IT is no easy matter to analyze the charm of Clarence Day’s writing. His account of life with Father is as refreshing, as natural and unpretentious, as a bed of nasturtiums. The essays seem simply to have grown without artifice of any kind. But this we know was not the case. Here was a man bedridden with arthritis, a man whose writing hours were constricted by his malady, a man who when he could not sleep kept revolving certain scenes over and over in his mind until he had found the perfect word, the most direct sentence, with which to illuminate them for other Americans. These words and sentences he jotted down on small cards at his bedside table. This is not artifice: it is the most painstaking combination of industry and skill.
In Life with Mother (Knopf, $2.00) Mr. Day once more readmits us to that ebullient, normal, and warm-hearted household to which he belonged in the 1880’s. This posthumous volume shows us a more rounded picture of the Day family than was vouchsafed us in either of the earlier books: we see a good deal more of those four redheaded Day boys, we grow more fond of Mother with her quick, appealing nature, yet we never lose sight of that ruddy, impatient lord of creation, Mr. Day Senior. I think Clarence Day’s three volumes may become a lasting part of our household literature, books read aloud and handed down, first because we recognize in them the idiosyncrasies of our own brood, and secondly because the author achieves his effects with such simplicity and perfection of detail.
What were those idiosyncrasies? Father’s magnificent impatience, his contempt for pretense, his insistence on doing things his may, his wish to own whatever caught his fancy, his unshaken belief that in small matters his wife and children were always wrong. (Will my father and twenty million others please rise and take a bow?) And again Mother, with her loyalty, her pride in her men, her back-scat driving, her timidity which could so easily pass into a kind of stubborn courage, her ability to put Father in the wrong, her delight in the little competitions that sprang up between them — all this set down with a lurking affection within the words. I say Good!
Eight years have passed since the publication of A Farewell to Arms—influential years for those who write and for those who read. In the twenties a novelist could go his own gait, preoccupied with his art, living, if he chose, in a lighthouse of experience shut off from the surge of events. That is hardly so to-day. In eight years Ernest Hemingway has seen the Spain he loved go up in smoke, he has hunted big game in Africa, he has caught big fish off the Florida Keys, and as he weathered the depression here he had driven home to him, as most of us have had, the discrepancy in the country between those who ‘have’ and those who ‘have not.’ His blood is just as quick on the trigger as ever, his love of action and of dialogue, his preoccupation with Death (amounting to a kind of fascination), are as they were ten years ago, but he has grown much more aware of the inequalities in the community. So much is clear from reading his new novel, To Have and Have Not (Scribners, $2.50).
This is the story of Harry Morgan, a Florida boatman, a big man physically, resourceful, playing a lone hand, so hard a driver that he passes for a bully, but a square shooter if he is treated right. When the book opens, Harry is sitting in the Pearl of San Francisco Café in Havana. He has been renting his boat and his services to deep-sea fishermen at $35 a day; he does not need to bootleg or to run in Chinamen from Cuba — even though the latter come as high as $1000 a head. Then things begin to hum. There is a gangster killing to show you what does happen to those who run contraband. Harry is cleaned out by ‘a gentleman’ who loses his tackle overboard and skips without paying a cent. Harry has his wife and daughter to think about. Self-pity is left out of him: he’ll do what he has to, however dirty it may be. And the more he handles dirt the more it hurts him.
Three elements are conspicuously present in To Have and Have A of. First, action, swift-moving and wholly absorbing while it is on: I think of the shooting of Pancho and the boys; the blue marlin that got away; the beaching of the Chinese; and Harry’s roundup of the bank robbers. Action is Hemingway’s forte: he writes it better than any American alive. The second element is characterization, whether by word of mouth (listen to the talk of the rummies, of the Vets, of Harry and old Marie!) or by short flashes of introspection in the idiom of the thinker. And social satire is the third element. His sketches of the retired pirates, the oversexed women, and the literary flabbies of Florida are drawn with a cool contempt. But the contrast between these ’haves’ and the ’have not’ natives like Harry seems to me too theatrical in its arrangement. It would have hit me harder had it been less obvious.
There are points in the story where many readers will ask whether such brutality as the pitiless killing of Mr. Sing or the excruciating suffering of Harry on his last trip, whether the denunciation of Ruth Gordon or the bed talk of Marie, are defensible or necessary. One does not have to look to Spain or the recent bombings in China to find an answer: we have our own humiliations nearer home — in South Chicago and in Harlan County. This is not always a pretty world, and in mirroring its brutality Hemingway is only doing with his prose what Hogarth did with his brush.
Four years ago, I think it was, a trio of bookstores in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland banded together to conduct a series of Book Fairs, and in so doing gave impetus to an idea which I hope will last. The fair was designed not alone for bookworms but for readers young and old. Exhibits were arranged with the assistance of the publishers, lectures were scheduled, and a traveling circus of authors, editors, and camp followers went from city to city preaching books with the zeal of a crusader. The gospel spread because the fairs were enjoyable.
Last year New York carried the idea to its logical development. With some seventy American publishers coöperating (in itself a marvel), an exhibit of manuscripts, bookmaking, and literature in the flesh was arranged in Radio City, which was the talk of the town while it lasted. Over 90,000 spectators milled past the police, pushed through the turnstiles; the auditorium holding close to a thousand was tight-packed an hour before the speakers were due. More than 10,000 copies of Christopher Morley’s Ex Libris were manufactured on the spot and sold hot from the press. Over 4000 school children trooped in during the day.
This year committees in Detroit, Boston, Cincinnati, and New York have done their best to prepare a still more exciting exhibition. New York’s Book Fair (November 5-21) will have a room devoted to the manufacturing of a book (Hendrik Van Loon has designed it), a clinic to test reading skill, a Hobby Room, a model home library, an ideal children’s collection. Books may be a luxury, but if such things continue the time may come when a few of them will be a necessity.
