Preface to a Life
by . New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1926. 12mo. viii + 346 pp. $2.00.
DAYS come upon all of us, especially in the relaxation which follows illness or other shock, when the world is unbelievably, almost unbearably, bright and moving; when the trees are so sharply green that they seem to tremble like flame, the sky so poignantly blue that it recedes in a constantly enlarging vault above, and myriad points quiver in each slanting sunbeam. In the light of such a day Miss Gale recounts the life of an important man in a small Wisconsin town — a fantasia of the commonplace.
Bernard Mead is twenty-seven when the story opens. He is making a feeble attempt to escape from the impending weight of his heritage — his father’s ambition, his mother’s love, the town’s expectation that he will take on the family’s lumber business and marry his childhood sweetheart, rich, pretty, obviously suitable. In one sweep fate undermines his struggle. He is back in Pauquette for only a few days to propitiate his family. The soft spring lures him to declare a purely generic emotion for Laura, seen suddenly after many years in the transformation of womanhood and a ‘finishing’ trip abroad; and in an argument between father and son over the business the elder Mead suffers a stroke and dies, leaving Bernard with the conviction that he is a murderer, and a deathbed promise to devote his life to lumber. The next day the luminous figure of Alla Locksley crosses his path, but it is too late.
In a scene between Bernard and Alla which to my way of thinking is the high point of the book, he has vistas of life as it might be for him — tenderness, humor, adventure, mystery, understanding. But between him and this lie the rigid conventions — duty, honor, and financial independence. These he accepts, and, himself assisting, they form a crust over the flowing stream of his life. He marries Laura and they have three children. He settles solidly into the business and social life of Pauquette. He is the centre about whom revolves a household of women — his mother, his aunts, his wife, his daughters. He is prosperous, busy, content.
But beneath the crust the stream of life flows on. The pressure above relaxes. Suddenly he sees his children, not as parts of him, but as separate people, encased in spheres which he can hardly touch, much less penetrate. Laura, infinitely familiar, is infinitely alien. Even the business moves along its own appointed path. He looks about him at the people of Pauquette — ‘I saw you — you had nothing in common with yourselves.’ In the thin clear light sifting over his universe all is motion, color, dancing particles. He looks through.
In the eyes of his family, of the alienists, even of Alla, whom he seeks once more in his desperate need of understanding, this is madness. Perhaps all mystic experience is madness. Yet in its white heat the stream of his life fused with its barriers.
‘If he had made his choice differently, away from Pauquette, away from Laura and lumber, he might never have broken through, broken through ... he considered this, felt a slow wash of satisfaction. For after that choice, events had seemed to form themselves and to function without his knowledge or will, as had the cells of his body. And now this new way of experiencing all. It was not a point but a process. . . . After all he was only fifty-two, there would be eight years before he was sixty, and there would be time . . . time enough to find out everything.’
Thus, against the quiet background she knows so well, Miss Gale tells a story of Babbitt from the inside out, envisaging in flashes of insight, in conversations which might have been if people could only talk as they are feeling, the fantastic beauty and pathos which swirl hidden through outwardly prosaic lives.
MARY ROSS