EACH year at this time when a bookman has to swim hard to keep his head above the current of new books, some anonymous friend deposits on my desk a chunky, gray-green volume, The South and East African Year Book and Guide (Sampson Low, Marston & Co., London, $2.50). It has the heft and paunch of a good Pickwick, and to dive in and out of its 1100 pages of text is to have no breath left for novels, biographies, and the latest collection of proletarian verse. For this is the Baedeker of the Dark Continent, with here a brief history of gold in South Africa and there an account of the Balearic Islands; here a terse essay on the ostrich, with the price of its feathers since 1870, and there not far off a chapter on South African fruits which must put California in the shade; here are the game laws, the railways, the steamers sailing to Khartoum (the fare is n’t expensive) and those on the Limpopo; here a dissertation on the sleeping sickness and there the pedigree of the Greater Kudu so well known to Mr. Hemingway. I shall probably never go. Editors seldom track down their authors on the African veldt. But if the game laws will permit, I’d like to try.
How much of a book’s popularity is traceable to its success in creating an emotional state of mind? Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Abolition, Trilby and hypnotism, Over the Top and the war fever, All Quiet on the Western Front with its purge of belligerency, each of these books touched an exposed nerve, each in its own way excited the reader’s emotions — and swept the country. Anthony Adverse was an uncommonly good novel, yet I wonder if its magnetism was not partly attributable to the fact that Anthony consistently attained his heart’s desire at a time when every reader was suffering from the frustration of the depression. To read of Anthony’s triumph in boudoirs and capitals was to compensate our own quite hungry emotions. This speculation (which I leave to you to prove) came to mind as I read two new novels destined for high place on the best-seller list.
Europa, by Robert Briffault (Scribners, $2.75) is approaching the peak of popularity. Like Anthony Adverse, it is a biggish and colorful book (size counts these days); and, like Anthony, Mr. Briffault’s hero Julian Bern has a way with the ladies and an ease of achievement which lesser mortals must covet. Here is a cosmopolitan story of Europe in those golden, misleading years before the war, a story on intimate terms with London, Paris, Rome, and St. Petersburg, a story stuffed with countesses, princes, courtesans, perverts, dilettantes, artists, and dullards through whose midst passes our Galahad in search of pure reason — which, incidentally, he never finds.
Europa was written to be entertaining, and entertaining it certainly is. It contains the gossip of a hundred memoirs; it tickles you with its ironiccondemnation of a blundering world (criticism so much more pointed after the event); it makes a showy display of the biological sciences, and its panorama of international politics is dazzling in its sweep. But by no stretch of the imagination can this be classed as a first-rate novel. The structure is faulty, the story being told now by omniscience, now through Julian’s eyes, and now in the words of a good friend; the style is uneven and made pretentious with jawbreakers, many of them too tough for a household dictionary; objectionable also is its titillation of topic A, sex suspense arranged so artfully that one’s suspicions are aroused. Take the book with a pinch of salt: enjoy its show and its irony, and ask yourself — as the author intended you should—whether we in 1935 are any better prepared against, disaster than was the glittering, reckless society of 1905.
Such an apprehension is clearly in the air, making us excitable, making us ready for the question which Sinclair Lewis drives home in his new novel, It Can’t Happen Here (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50). Is the United States really in danger of a Fascist dictatorship, asks Mr. Lewis, and if so, have you any idea of what it may mean in trial and tribulation?
The idea is, of course, unwelcome to most of us, but to close our eyes to it is to make us as gullible as the characters in the novel itself. It Can’t Happen Here is a vigorous demonstration that Fascism did sweep this country following the preposterous election of 1936. With his plan to give every citizen $2500 (or maybe $5000 — the sum varies from time to time) Senator Buzz Windrip rode triumphantly into office. He had the backing of the American Legion; he had the strong-arm support of his own Minute Men; he had promised to bring salvation to the League of Forgotten Men; he was endorsed, at least for a time, by the broadcast oratory of Bishop Prang. To place a story in the future is a difficult feat for any writer; to date it the day after to-morrow and to bring it down to earth is an undertaking which taxes the skill and realism even of Mr. Lewis.
To make us at home in such an unhappy scene Mr. Lewis creates one of his most likable characters, Doremus Jessup (his wife calls him Dormouse), the sixty-year-old editor of a country newspaper published in Fort Beulah, Vermont. Doremus is by nature a quizzical, warm-hearted Liberal. His experience in journalism has given him more forethought than most of his neighbors, but even in a pessimistic mood he could never have conjured up a state of affairs comparable to Windrip’s administration. Here, as in Europa, the author has employed historical material for his own purpose. The persecution, the internment camps, the fearful inflation, the suppression of liberty in any form — these aspects of Fascism, so well enforced by Windrip’s Minute Men, have their source, one suspects, in the written accounts which have come to us from sufferers in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia. To bring these ugly truths home to the reader is the responsibility of Doremus Jessup. As he suffers, so should We.
Chapters of biting satire alternate with passages of direct narration. It seems to me that the fusion is perfectly maintained throughout the first hundred and fifty pages. The account of the Democratic Convention, the quotations from Windrip’s book Zero Hour, show Mr. Lewis at his brilliant best. But as this satirical mood gradually takes possession of his mind, just so does the story of Doremus diminish in plausibility and interest. American readers are apt to be a little distrustful of satire, and I suspect that they will come to feel that this story is too long for its best effect. But this must be said about Mr. Lewis’s fifteenth novel: he wanted very much to write it, and when he did so he wrote with a spontaneity and thrust that were certainly lacking from its two predecessors. People who read for ideas will find their minds excited by this book. People who believe that the times are out of joint, that war was never more threatening, and that the American temperament has been weakened by overdoses of propaganda, will find here a tonic worth taking.
