Mostly Canallers, Collected Stories
by [Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $2.50]
THE world re-created by Walter Edmonds and inhabited by Big-Foot Sal, Cosmo Turbe, and their contemporaries reaches in space west from Albany to Buffalo, in time from the late thirties to the eighties. In the roaring microcosm of the Erie Canal these people fight, drink, love, make money and lose it, live and die. Liquor is cheap and plentiful, tobacco is strong, pretty girls are available at Lucy Cashdollar’s for fifteen dollars a month and found, and for the man with farming in his bones and a fancy for cows and a matched work-team there is the Ohio country always beckoning.
Those who people this world are ‘mostly canallers,’ born on the Canal or near it. Among them flock gamblers, highwaymen, a wandering preacher or two, sheriffs, teamsters, boatmen. There are lock-tenders who feed the Canal and inn-keepers who feed the canallers. News of the outside filters in, there is some talk of the rising competition of steam, but of the greater world the canallers need know little. The usefulness of the Canal vanished very soon alter its completion, but during its short life it saw all the violence, hard living, and melodrama soon to be transferred to the railroads. This life Mr. Edmonds describes vigorously and skillfully, balancing historical fact with a nice counterpoise of invention.
There are twenty-four stories in the volume, ranging in date from the days when the author was contributing to the Harvard Advocate to the present time, when his work is published in the major American magazines and constantly reprinted in Mr. O’Brien’s anthology. Four appear here for the first time. In the beginning Edmonds instinctively knew how to tell a story, his characters talked well, but the narrative was impeded by a cumbrous insistence on detail for its own sake and a strong tendency toward Dickensian exaggeration. He has to-day lost none of his original ability as a narrator, his people’s talk is as pointed and full of flavor as ever, but his attack is surer, neater, more confident. It is at last a pleasure to read Walter Edmonds for style as well as for story. Those who meet the author for the first time in this volume of collected stories will want to range through his novels, which deal more or less with the same subject: Rome Haul, The Big Barn, and Erie Water.
MERLE COLBY