Within This Present
by
[Houghton Mifflin, $2.50]
THE increasing appetite of the American public for chronicle has not yet been analyzed, but even if one regards it as a mere aftermath of the Forsyte Saga, or a corollary of enforced leisure, one must admit that the taste is strongest among members of the generation which Henry Adams in 1900 welcomed so doubtfully into a ‘new world’ where it would find neither unity nor illusion.
To this generation the heroine of Within This Present belongs. By the time Sally Sewall, granddaughter of an enterprising storekeeper, daughter of a successful banker, emerges from childhood into the well-broughtup semiconsciousness fostered by the education of her period, America is about to enter the War. After a brief experience of Chicago parties, she is married to the son of her father’s partner, with just time for a training-camp honeymoon before Alan is ordered abroad. When he returns from Coblenz they settle into the routine of prosperous young couples in fashionable suburbs, where the drinks they take because they are tired stimulate them sufficiently, because they are young, so that they can go on getting more tired, in a round just short of endless.
Alan, however, after ten years of increasing responsibilities and cumulative fatigue, finds in the local femme fatale a more potent release than bathtub gin. Just as Sally is ready to concede a divorce, the fortunes of both families collapse with the Sewall bank. Family solidarity triumphs: Sally and Alan are reunited as Mr. Roosevelt’s inaugural speech peals from the walnut radio cabinet.
This is not a fair account of the book, for Mrs. Barnes’s real concern is not Sally, but Chicago and the people who created that amazing city from the cinders of 1871. It is her presentation of three generations leading their quarter century of common life on planes as remote from one another as planets that gives her book its documentary value. Old Mrs. Sewall, valuing the discipline of necessity that she failed to pass on to her own children; Aunt Cora, tirelessly attempting to create by affirmation a world as artificial as the waves of her blond pompadour; Georgie recognizing the multiverse by voting Socialist and working Capitalist — all these Mrs. Barnes sees clearly, as she sees the crystal walls that cut them off from one another.
But the minds of Sally’s contemporaries revert uneasily to Sally. Passionless without being dispassionate, Sally looks like a problem beyond Mr. Roosevelt’s solving, in spite of the author’s concluding burst of social optimism. Henry Adams is rather a big gun to fire at poor Sally, but if we accept her Testament of Youth we are face to face again with the question that startled Mr. Adams’s dinner partners thirty years ago: Why is the American Woman a failure?
MARIAN VAILLANT