Three Novels

Joseph Hergesheimer’s The Limestone Tree (Knopf, $2.50) — a very pleasing book, constructed on a happy plan, and interesting both as history and as fiction — traces the life of a family, founded in 1769 by Gabriel Sash and Nancy Abel in the limestone or bluegrass region of Kentucky. The ’tree’ of the title is, in fact, a family tree, extending over a hundred years. The method of narration is not unlike that of Quiet Cities, of setting vivid narrative against a background of sober history, except that here the stories are strung upon a chain of lineage, the progenitors or their descendants appearing again and again. It is a saga of pride, probity, strong passions, and heroism. ’The Sashes, says one of their number, ‘have always been a positive people; they were good or bad, one or the other, with all their hearts.’

The novel is one more illustration of the author’s theory of the importance in American life of an old tradition based upon an ideal. These generations of courageous and passionate men and women represent the ‘slow painful accumulation of a tradition,’ rooted deeply in the rich soil of their region; and each new member of the family finds in this tradition a ‘tangible stronghold,’ ready for him to occupy, lie does or does not do a thing because it is or is not what the Sashes or Abels do. And their tradition has been created and shaped by the hard environment and circumstance that through the years have surrounded them. One cannot read this piece of social history without an increased respect for ideals which, however limited, are never ignoble.

The ten episodes are all entertaining. The comedy of Elisha Abel’s double courtship is good, but so is the tragedy of Wickliffe Sash’s conception of honor. Perhaps the most memorable portrait is that of Gabriel, who could not be happy anywhere except in the woods. Best of all is the presentation of a region and a people, by means of vivid detail that is discreetly handled and that impresses one as accurate.

The persons in Sylvia Thompson’s Portrait by Caroline (Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50) belong to that English set of smart people who, with every material concomitant of happiness, are unhappy or, at least, uncomfortable, perhaps because they bore themselves and one another. Lydia Stanley, who is apparently the raisonneur of the piece, ascribes their misery to cynicism, and observes that cynicism is ‘always the mark of the mediocre person in a skeptical age. Even a mediocre person, she declares acutely, may attain dignity through religion or a grande passion, because he feels that what he does ‘has importance, and that the acts of his life have significance. So far as such women as Caroline and Jane are concerned, one feels that they have never learned that lesson one must learn in the nursery: the value of discipline. Caroline is the granddaughter of a passionate woman, the daughter of a silly one; and the sins of her maternal ancestors are visited upon her.

In describing Caroline the author is in somewhat of the quandary of the college boy who complained that he was trying to describe chaos and could think of nothing to say about it except that it was chaotic. If Caroline is puzzling to the reader, that is because she is to herself. With two powerful incentives to happiness — her marriage and her art — she is unhappy because she is in love with Peter, whose portrait she paints. The portrait is a symbol of her egotism and instability, in that, as Lydia says, ‘it shows only half of the real Peter’ — Caroline’s half. She has in a sense painted herself; and the fact appears to be that she mistakes lust for a grande passion.

If Caroline’s malady is a malady of the age, it is that of a very small group. Smart people of her sort are more arresting than representative; and one suspects that the author has not expended her abundant wit and intelligence to the best advantage in writing about them. The trouble is that a young reader might be dazzled by their smartness and miss their meaning.

Caroline cannot even cause tragedy among her group, because her friends are incapable of it. She is uncomfortable and spreads discomfort, but one cannot profoundly pity her or them. Of the other characters, Jane in her reckless way is very amusing; Peter almost rings true; Maurice does not seem of the stuff of which great scientists are made; Lady Snow, gourmet and simpleton, is the best portrait in the book; Dick is a brilliant sketch of one kind of vermin.

The story of Ray Schmidt, whom every man wanted to kiss and who usually permitted him to do so, might appear abstractly to be a not very edifying narrative. And when it is further divulged that she became for twenty-odd years the mistress of a man who was happily married and the father of three promising children, one might conclude that the story was sordid. The fact is, nevertheless, that Fannie Hurst’s Back Street (Cosmopolitan, $2.50) is a novel of cumulative power, and that the portrait of Ray, drawn with a methodical, humorless, Dreiserian fidelity, which winks at nothing, condones nothing, condemns nothing, has beauty and pathos.

It is always easy to object to Miss Hurst’s predilection for physical ugliness, and for describing it in plain terms, The accumulation of horrors at the end of the novel might be condemned on grounds of art. Nevertheless, there is a kind of thoroughgoing, Elizabethan honesty about her horrors, as there is about her emotionalism. She is too much interested in her tale to he bothered with squeamishness or delicacy. But it is curious to note that here, in a novel dealing with passion, she is reticent about the sexual — reticent, that is, compared with some writers of polite and clever novels about smart people.

Her heroine, as she says, ‘spends her life skulking along the back streets’; she is a half-voluntary outcast; she knows before she dies about every sordidness and indignity life can offer; and yet, in her loyalty, kindness, generosity, and even intelligence, she is clearly the best person in all the various circles she enters. Hers is a grande passion, though in low life. The theme, of a mistress who is really her lover’s wife in spirit, is not new, but it has usually been treated by French realists. Here is a novel American to the core, by a writer whose sense of character is instinctive and whose knowledge of American life on its basic levels appears inexhaustible.

R. M. GAY