Tutor’s Lane. By Wilmarth Lewis. (Knopf.)
Imagine Yale College without appendages, and New Haven without slums or business section, and life just as it is now and you will have the setting for Mr. Lewis’ ’17 first novel, “Tutor’s Lane”.
You are given as hero a young English instructor, a graduate from about the same class as Mr. Lewis, probably with a Chi Delta Theta charm, and a heroine not greatly sophisticated, of good family, mildly fond of “doing good” to “the people.” These two fondly follow a Quixotic scheme of uplift (which he doesn’t even like, and about which she’s a fool), and come out of it ashamed but at one in their shame. The inevitable marriage ensues. The plot is the weakness of the book. It is a thin-spun web, and disappointing.
But the non-plot characters, and the phrasing of the Syllabus, and the satire scattered through the pages are features over which no one can pass without delight. Mrs. Norris talks, the reader is amused; Mr. Lewis talks, the reader is wholly captivated. It is not the genial gay humor of Punch; it is something with a sharper touch than that, more witty, more satirical. It is only when Mr. Lewis becomes sympathetic with his character or with his reader that he fails. He is superb when he is laughing at both simultaneously.
If he ever gets hold of a plot, the result will be a fine novel. He has the power of restraint and objectivity which most moderns lack. He is refreshing in the midst of so much that is conspicuously heavy and bent with the weight of the world. His product is not marred by continual reference to the travail and labor its creation caused. He seems to have enjoyed writing the book, and not to have written it in order to save the world, or the destinies of nations. To amuse himself and his friends seems to be his only purpose in writing, which is probably why “Tutor’s Lane” will also amuse so many other people.
M. E. F.
Young Peoples Pride. By Stephen Vincent Benét. (Henry Holt & Co.)
There are probably very few men now at Yale who are destined to look back, after an equally short span of years, upon a more enviable literary record than that already possessed by Stephen Vincent Benét. And yet, we had to read a good deal of “Young Peoples Pride” before we began to enjoy it. Perhaps the reason was that we had expected another “serious novel” or “character study” somewhat along the lines of Mr. Benét’s “The Beginning of Wisdom”. The rather affectedly “super smart” illustrations with which the present book is garnished annoyed us, and the occurrence of passages like the following caused us to fear that Mr. Benét, with an eye to the box office, had joined the Fitzgeraldine ranks of tale-tellers-out-of-school.
“‘The trouble with Art is that it doesn’t pay a decent living wage unless you’re willing to commercialize—’