Page 2 University Daily Kansan Friday. April 20.1962
U.S. Novels: Garland, James and Fitzgerald
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS, by Hamlin Garland. Premier (Fawcett). 50 cents.
Hamlin Garland was a pioneer writer of the naturalistic school who championed what he called "veritism"—the truth in portrayals of life. His truthful portrayals in these six stories of life on the American prairies in the late 19th century are grim and subduing.
He was not an expert writer. "Main-Travelled Roads" is full of cumbersome writing, but it is honest and expressive. His people, for the most part, live "lives of quiet desperation," from which it is difficult to escape. And if you do escape, what have you got?
Only those who get out—or those who are tough and hard—survive. Will Hannan, in "A Branch-Road," leaves the farm in insane anger at his sweetheart, and goes west. He returns and finds that his sweetheart, Agnes, has married the wrong man and is being screamed at all day long by a shrewish old woman and a miserable old man. He persuades Agnes to flee with him, but it is obvious that neither can be truly happy.
HOWARD McLANE, IN "UP THE COULE." comes back to his Wisconsin home after a life of success as a Broadway actor and playwright. His brother Grant has become embittered by the hardships of life, and when Howard tries to offer him a chance for comfort and relative happiness, he refuses. "I'm a dead failure," he says.
Rob Rodemaker, in "Among the Corn-Rows," goes east to find himself a wife to take back to Dakota territory. The girl he selects is Julia Peterson, who is consigned to a life of hardship and dullness with her Norwegian parents who refuse to accept the ways of life in Wisconsin. She leaves with Rob, even though she knows she does not love him. But love isn't that important to her.
Edward Smith comes home from the Civil War in "The Return of a Private." He comes home weakened in body and spirit. He comes home to a life that he knows will be full of drudgery, and his friends and neighbors know their lives are the same, even as they sing and dance and make jokes and eat and talk. Life is a grim matter, so let's face it, they say.
HASKINS WORKS AND SLAVES, in "Under the Lion's Paw," improves a farm by some $3,000 worth, and then, when he tries to buy it from its owner, finds that he has improved it so much that it now will cost him that much more. He's "under the lion's paw," and, as the owner Butler says, "Why, man, don't look at me like that. Don't take me for a thief. It's the law. The reg'lar thing. Everybody does it."
INDIAN SUMMER, by William Dean Howells. Everyman (Dutton).
SUMMER, by William Dean Howells. Everyman (Dutton). If any American novelist is due a reevaluation it is William Dean Howells, and this fine novel, which Howells himself regarded as his best, should be the cornerstone of such a movement. Howells tells here a story that is simple and refined and non-sociological, in contrast to some of his later works. It belongs quite properly among novels that we consider to have an "international theme."
Whether Howells was trying to emulate Henry James we don't know. James, by the time "Indian Summer" had appeared in 1896, had written such internationally pegged novels as "The American" and "The Portrait of a Lady." Certain it is that "Indian Summer" is in the mood of James' novels, though perhaps not as good.
COLVILLE, HIS HERO, IS A MIDDLE-AGED AMERICAN IN search of culture in Europe, like James' Christopher Newman. In perceptiveness he is closer to Lambert Strether of James" "The Ambassadors." In the course of his culture search he falls in love with a young girl, Imogene Graham. But a serious accident awakens him to his folly, and he comes to his senses and ends up by marrying an older woman.
RODERICK HUDSON, by Henry James. Harper Torchbooks, $160.
I am about ready to draw attention to myself in my literary circle of five or six by proclaiming that Henry James has been praised for the wrong books. Or, perhaps, for too few books. "The Princess Casamassima" and "The Bostonians," which even James himself wasn't sure about, got me started on this kick, and now there is "Roderick Hudson."
For this is an amazingly good first novel. I would guess that even the unpolished version would be a good first novel (James took this one and several others and gave them finesse in a special edition published, I believe, around 1906). In view of the fact that this is a touched-up novel, it was refreshing to find a splendid dangling modifier and a number of unclear antecedents. It's nice to know that our greatest novelist was human, after all.
"RODERICK HUDSON" was the first of the "international novels." Rodderick is a New England sculptor of considerable ability and considerable instability, who goes to Rome under the financial auspices of the central intelligence of the novel, Rowland Mallet. In Rome, chiefly through a misguided love affair with an American woman who later becomes James' "Princess Casamassima," Hudson disintegrates and finally hurls himself to his death.
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THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN, by Mary Austin (Doubleday Anchor, 95 cents)—a picture of the border country of southern California and Arizona, a natural history of desert land. The book was first published in 1903 and endures as a study of a region becoming more and more important in our modern life.
MOLIERE, a new criticism by W. G. Moore (Doubleday Anchor, 95 cents)—an Oxford professor examines plays such as "Le Tartuffe" and "Le Misanthrope" as comic art. Moore contends the plays are best approached as theater.
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THEODORE PARKER, YANKEE CRUSADER, by Henry Steele Commager (Beacon, $1.75) — a paperback reprint of the 1936 biography of the famed Unitarian minister, abolitionist and Transcendentalist. Parker served as the dynamic conscience of abolitionism for many Americans, and his story is of particular interest to Kansans for his impassioned defense of John Brown. Here is a good biography deserving of special attention.
BABYLON REVISITED, AND OTHER STORIES, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner Library, $1.25.
For a good part of his writing life, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a kind of Peter Pan of letters. He refused to grow up, and his writings reflect this.
"THE ICE PALACE" IS, A CRITIC MIGHT SAY, a story of a conflict in cultures, what happens to a slow-moving, languid Georgia girl when she is transplanted to the cold of what probably is Fitzgerald's home town of St. Paul.
"May Day" is a wild and disturbing story of the generation about to embark on the twenties, about a night of gaiety and tragedy as a mob of soldiers invades a Communist newspaper office. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a fantasy about any Ayn Rand kind of family that is holed up on a Montana mountaintop, living in luxury and fighting off all invaders.
Then there is "Babylon Revisited," which seems to sum up all that Fitzgerald had to say about desperate and unthinking living in Paris in the twenties—and the consequences of such life.
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