The New York herald., 1922-04-09

traSt to Three Soldiers STANDS
out The Wasted Generation
yirohment-mueh as Selma White, in
Robert Grants "Unleavened Bread
dreamed and revolted twenty years
ago and ruthlessly won her goal in
Washington. OF course Main Street
itself is what most readers remem-
Der; but that is because most read
ers do not care primarily for femi-
nine psychology. What Mr.. Lewis
has really given US, whether he is
precisely aware of it or not, is what
Main Street meant to Carol Milford
and how she reacted to it. That
there were many other ways of see
ing Main Street is limited with true
artistry-hinted but not insisted on;
Bea Sorenson's way, for instance;
electric lights, movie show and
four whole blocks of stores. 1T was
worth while working for nothing, to
be allowed to stay"
VI.
Scott Fitzgerald seems quite nat
urally to claim attention next, partly
because of the complete antithesis
he affords in standing for a radical
break with traditional methods, but
more especially because of all the
younger group he has perhaps the
largest share of promising raw ma
terial that is still woefuI,y in need
of discipline. His books ere con-
spicuous example of the new ten
dency, probably an unconscious one,
to follow the technique of the NOV
ing picture, to seek primarily the
appeal to the eye; fiamboyant
colors. dazzling lights, thousand
and one distract,ng details of envir-
onment. Then follows a brief "close :
up" Of some young couple, a few
cryptic utterances flash before us
and we are left with baff1ed won-
derment as to just what those two
young people were really thinking.
The art of the moving picture gives
us on the screen the thee clements
essential to story telling: first. the
action, doubly convincing because
we see it; secondly, the dialogue,
flashed on in homeopathic doses;
thirdly, the thoughts, read more or
less clearly through mobile faces and
expressive gestures. But in the new
fiction we have the picture, we
have the dialogue, but much of the
time we do not get the thoughts. for
the printed page cannot show US the
play of the features-and the tempo
of the novel is too fast 60 leave time
for analyzing emotions.
VII.
This Side of Paradise" is a study
OF adolescence; the groupings, the
blunders. the disillusions of an Amer
lean youth who is exceptionally un-
lucky in starting life with more
than an average share of false ideals
and misfit ambitions. Many novels
both better and worse have been built
around this theme; stripped to the
bare framework, that is the theme
Of "Pendennis," Fitzgerald's pages
swarm with incidents straight out of
life, so vivid that the reader Won
ders how many were personal ex-
periences. Moreover, they are young,
naively so. and narrated with such
cheerful assumption that they are
new discoveries that in reading them
one Is almost tempted to believe that
Mr.. Fitzgerald's hero is the first
young man who ever suffered frolr
the morning after or found some
thing rather bittersweet II the savor
of a first kiss. The book as a whole
Is rather amorphous. The author
might readily have shuffIed his
whole deck of episodes and dealt
them in a different order. They
would have led up to the same age
old cry OF disiliusioned youth, al
gods dead. all wars fought. al
faiths in man shaken" That is how
Amory Blaine feels because he ha:
lost his Rosalind. Wasn't It some.
what the way Pendennis felt aftel
he lost his Emily? And the differ,
ence is that one remembers pooi
Pendennis with an indulgent sym