The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

HERE in New England, April is the key that unlocks us from the iron-bound severity of winter; we get the first whiff of escape as the snow melts and the light lingers on in the afternoon. The effect of all this upon the human system is fun, both to watch and feel.

I am sure that in April women feel younger. They spend more time before the looking glass, and their glance of self-appraisal is more hopeful“I don’t think that’s really too young for me: Hope asks, as she tries on the new hats, and if her men at home applaud, she’s in luck. Alter Easter the bonnets are everywhere, and like spring flowers, their colors have a crisp, vernal freshness which catches the eye. Women wear their hats for other women. Yet, as they walk, they are not unaware that the men are looking (is it at the hat or at the figure?), particularly on days when it is warm enough to walk without a coat and the wind blows the skirt attractively.

The men do look, but not, I think, so flirtatiously as the ladies might hope. This is not because of our lingering Puritanism. It is because April in New England is so fickle. Here there is nothing to be compared with the rising tide of green along the Main Line, or in Delaware. Here the sunshine is thin, the woods are bare of that sylvan beauty of dogwood and redbud. Lovers still wear their galoshes, and on those few days when April really does capitulate, a man’s first reaction is of lassitude and a slight head cold. The nervous drive which has kept him spinning faster and faster through March suddenly slops. And if, at the invitation of the morning, he has put on a light suit, the odds are ten to one that, before dark the rising east wind will have given him the snuffles.

Men daydream in April, but less of the ladies than of gardens, a trout stream, or a boat. And speaking of boats, Mr. H. H. Harris, a Boston engineer, has come up with a new one. Last year, according to the Boston Herald, Mr. Harris bought a sizable fleet of DUKWS from the .Army in the Philippines. Some of these he has cannibalized for spare parts, but the best of them he has remodeled into what he calls a “dukyot” (pronounced duck yacht). On this 2½-ton truck which has wheels, a ship’s body, and a propeller, Mr. Harris has mounted a stainless-steel and mahogany waterproof cabin. In one compartment are dining table, desk, and radio, and divans convertible into double beds. Off the main compartment will he a shower and toilet, a galley with one of the compact electrical units used on the Army B-I7s, and a deep freeze, into which the hunter or fisherman can store his kill or catch.

The dukyot has a speed of six miles an hour at sea and up to sixty miles on land. Last summer Mr. Harris cruised from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard; he tested it in eight-foot surf off Atlantic City. He believes it will climb Mount Washington, or let you live in comfort beside the most remote trout stream. Mr. Harris has named his own yacht the Platypus, and says he will use a Weasel or an amphibious jeep as a tender. So don’t be alarmed if one of these amphibians comes crashing through the underbrush or waddles up the beach to sec what you have been catching.

My wife wants one.

For reasons not unconnected with the American climate and nerves, the short novel makes a powerful appeal to our imagination. I think we like if for its puce, its tension, and its power of suggestion; wc know that within its design, which is not, for a moment to be confused with that of a fat, meandering short story, Stephen Crane, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, Willa Gather, Thornton Wilder, and John Steinbeck have done their best. It may be the outgrowth of a single experience, an experience which reaches now back in time and now forward toward the crisis, as in Hall and Nordhoff’s Men Against the Sea; it may be a fait accompli slowly unraveling to a youthful tragic decision, as in Ethan Frame; or it may be the story of a lifetime, thirty years compressed in thirty thousand words (that is, about one third the size of the ordinary novel), as in A Lost Lady, by Willa Gather, where growth and destiny, implacable and pitiful, are built up by the sublest transition and selectivity.

In The Sea of Grass,Conrad Richter drew from history the best short novel that has yet been written about our Southwest at the time the cattle barons with ranches “as big as Massachusetts with Connecticut thrown in” were being invaded by the nesters from the East. In The Trees and The Fields he wrote of the earliest days in the Ohio Valley, from the lonely cabins in the dark forests to the burned-over clearings and the first rude towns; and in Tacey Cromwell he caught the fever of the mining and gambling in Arizona. The son of an itinerant preacher, he has traveled far and close to earth, always with a consuming, accurate interest in the growth of this impetuous nation.

Always Young and Fair marks Mr. Richter’s return to his home country in Pennsylvania. It is a period piece beginning at the lime of our war with Spain and tracing its way up to the midtwenties. In essence it is the story of T.R.’s America and of the serene, bucolic life in the pleasant coal town of Pine Mills, where Asa Markle was the autocrat, and where his daughter Lucy, with her soft, steel-wire stubbornness, was determined to make herself the village heroine and martyr.

The picture of Lucy’s protracted maidenhood is painted for us by her young and adoring cousin Johnny, and it is a picture full of hero worship, full of those nostalgic details of the life that went on in the big house as seen and remembered by the poor country mouse. Johnny is a somewhat timid and bloodless observer. We feel that he is overawed by Miss Lucy’s wealth to the point of being unable to render any judgment on what she does. In his eyes we see a dedicated female who projects herself first as Tom Grail’s widow (they were engaged but never married), and then, after a somewhat mysterious illness, as Will Grail’s aging fiancée. When her youth begins to fade, she chases Will, whom she has been holding at. arms length for years, and she chases him until he is just about ready for the wheel chair.

The portrait of Lucy is dear and not easily forgotten. I see her vanity, her growing eccentricities, and with what consuming egotism she pursues her way. I see the spacious, high-ceilinged, darkwooded serenity of the Markle home, and the nostalgia with which Mr. Richter lights up the tranquility and, as it seems to us now, the unruffled life in that little mountain town. He has been eminently successful in recapturing the spirit of the place, and the episodes in that long war between Lucy and Will have been picked out with tHe accuracy and affection of a native son. But I miss in this story the fine edge of temper which makes The Sea of Grass vigorous beyond its brevity. One feels that Will Grail must have raged against Lucy’s perversity, and that it would have done us good had he blown off steam, yet this never happens. The lovers in this new story live too long within their own rigid reserve; in shutting out life they also shut out some of the reader’s interest.

To his short novels Robert Nathan has brought an endearing originality. He has been able to walk the precarious line between sentiment and whimsey with a sure and delightful sense of balance. In Portrait of Jennie the mystery keeps the sweetness from ever cloying. In Journey of Tapiola the wit saves the story from being cute. In Road of Ayes, which I think is his finest, performance, the prescience and the very human touches reinforce the feeling of exile.

Mr. Nathan is that rare combination, a writer who is both farsighted and tender-minded. He feels before most of us the storm clouds that are gathering, and thus it is no surprise to find that in his new novel, Mr. Whittle and the Morning Star, he is writing of a mild-mannered college professor who has become convinced that the end of the world is at hand and who determines to warn the little college town, while at the same time he prepares himself for oblivion. His wife, the practical and comely Amanda, first thinks he is suffering from indigestion, and his daughter Lucinda can’t be bothered. Mr. Whittle begins to preach the word to the Ladies’ Auxiliary: “Having learned to blow ourselves up, we shall certainly do so. . . . I am convinced that this is our destiny; I see no way to avoid it, and I do not expect that we shall ever meet again. I thank you.” And when he warns the president of the bank, the president of the.college, and the adolescents in his class, Rivertown and the campus of Caraway College begin to look askance.

His alarm is such a burden that Mr. Whittle soon feels in need of creature sympathy. And when Amanda blows him and his logic out of the house in one of her gusty irritations, he finds a soul mate for the evening in one of his coeds, with ensuing embarrassments from which Cod alone can save him. The story begins wilh that enticement of which Mr. Nathan is such a gentle master: the college, ihe family, and Mr. Whittle are shown to us with a very nice balance of satire and sentiment. The relations of Penelope and Mr. Whittle in the classroom are delightfully natural, and in his appearance before the Auxiliary, Mr. Whittle certainly delivers what is one of the most remarkable lectures over heard. So far so good. But what follows seems to be more theatrical and less entertaining than act one. The staging is too apparent, the cues too pat, the discovery of the lovers too well timed, and God’s voice too much like that of Gabriel Heatter’s for my acceptance. Mr. Whittle’s warning, which ought to be taken seriously, evaporates on that spring night, I am sorry.

John A. Lomax was born with a true and singing ear. Singing came naturally to him: he sang as he churned the butler, he sang wilh his elders at camp meeling, he sang the field songs of the South he had learned from the bond servant, and his beloved friend, Nat Blythe. His father, a Mississippian, moved by ox team to Texas after the Civil War and settled on a branch of the Chisholm Trail. Their two-room house — “twelve of us sometimes in two rooms” was on the bank of a stream, a good place to make camp and rest the rattle before the long plod through the Indian Territory. During his youth millions of cattle passed over the Chisholm Trail, driven by cowboys who called, yodeled, and sang as they rode along. “I was sleeping in my father’s two-room house. . . . Suddenly a cowboy’s singing waked me as I slept on my trundle bed. A slow rain fell in the darkness outside. I listened to the patter on the pine shingles above me . . . and mv heart leapt even then to the cries of (he cowboy trying to quiet, in the deep darkness and sifting rain, a trail herd of restless cattle: —

Johnny Lomax began to write down those songs when he was still a small boy; a roll of them tied up with cotton siring was at the bottom of his trunk when he wont to Granbury College. Teaching and scrimping to make the grade, he transferred to the University of Texas in 1895, and there he showed the manuscripts to a great AngloSaxon scholar, Dr. Morgan Callaway, Jr., only to be told that his frontier lyrics were “tawdry, cheap and unworthy. . . . There was no possible connection between the tall tales of Texas and the tall lales of Beowulf.”So Mr. Lomax made a bonfire and burned the lot. It was not until he had reached Harvard, in 1906, that Barrett Wendell and then Kittredge heard him sing those cowboy songs; with the aid of a traveling fellowship they urged him on the quest, for American folk songs, a quest which has carried him into forty-seven stales and which, over four decades, has so richly rewarded the Library of Congress and made Mr. Lomax at last a prophet with honor in his own country.

In Adventures of a Ballad Hunter we see how that quesl extended from songs of the plains to songs of the penitentiaries and chain gangs, the field songs and spirituals of the Negro, the songs of the Erie Canal and the ballads of the mountaineers.

There was plenty of opposition: he traveled with a recording machine, and at many a campfire and rodeo the cowboys refused to sing “into the professor’s horn"; plenty of trouble from suspicious wardens who could not see what Congress wanted with “dirty songs”; plenty of months when no money was in sight and when the Boston Transcript’s dismissal of his first printed Collection as “cheap trash” seemed the last word. But Mr. Lomax persisted. Carl Sandburg encouraged him; so did the Carnegie Corporation. With his son Alan to help, and with the incredibly beautiful singing of his famous convicts, Lead Belly, Iron Head, Clear Rock, and Lightnin’, to prove his discoveries, this doughty Texan has done more than any other American to revive and preserve the folk music of this country. His is the saltiest, singingest autobiography of our time: its character and color, its dialect and melody, come straight from the heart of our people.