+ − Sat R 130:39 Jl 10 ’20 200w
NOYES, ALFRED. Beyond the desert; a tale of Death valley. *$1 (7½c) Stokes
20–18658
The story is symbolic of a soul losing itself in a desert of ideas before it emerges into the light of clear understanding. James Baxter, an I.W.W., is a prisoner in transport and escapes from a stalled train into Death valley in the Arizona desert. His hardships bring on delirium and in a trance he finds himself among a halted pioneer party of 1849. In exchanging notes on their respective civilizations with them he comes to see the error of his ways and when he is finally rescued he goes among his I.W.W. comrades to convince them also. He is successful with the crowd but the infuriated leaders kill him.
“Though Mr Noyes’s work is earnest and readable, we wish that so experienced a hand had not permitted polemics, poetics, and melodrama to crowd the same pages.”
+ − N Y Evening Post p10 O 30 ’20 230w
“The very qualities that one admires in such a poem as ‘The highwayman,’ depreciate when used in the prose form. It is possible that in verse the story would not seem so lacking in vitality. The descriptions of the desert are good; the style is fairly clear; and yet there is a quality of unreality, of dreaminess, of sentimentality.”
− + Springf’d Republican p5a Ja 2 ’21 260w
NOYES, ALFRED. Collected poems. v 3 *$2.50 Stokes 821