Growth of a Man
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $2.50]
THE first question anyone asks about a new book by Mazo de la Roche is, of course, whether it is a Jalna novel. I have been asked myself five or six times in two days. And so I shall say immediately that it is not, but is a fine and appealing story in its own right. I read it with continuous pleasure, and with something besides pleasure, because it gave me certain twinges of memory that made me wonder how a woman could ever have discovered so much about a certain kind of boy. I do not remember to have come upon any other boy like him in a novel. I want to recommend his acquaintance to every boy who thinks his own life is hard, or who, because he is an ardent student, is laughed at as a bookworm, or who is dreaming of some day making a success that will not be merely making money. Girls should know him too, and mothers and fathers and teachers.
There is not a sign that the author intended to be instructive. And yet in presenting a boy and man so free from rebellion, when he has so much to make him rebellious, so sane when he might easily have been odd, and so loving when he might excusably have been embittered, she has really suggested some ideas about life that need to be expressed in our time more than in most times. It is as if she had proposed to herself to portray a man who suffered about everything that a man can suffer and yet wasted no time in pitying himself, blaming fate or other people, or rebelling against the social order, and who was heroic without ever thinking of himself as even unusual. The resulting picture is very refreshing by contrast with some other young geniuses we have all read about in novels, in its freedom from self-pity, morbid introspection, and hatred of a cruel world.
Growth of a Man is the biography of Shaw Manifold, a tough and dogged boy in body but sensitive in mind, who is solid rather than brilliant, singleminded and stable, driven to excel by an inner fire which is fed partly by love of his mother, from whom he is separated, and partly by a desire to free himself from dependence upon his grandparents, who care nothing for the things he values. From his ninth year, although harassed by poverty, ill-treatment, misunderstanding, and at last by long and desperate illness, he never swerves from his determination to gain an education and to excel in his chosen profession of forester. His ultimate triumph is simply one of will power, and in his singleness of purpose he has some of the marks of genius. But he is very much like a great many boys in real life who are not much written about, and his history might be taken as a criticism of some of our current tendencies to view man as a victim of environment and the slave of circumstances. I do not wish to suggest that it is presented as an exemplary or moral tale, or that the hero is a Galahad of purity and courage. It is a moving and yet at times highly entertaining story of an entirely believable boy.
He is not, however, the only successful portrait in the book. His grandfather Roger Gower, dense, inarticulate, and rigidly righteous, who kissed his wife only three times in fifty years, is memorable and somehow likable. Louie Adams, the ugly duckling of the high school, who later becomes a ‘beauty expert’ and who lies about a nonexistent lover in order to make Shaw jealous, is very touching. Dr. Clemency, who pampers his wife, and Mrs. Clemency, whose love of flowers seems so ludicrous to her stolid neighbors; Shaw’s playmates in the Pirate’s Cave; Jack Searle, as beautiful and as conscienceless as the gods of his Greek ancestors; the doctors and nurses in the two sanatoriums; and finally Shaw’s mother Cristabel — all are alive on the page. And worthy of the characters are the scenes, in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and the coast of the Pacific. It is fresh territory in a novel of this kind. I hope Miss de la Roche will work her new vein further.
R. M. GAY
