Pieces of Hate
by . New York: George H. Doran Co. 1922. 12 mo. xii+227 pp., $2.00.
‘IN the plains and the rolling country there is room for the individual to skip and frolic, but all the peaks are preëmpted.’ So writes Mr. Heywood Broun, in his latest volume, Pieces of Hate, and thereby lays down the very precept and suggestion for his own hilarity. He skips and frolics through the plains and across the knolls of ordinary experience, swift of toe and ready-shod for frauds, whether literary, or dramatic, athletic, sociological, or domestic, and with a zest which starts suspicion in his reader’s mind that, possibly, the ‘preëmpting of the peaks is not such a discouragingly important matter after all.
Pieces of Hate is a volume of essays, criticisms, discussions and casual gossip about living, snatched from the flood which Mr. Broun pours steadily into the monthly and daily press. Some of its pages are trivial, many are extremely valuable, and a few are excellent. The whole volume is deliciously alive and full of chuckles. Its author is awake to the common weakness for packing away the critical toga in moth-balls when we plunge into the popular novel, or take our seats before the theatre curtain, or go about our daily concerns, He shakes out the camphor and holds to the sunlight some of the absurdities of the fabric of habitual opinion.
If that were the sum total of his service. Pieces of Hate would be welcome enough; but behind the whole performance there looms another matter, seldom noticed: the question of merit in those fugitive contacts which men make with life, contacts that find their sole record in the daily newspaper. Himself a newspaper man, Mr. Broun has his clan’s gift of haste; and yet, though this book shares largely in the bewildering implications of speed and tumultuous life crowding the press, though it contains much frolic and friendly laughter, there are also signposts to a, discernment and meaning not commonly associated with the press.
To the inveterate and stupid tradition about the essential badness of all newspaper-writing, its shallowness, conscious falsity, and poor pretense of coming to grips with the subtleties of human affairs, a severe shock is administered by writing of the quality revealed in some of the pages of this volume. Evidently some of the fugitive writings that flit across the pages of one’s newspaper may be instinct with a beauty and stung with a life well worth a longer existence than the twenty-five minutes between editions. Probably Lafcadio Hearn was not wrong, after all, when he caught his Fantastics into the pages of the New Orleans Item; nor Anatole France, when he penned his famous series for Le Temps.
Mr. Broun, of course, is a long way from Hearn and a longer way from M. France; but he confounds the dubious for all that. One wishes only that he would halt a bit more frequently to lay his shovel to those deeper treasures that are strewn under the plain. For fugitive beauty, even when glimpsed in a frolic, is still us tantalizing as an incomplete adventure.
JAMES H. POWERS.
These reviews will be reprinted separately in pamphlet form. Copies may be had by any librarian, without charge, on application to the Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington St., Boston.