American nights entertainment

by Grant M. Overton

If, as some contend, the purpose of fiction is entertainment—an assertion we need not either attempt to refute nor deny—then the mark of good fiction is that, while perhaps entertaining us, it does something else. And about the “something else” I should think we need not be narrow in definitions. Maybe the entertaining novel we are reading adds its unobtrusive item to our understanding of this or that; maybe it tunes up our emotional natures. Or it may accomplish its bye-purpose in other directions. We may or may not be conscious of the additional result, or, if conscious of it, we may continue (perhaps wisely) to read for the sole purpose of being entertained. I do not believe one should read fiction with the something else in mind, nor, in a brief account of some new novels, would I attempt to suggest what the something else—differing, it is likely, with the individual reader—may turn out to be. If one asks me for bread, I will not offer him a loaf of vitamins, but palatable bread from which his body may take the elements it pleases.

For examples, you may derive from John Buchan’s Midwinter your clearest idea of Dr. Samuel Johnson, or your greatest knowledge about the affections of a young lady; your own mind will satisfy its proper need. From Compton Mackenzie’s The Altar Steps and its sequel, Parson’s Progress, certain temperaments gain religious and ecclesiastical satisfactions. The modern, intimate taste for sensory impulses can be gratified in reading John Dos Passos’s unusual novel, Streets of Night; just as the correlative instinct for a fresh and daring idealism is fed by such a fine first novel as Cyril Hume’s The Wife of the Centaur. Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, with its story of a young charwoman who works for a miserly bookseller and his wife, renews the heart in its assurance of our common humanity, and offers the rich nourishment which rejoiced us in The Old Wives’ Tale. And so it goes with fiction.

We think of Brand Whitlock now as the author of Belgium, but a further thought recalls him, and with pleasure, as a writer of fiction. His new novel, J. Hardin & Son, was planned ten years and more ago and discussed with the late William Dean Howells, whose interest in it was keen. The actual writing had begun in the summer of 1914 at a small country place near Brussels when the catastrophe of war began its pre-emption upon all of the American Minister’s time and energy. Except for intervals of thinking about it and occasional notes, Mr. Whitlock could do nothing but protect the manuscript on journeyings to and fro—until the end of 1918, when, after the armistice, he resumed writing as opportunity offered. The book was progressing in earnest at Biarritz and Spa in 1922, and was completed in New York in the spring of 1923. Mr. Howells’s interest will be understood when it is explained that J. Hardin & Son takes place in a little Ohio town. The story begins when Paul Hardin, the son, is ten and accompanies him to middle age—perhaps one should say to that point in or at the beginning of middle age where, as with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a man’s character takes its final determining shape in some act or decision which controls the rest of his life. For Paul Hardin this moment comes when he recognises one of the buggies made forty years before by his father, takes hold of one of the spokes and finds it as solid, as resistant as on the day it was made. Paul had hardly liked his father, whose sternly-held and sternly-expressed views and whose passion for moral reform in the shape of prohibition seemed like a life-long and perverse obstinacy, embittering all the preludes to affection, sympathy or even understanding. Yet now! Something comes out of that spoke, something out of his father’s life that settles his behaviour toward the two women who are for him to deal with in regard to himself. Mr. Whitlock has aimed, however, at the reconstruction of a period in American life. His momentous personal problem in the life of Paul Hardin is simply the foreground for a study of American ideas in a certain kind of community in the years within his own recollection, say from 1880 on pretty well into our century. Over a hundred characters, many of them of more than passing importance, are involved in the extremely varied but entirely naturalistic incidents of the novel.

J. Hardin & Son, the work of an American at fifty, makes a contrast with the work of a Norwegian of fifty, the age at which Jonas Lie wrote his The Family at Gilje. The Norwegian novelist, whose story is just offered in a careful translation, uses a much simpler scheme. His tale opens with a picture of a home in the mountains of Norway where a father and mother are anxious to get their children married off. It ends when each child has solved his or her problem. If environment conquers in one child, individuality is sure to come out on top in another. Jonas Lie’s book, I am told, makes Norwegians feel that they are living again the scenes of early life; and at the same time the novel is full of the most modern ideas about marriage, the home and the management of children, introduced not by main strength and the hazard of fictional illusion but subtly, by an artist who shared Ibsen’s supply of “social dynamite” but whose artistry was paramount. Lie is called a realist, as, I suppose, Bojer and most of the Scandinavians would be (except Jens Jacobsen in Marie Grubbe); but what is the white magic in these writers of the white snow-countries that makes their realism so unfailingly poetic? Is it indigenous? Cannot we acquire it here in America? Shall we exile our artists to Canada, whence now comes little but the worn-out stories of strong men and their uniform primitiveness with women?

I do not know the answers to these questions, nor do you; but I do know that certain writers are simpatico in certain provinces of society—Frank Swinnerton, for example, in the stratum whence he drew his Nocturne and his Coquette and in the somewhat different middle-class level on which we meet the characters of his new story, Young Felix. Here is a satisfactory representative English novel in the mode called realism to contrast with our American and our Norwegian. I say “contrast”—for I don’t think comparisons will get us very far. What we are better employed in doing, in my opinion, is a species of addition rather than subtraction; we shall find a difference in the attitude as well as the art of Brand Whitlock, Jonas Lie, and Frank Swinnerton. Is not each worth our while? I think so. I think such a novel as Jay William Hudson’s Nowhere Else in the World is worth the while of most readers, who may, however, be a bit puzzled at first to discover how different it is from his Abbé Pierre. Mr. Hudson may possibly have written the Great Chicago Novel as Carl Sandburg is sometimes thought to have written the great Chicago hymn or chant. At least, his Nowhere Else in the World is in its essence apocalyptic. Stephen Kent, who had been enchanted by Paris after a youthful rebellion against Chicago and its blatant commercialism, lives to look upon the city of his birth as “like Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ primitive, powerful, with mighty sinews,” as “the spiritual capital of America,” as a place where he and others will join in “moulding, not paintings and statues, but a civilisation destined to be the summit of all art, of all dreams.” There is incidentally in this tense story a competent picture of American academic life which will cause squirmings. Mr. Hudson’s knowledge of American colleges is derived at first hand.

Much first hand knowledge, I happen to know, has gone into the writing of George Looms’s second novel, John-No-Brawn. The action of this rather terrible but certainly impressive piece of fiction takes place in Louisville, Kentucky, the author’s home town, and in and near Denver, Colorado. The book is one of an intensity that has already occasioned extremely divergent opinions. The story is that of a sick man, an indeterminate character trapped by the horrible and inescapable fact of disease. He comes to the conclusion that he is a hopeless drag on his young wife. Against the warnings, protests and threats of doctor and nurse, he walks out of the hospital. “They watched him near the stairway, saw him reel slightly and then reach out his hand and take hold of the banister—saw him steady himself. He paused for a moment ... and then he passed around the partition corner, out of sight.” Such an ending is exalting or deadly in its depressiveness, as you please; just as the story itself is a thing of magnificence or of utter drabness. Like the powerful war novel by Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat, a violent reaction in one direction or another is to be expected of the reader. It is probably an advantage in Mr. Boyd’s novel over Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers that Through the Wheat is almost entirely a story of fighting in the front line. All agree that this was war, at least, and something is gained at the outset by the setting aside of various prejudices and preconceptions. Through the Wheat, far more than Three Soldiers, contrasts with high effectiveness with Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire. Again may I plead that if the two novels, the French and the American, are to be entered in a fight by rounds, there can and should be no decision. Through the Wheat is a wonderful thing to have been plucked in Belleau Wood, at Soissons and Saint Mihiel by a boy not yet twenty.

While Mr. Whitlock is going back of our day for his Middle Western picture, Meredith Nicholson, slightly his senior, has been busy with the immediacy not only of the present day but the very hour. Mr. Nicholson’s new novel, The Hope of Happiness, like its predecessor, Broken Barriers, reckons with a social life in which, if they have not been entirely swept aside, American standards of conduct have been very much altered. The young woman who drinks too hopelessly much is put before us, but the essential story is one of a situation between father and unacknowledged son with the probable complications of men’s business and women’s love. There is an ability of characterisation and a temper and evenness in the writing which make the reader feel that Mr. Nicholson writes for a much ampler purpose than would be served by a novel of changing manners and enlarged social license. These are mere appurtenances of the story he has to tell.

Not to have a story to tell is to forfeit the best claim to consideration at the hands of most readers of fiction; and among those Americans who have never made the forfeiture I would have no hesitation in naming Irvin S. Cobb. The award of the O. Henry Memorial Prize for 1922 to the title story in Cobb’s Snake Doctor and Other Stories seems to me more or less of an irrelevance; Cobb has written so many capital stories and the award, if it had then existed, might so easily have gone to him years ago. The tales collected in Snake Doctor and Other Stories exhibit, perhaps, a greater variety than some of the earlier collections, and there is a Judge Priest story without which, I am certain, a majority of Cobb’s readers would consider the book incomplete. “Snake Doctor” itself has been criticised as being altogether mechanical. My suggestion to those who advance that criticism would be conveyed in the form of a question, or two questions: Did they get no thrill from reading the story? And if they did, was that thrill a purely mechanical effect? For the point is not whether the thing producing an effect is a mechanism, but the nature of the effect itself. Nothing is more mechanical than the theatre, but a good play is not made the less art thereby. Actors, you may say, or acting; but a scene has been “made” or destroyed more than once by that utterly mechanical detail, the stage setting.... If as has sometimes been predicted, a machine will be invented to produce upon us all the effects of good fiction, we shall none of us quarrel with the inventor nor will anyone try to destroy the device unless it be our fictioners. In the meantime, I advise no one to neglect them, lest the day of the obvious and unconcealed machine never arrive.

iv

To blaze a trail for the reader through the rich forest of books educational, philosophical, scientific, and withal “popular” is no easy task. I have not attempted to do more than put down the titles of some new and recent “general” books, with the authors, and sometimes a note upon the volume. But should these not be classified? Dear reader, if you will give me the classification of the things you are interested in, I will classify the books....