Artillery of Time
by [Scribners, $2.75]
ON an upstate New York farm in the fifties, the Lathrops lived in the staunch pattern of the Yankee gentry: educated and well-to-do, they had a strong sense of personal integrity and group responsibility. Mr. Smith takes up the line of their life at a point of division in their own way and in the way of Eastern America. His long, close-packed novel approaches their story through full and minute detail, through many small incidents, through painstaking account of the minutiæ of living.
While some of this delineation suffers from repetition and inevitable slowness, it is never static. The story is carried chiefly by the brothers, Ike and John, and the character of Ike in action, developed early, is compelling from first to last. He is the American materialist, but no type. Nothing of the grim-jawed, steely-eyed monster of finance, Ike is a country boy with his eye on the main chance and a heart full of problems. Starting with mechanical innovations, Ike grows in economic importance as the new machinery grows in effectiveness; starting when the country town of Byzantium begins to expand, he expands with it. The coming of the Confederate War for Independence offers Ike, as it did many another American industrialist and financier, the chance for quick profits on a rapidly advancing scale. The fact that he debases artillery he sells to the United States armies might trouble him, but he does it — as, early in the story, he persists in a rather tricky horse trade, even though his family is revolted. While the youthful horse trade ended in misery for the traded animal, the defective cannon ends in the death of his closest friend and the serious wounding of his brother at Gettysburg.
The brother John is the idealist and, to my mind, less successful, chiefly because many of his speeches and points of view smack of laterday reasoning. I do not say such reasoning did not exist at his time; I merely say Mr. Smith’s treatment of it in John lacks the wholehearted conviction of his treatment, of Ike.
John literally orates to his brother on ‘the river of America,’on our democratic experiment, on the Jeffersonian ideal of the man of small property as the salvation of the country. I am doubtful of how much of the irony is conscious with Mr. Smith when John dreams magnificently of the New West and its freedom from the money rulers, just seventy-odd years, a lifespan, before the Okies complete in tragic migration the cycle of the trek toward a free way of life.
These more or less picayune objections are meant in no wise to detract from the real stature of this novel. It has a largeness of conception and a general excellence of execution, and includes an immense gallery of portraits dominated, but not dwarfed, by Ike and John.
CLIFFORD DOWDEY