Moon-Calf
by . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1920. 12mo, vi+394 pp. $2.50.
THE America that has recently given birth to a Main Street and a Miss Lulu Bett has produced another mid-western novel, which for seriousness and candor deserves a sympathetic reading. But where Mr. Lewis is sociological and Miss Gale ironic, Flovd Dell’s method is autobiographic — which is to say that he flies higher than the other two, and is less sure of his way. In spite of the many efforts of the younger Englishmen, one sees no real mastery of this difficult form in our day except in the pages of Jean-Christophe.
The evolution of Felix Fay’s soul is too straggling a business to be dealt with in the concentrated manner that makes Miss Gale’s novel so distinguished. Moreover, its psychological matter cannot carry weight unless subjectively felt, imagined with an intensity which Mr. Levis is far from attempting. Moon-Calf occasionally hits the bull’s-eye, humanly speaking, with a thud that must make irony and objectivity turn pale. But the world is full of moon-calves, growing boys of the tender-minded artistic race, suffering from contact with reality and turned aside from life by a subtle antagonist, who bids them fear conflict with other wills and seek refuge within their own rationalizations. Whether such a boy is engendered by a butcher or a millionaire, the struggle between his weakness and his strength, the anguish, the pathos, the humor of his adaptive processes, are relatively the same. We need to be very fond of him to endure to be close spectators of his growth.
We are not quite fond enough of Felix, — that is the truth of Moon-Calf, — though we follow his career with interest genuine in its degree. The youngest son of a Civil War veteran who fails as a butcher, he grows up in a meagre Illinois town with a sense of ‘difference.’ He takes school and the lady teacher hard, haunts the library and the lady librarian, dreams and writes poetry, is converted to socialism, atheism, and the world of ideas, tries reporting, and ends, after a love adventure, on the road to a literary career.
The most beautiful and poetic pages in the book concern the young hero’s introduction to ‘the sex’ in the person of a little girl, — the daughter of an actress, — who might have been bad, but was good. The least convincing pages relate his affair with a young person who might have been good — but was thoroughly banal. This episode, supposedly Felix’s final introduction to reality, is as Savorless as a California peach. And the lad remains a moony lad, marooned in his own egotism by a creator inclined to sentimentalize him.
Mr. Dell has another difficulty: he is always trying to be a descendant of Howells and the realists as well as an heir of Holland. After hearing Felix Fay’s hungers of soul, we share his champagne ice on Alain Street. Miss Cather might conceivably combine the two genres; to do so requires more elimination and more evocation than Mr. Dell has yet achieved. His small town is, however, the ‘native son’s,’ not the ‘West side of Main Street seen from the East.’ Chicago was Felix’s goal because it was the only capital be could discern beyond the rolling prairie. If Mr. Dell will only blow his creative bellows and make that central fire of his burn harder and brighter, the Moon-Calf may then, in another volume, come to man’s estate.
E. S. S.