The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

To EVERY American boy the fall means football. I remember how October came in with the smoky days and the smell of burning leaves. Fall meant the swiping of wooden fences and gateposts, even of an old outhouse for the big bonfires on Halloween; it meant the little charcoal brazier on the street corner where you bought the roasted chestnuts which kept their heat so long in your pocket. But chiefly the fall meant football and for me the Saturday trip to Princeton.

Princeton is a lovely spot in the autumn and to a prep school boy a place for hero-worship. I used to go down religiously on the 9.01 every Saturday. My mother insisted on my carrying a box lunch. I of course was heartily ashamed of it, hid it under the seat, and left it there as I scuttled off. Why worry, one of my heroes would feed me at his Club.

Immediately on arrival I would buy a copy of the Daily Princetonian and dope out my schedule for the day, which would begin with the freshman football game in the morning and never slop until the last act of the Triangle Show. My tickets to the game came free because in those days prep school boys were given passes; and as for my food, I sponged it from those wearers of the “P” whom I had been following at a respectful distance the previous summer. I must have been an incubus especially when they had a girl along, and I now apologize.

Boy, to walk along Nassau Street at 10.30 on a football morning, not a cloud in the sky, and the sun taking the frost out of the ground! Pictures of the football squad were in every window and you always stopped and studied the full-length portrait of the Tiger captain. Now you had your pass, you had your date for lunch, 85 cents in your pocket and Princeton was sure to win! You paused at the Jigger Shop and took in a cherry jigger. That left a balance of 70 cents. Why worry!

So it was that I saw Charley Brickley kick five field goals against the Princeton freshmen; I saw Eddie Hart in the line, Tol Pendleton defending against one of the first forward passes, and Bush Dunlap going down under a punt; I saw Hobey Baker drop his head in his hands as he watched Pumpelley’s 47-yard kick hit the crossbar and topple over to tie the score for Yale; I saw Sam White’s run against Harvard. It is all as clear as yesterday, in those soft, smoky tones of the fall, a romantic picture which will always be preserved as such since I eventually went to Cornell to study Mechanical Engineering and to Harvard to study English.

But as we grow older the urgency for football is replaced by a feeling more difficult to define. As a young bachelor I remember remarking lo a slightly older couple that October was so “poignant,” and when they laughed I of course fell self-conscious. But what other word so expresses the feeling which invades us in Indian summer? The season itself is like no other season in no other country. The senses are all challenged for there has been a change in color, fragrance, and temperature. Even the air tastes differently. Now we see the maple in flame, the yellow beech, and the sumac; the purple asters at the roadside and the pheasant exploding out of a thicket; the apples and the golden clusters of pumpkin at the roadside stand; the long V’s of the geese, and the huge high swarm of grackle passing overhead, voluble and obedient; the harvest moon, and next morning the print of deer in the moist path behind the barn.

It is a feeling stronger than regret which pierces us while we gaze at the fullness of flood tide in the marsh; the cold reaches through our summer clothing, and with a sigh of retreat we turn indoors to light the open fire. In the fall we quicken because we suddenly realize how little of the year is left. With this comes the urge to step off time’s treadmill and be our other self. If a man wants to make his real bid, the fall is the time.

Very rarely does an actor succeed in retelling the past. Living as he does with such intensity in the present and dedicated to the old tradition that the show must go on despite the nervous drain of hard travel, heady applause, and incessant personal Friction, the actor commonly keeps little record of his ups and downs, and when he looks back it is all too often to record a bloodless itinerary of first nights, of parts which were successful and so ran on too long, and of failures which he would prefer not to recall. The two exceptions in our time aec Present Indicative by Noel Coward and Sacha Guitry’s, autobiography, If I Remember Right, but even here, since an actor more than most artists is a dual personality, the private life, the life without grease paint, is subordinated and overshadowed by what is taking place on the stage.

In Family Circle (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) Cornelia Otis Skinner effects a happy balance between the glamour of the footlights and the unrehearsed anxiety and affection of an actor’s family. She is recounting the zestfull, magnetic career of that matinee idol and great romantic, her father, Otis Skinner; the resourcefulness and charm of her actress mother, Maud Durbin, who retired from the stage and settled down in Bryn Mawr when Cornelia herself was, so to speak, in the wings; and her own irrepressible ambition to prove her father wrong when after one painful school play Otis was heard to remark “in that voice which could spread through the topmost gallery, ’Well, Maud, she certainly has no talent — thank God!”

The portrait which she draws of her father is an endearing one. The star who never really seemed to cash in despite his hits; the trouper who played more one-night stands and made more life-long admirers in the sticks than any other actor of our time; the devoted husband who was never too tired to write his wife the gay chronicle of his ups and downs; the father who could still play the part of a great lover at sixty-six and who at the end of that very play, Blood and Sand, had the first-night satisfaction of leading his daughter out for a curtain call, squeezing her hand, smiling, and then saying as he waved her off the stage, “Well, Miss, you’ve made your New York début. From now on you’re on your own,” — Otis Skinner comes to us in affectionate tones as an actor who had played with the best, who had mastered an enormous repertoire, and who in his best parts dominated the stage.

He was the leading man for Madame Modjeska when he first met young Maud Durbin. He played opposite Ada Rehan when she was eating her heart out for Augustin Daly, and again years later when after Daly’s death she was so unsteady in The Merchant of Venice that it was an ordeal to support her; he played with Joseph Jefferson in an all-star production of The Rivals, with Edwin Booth, and in many a play with John Drew; he was managed by Charles Frohman, that elusive figure, in The Duel and The Honor of the Family; and in Kismet, which was to be his great run of three years, he somehow neglected to ask for a percentage of the gate.

The home life in the little house in Bryn Mawr is a commonplace by comparison, but a commonplace which is warm, affectionate, sparked by Father’s occasional visits, and always subject to the absurdities of the growing, gawky Cornelia. Miss Skinner writes about her youth with that laughing, photographic candor which was so infectious in her earlier collaboration with Miss Kimbrough, Our Hearts Were Young and. Gay. “Our teacher,” she writes, “was very plain and smelled like a hymnal.” She remembers how she memorized Macbeth in the open air only to be surprised by a wandering group of tourists. The apparition which “met their eyes was that of a gangly sixteen-year-old girl in dazzlingly unorthodox riding clothes, clutching at a skinny chest which flatly denied the words she was in the process of shouting, which were, ‘I have given suck and know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.’ After whooping forth this bit of gratuitous information, I became slowly aware of the presence of the line of heads above the encircling rocks.”

She recalls how in a Liberty Loan drive, at the conclusion of one of her father’s performances in the First World War, Mrs. Skinner sprang to her feet, with “ ‘I’ll take a fifty-dollar bond for every uniformed man in the house!’ A little stunned, Father ordered the electrician to turn on the house lights. . . . The balcony was a solid blue and khaki! Business being bad, the company manager had filled all unsold seats with sailors and doughboys.” So the story goes its way, affectionate, uncritical, the chronicle of a talented, uneccentric trio.

Toward the Morning (Rinehart, $3.00) is the third volume in Hervey Allen’s series of five novels depicting the reclamation and education of a big hulking blond, Salathiel Albine, a boy who was brought up by the Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier, and who in the early 1760’s begins to wend his way east, the natural man with the sharpened instincts of the savage, the lore of the forest, and the education which has come to him in his hazardous experience with the English regulars, the trappers, and the hardened frontier folk with whose help he passes on his way to civilization. With him come his young common-law wife, Melissa, and young Bridget whose parents have been lost in an Indian raid, and who is now being restored to her relatives in Carlisle.

Mr. Allen is a devoted student of the early days in Pennsylvania. He knows the country and he loves it, and with sure, deft touches his story lights up a hundred vignettes of the hardihood and peril, the hospitality, hard drinking, and swift resourcefulness which were chief among the elements of frontier life. Toward the Morning is in effect the chronicle of a lingering, leisurely journey. It will be enjoyed for its itinerant episodes, but I miss in it that pulsing concentration on the main theme. I wish the author had provided us with a clearer sense of direction — other than Sal’s desire to head east—and most important of all, I regret that he has not given us more clues for the reidentification of those characters who appeared in the two earlier books, The Forest and the Fort and Halford Village, who naturally have grown somewhat misty in the reader’s mind after the passage of five years.

The integrity, the thoroughness, and the humanity of Hervey Allen’s writing are a great relief alter the syrupy nonsense which has been served up to us as historical romance these past two years.

Robert Nathan, one of the most poetic of our novelists, has spent much of his summer life on Cape Cod, and in his new short novel, Long After Summer (Knopf, $2.00), he tells a story which, in its taciturn speech, its descriptive beauty, and its sensuous feeling for spring and summer, is truly evocative of the Cape.

The story comes to us through the observation of a Bostonian, a bachelor, old beyond his forty years, who has long been accepted by the natives of Truro and whose quiet existence with his dog Penny, his sailboat, and his walks along the beach is suddenly interrupted by illness. In his convalescence he needs a housekeeper and finds her in the person of Johanna, a fourteen-year-old, fresh from the Taunton orphanage and already at that turning point of womanhood where her beauty captures the eye and salty comments of Tom Goodenoe, the Truro carpenter and man-about-town. She also catches the eye of Jot Deacons, the son of Alben the lobsterman, and in the call love they feel for each other, an affair which begins in the bachelor’s kitchen and quickens in the square dance and in the Deacons dory as they pull up the lobster pots together, are the kernel, the freshness, and the pathos of the book.

The attraction of these two for each other and the paternalism, verging into something deeper, which the bachelor feels for Johanna,—these shades of devotion are conveyed in phrases deft and of the heart. We first see Johanna in the “vinegar sun of early spring”; we see her dancing at the Town Hall, “light as dandelion seed, and soft and firm as fresh baked bread”; in the dory we catch the look which passes like electricity between herself and Jot, “a look of gaiety and wonder, of joy without longing, and thanks without fear. It was a look of acceptance and of pure delight, in the sun-warmed air, the sparkling water, the blue and peaceful sky, and in each other.”

Johanna has always lived in the barest poverty; her only vanity is her two bits of hair ribbon, her only possession the puppy, Monday, which she gives to Jot. (“It’s like if you’ve got something together,” she said, “you’ve got more than if you’ve only got it alone.”) Thus, when Jot is caught in the storm the shock upsets Johanna’s hourglass, and the aftereffect on the girl I leave to Mr. Nathan to describe. This short novel of calf love and of happy summer merging into poignant autumn is a thing of beauty, a book to set beside Portrait of Jennie.