A Peter Pan Lover
Young Earnest, by Gilbert Cannan. [D. Appleton and Company, New York]
A man “who is submissive to his emotions is not in power over himself”—so wrote Spinoza; and such a man is René Fourmy, the Peter Pan lover of Gilbert Cannan’s latest novel, who never grew up into the fact that he should not have everything he wanted. After a boyhood and youth of almost unconscious surrender to environment, he suddenly rebelled against the pretense that surrounded him and gave himself up as completely to his emotions as he had hitherto yielded himself to external circumstances. He had been educated to be a professor and had married an ambitious girl without having awakened to the meaning of life, love, or passion. His first great disillusionment came with his honeymoon, when instead of finding in his bride “the new wonders and sweet joy” of fulfilled love, they together “attained nothing but heat, hunger, and distress.”
When he could bear this relationship no longer he fled to London, cast in his lot with Ann, a girl of the slums, and became a taxi driver. Here he was happy for a time because of his savage hunger for real things, no matter if they were degrading. The crude, harsh reality of this life fascinated him until he discovered that Ann’s love was no more the fulfillment of his dreams than his wife’s had been; only its honesty had made it endurable. When he discovers that Ann is to have a child—an unwanted, unexpected child that will be like a chain binding their two lives—he is driven to a second rebellion and the ultimate rediscovery of his first sweetheart. Ann shows her anger in the vulgar, uncontrolled outbursts natural to such a woman, and finally disappears to Canada, leaving René free to go to Cathleen. We are given to understand that at last René has attained to the happiness of his love dream, but nothing Mr. Cannan has told us warrants the belief that he might not suddenly discover that Cathleen too falls short of his vision of what real love should be and start out madly once more in pursuit of he knows not what. If he and Cathleen do finish their lives together it is safe to gamble that it will not be because René has learned to adjust himself to life but because he has met his Waterloo in Cathleen, a clever woman who wanted him and understood how to keep him.
René was a rebel against the conventions which interfered with his happiness, a dreamer, and a seeker after the Holy Grail of love. His attempts to find happiness were utterly selfish, yet honest, so that our quarrel is not with his morals but with his egotism. He never awoke to the responsibilities of life, never felt remorse for the sufferings that he caused others, never grew up to the consciousness that life was intended for something higher than the fulfillment of his enthusiastic visions, but blundered into more or less freedom where another man, perhaps equally rebellious but more scrupulous, would quietly maintain his outward equanimity and let conventional spiders weave their webs all about him.
Quarrels there will be and condemnation arising from Young Earnest, but will they be because readers think Mr. Cannan does not understand whereof he writes or because he is audacious enough to describe a man who would not accept shams? We may not like the subject any better than we would a painting of a maimed or ugly person, yet that objection does not destroy its art, and art it has, in an unusual degree. Only a skilled writer could depict a man doing sensual things without being a sensualist, and René was just the opposite of that. All his sins were of the spirit rather than of the flesh. His ambition in life was to find happiness at any cost. He desired love as many desire money and with as little consideration for others, and although hopelessly at odds with conventional standards and prudish morals it seems to me that the study of Young Earnest’s efforts to understand life and his own self is rather a glorious attempt, and that Gilbert Cannan has been decidedly courageous to try to reduce to printed terms the emotions, aspirations, cravings, and blunders of a young man too honest to accept deceits, yet too cowardly (or perhaps too brave) to stand by his blunders. Not a pretty story, of course, but life is seldom pretty when it is frank, and his stumbling “from one love to another” is not the expression of sensuality but rather a spiritual attempt to live out the best that was in him.
The book has many passages of beauty, many expressions of keen philosophy which seem to indicate that the author’s soul belongs to the divine side of life—not to its sordidness. So wonderfully does he reproduce mediocrity, middle-class respectability, and the vital if less commendable phases of Mitcham Mews that one is led to believe that all of life—from visions to slums—is unfolding to him, and that no matter what his subject, his pen will paint a picture that rings true. One could hardly find a more subtle task than has been accomplished in Young Earnest—that of painting a man who was not a sensualist doing sensual things. That Mr. Cannan knew precisely what he was doing is revealed in the words that he puts into the mouth of one of his characters who describes René as being a man “simply inappropriate in a community of creatures who live by cunning.”
M. A. S.