Houghton Mifflin, $2.00) a novel, but personally I doubt it. What Louise Andrews Kent has given us is a very flavorsome slice of life. Like Donald Moffat’s saga of the Mott family, this book comes delightfully close to home. The Motts happened to be living in pre-war France, while Mrs. Appleyard has her affiliations in the Boston and Vermont of today; in each case we have a family narrative which without ever being spectacular steadily enlarges our appreciation of the day-to-day existence, and which in its touches of tenderness and irony increasingly draws upon our affection. Refreshment can sometimes be had in a small container.
As an author myself, and as one who made several attempts to define American humor on the airways, I claim to speak with some authority when I say how beguiling is that Subtreasury of American Humor (Coward-McCann, $3.00) edited by E. B. and Katharine S. While. These two, whose teamwork has been so indispensable a part of the New Yorker’s success, have again shown their editorial genius by selecting and arranging the best assortment of laughable Americana I have ever seen. The Preface is a model of what such things ought to be, the arrangement is appetizing, not academic, the quaint pieces retain their spontaneity, and the tips at the foot of the page are all the nudge you need. ‘Humor,’ writes E. B. W., ‘can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.’ But these pages jump spang into your eye, and they are funny! That’s enough.
It is not easy to attempt a contemporary judgment of That Day Alone, by Pierre Van Paassen (Dial Press, $3.75). The man is white-hot in his condemnation of the cruelty of our time. Now he is reporting what he himself saw of the self betrayal of France; now he is fabricating — I sup pose from personal sources — a picture of a Dutch village as it suffers the German occupation; now in his imagination he sits beside a German U-boat commander; now he rationalizes about Hess’s visit; now he envisions what must be done for our future. Intensity is the one element common to all these segments. You feel that the man is driven to write, and that in his urgency he sometimes hurtles over the boundaries of plausibility. Certain stories — as, for instance, those of Verdun — have clearly been enlarged in the telling. But more important than this or that detail is the moral force, the fiery anger, with which the author high-lights the brutality abroad. A missionary like Mr. Van Paassen might stand a chance of converting Messrs. Wheeler, Nye, and Wood to a firmer understanding of what Naziism really means.
EDWARD WEEKS