Let me prove the point. “Our Mr. Wrenn” is a mouse-like little clerk in the office of a New York novelty company. He is called “Our Mr. Wrenn” in business correspondence by the manager of the firm. He is overshadowed by “the job.” He lives uncomfortably in Mrs. Zapp’s downtown boarding house. Because the author can see, various figures from the drab stream one meets in the street are made human. Because the author has whimsicality and scorn and sympathy, the book has humor and satire and pathos. All these things have been noted by the critics.
Mr. Wrenn is not always “Our.” He becomes his own in the gorgeously illustrated travel leaflets sent out by steamship companies. Eventually he does go to England on a cattle steamer. He is “Bill Wrenn” and licks a tough. He meets adventures—Istra, an over-fine artist girl who likes him because he’s real. In the end he pathetically sees her soar above him and sails back to America, where he goes into the office again, falls in love with a sweet little lingerie-counter clerk, marries, and “settles down.” All these things the critics have told us.
But Mr. Wrenn is at once glorious and pathetic, not only because he says “Gee!” when he has the emotions of a poet. It isn’t only the little things of the book that twist our smiles.
There is an epic conflict between Mr. Wrenn of the job and Bill Wrenn of the sunsets and the sea. Our Mr. Wrenn, oppressed and bullied, scuttling out of the way, not quite daring to think his own thoughts or dream his own dreams, not knowing quite enough to understand the great things of the world—this man is everywhere in New York, in America; he is in our own souls. And when he musters courage to become Bill Wrenn, when he sets out on dangerous quests and loves strange beauty, he becomes a conqueror who rallies with him the great of history, and stands on the high places of our own spirits.
Pitifully inadequate Bill Wrenn is, of course. The lonely tragedy of that conventionally “happy ending” has escaped the critics. The drab, the commonplace, creep over Bill again without his knowing it. That’s the frightful part of it. It’s very like what appears to happen to everybody. Our Mr. Wrenn he is at the end, sunk in comfort and forgetting his flags in sunsets.
It is a poignant, bitterly human novel. After reading it in sympathy one cannot lean back in satisfaction and write commonplaces. It leads to understandings and resolutions. When we learn to demand such things of American writers, their primary purpose will then cease to be either to entertain or to “teach a lesson.”
Gilbert Alden.
Lantern Gleams
Little Essays in Literature and Life, by Richard Burton. [The Century Company, New York.]
Readers of The Bellman will welcome in this permanent form many little lantern gleams of thought that have been shed athwart their path by this unacademically-minded incumbent of a Minnesota chair.