Evening star., 1923-12-25
NEW BOOKS
AT RANDOM

sen. Harcourt, Brace and Conn
pany.
Boston, 1t appears. has given way
to Chicago. Longfellow and Emer-
son. Lowell and Whittier and Holmes
are these days singing small-or so
the implication runs, And. set of
against this triclxle of sound out of
the east, the Windy city is one lus,y
cock crow Of jubilation. from Its
young men--its Sandburgs and An
dersons and Hechts-a challenge TO
the mongrel literature Of the eastern
sedboard, whose vehicle, pure Eng
lish in build, Is quite incapable OF
conveying even so much as the body
Of American life. to say nothing of
claim, to be sure. made perhaps more
in play than In full earnest Not
much given to play, though, these
savage youngsters. And clearly with
no respect whatever for their elders.
whom they refuse point-biank to ac-
cept as their betters.
+ + +
Harry Hansen agreed to give ue q
look In upon these new writing men
of Chicago. And in his company We
drifted into Schlogrs, where the tribe
met in nightly pow-wow. sweeping
the earth clean of hypocrisy and cant
and a sniVeling fear of life with the
besom of their fury and contempt.
An occasional word out of the gem
eral bedlam t,oated across on a cloud
of smoke. "Barbarisr," some one
snarled. Streets, houses, walls, els
waited tracks, doors, windows, geo
mettlcal patterns. No real building
in America. Only masses. Only
heaps Of energy. Utilttarian masses.
No ideas, only energy. Barbarism."
Ben Hecht talking. The big fellow
over there saying nothing at all, only
chuckling at the raVing Of Hecht?
That is Sherwood Anderson, who
thinks Hecht the greatest writer on
earthG"save only himself" Hecht
for the whole human race. l despise
these American sycophants. am
the only one Of the four major poets
Of America who" Hansen toach-
Bodenheim. Just a pose. All bosh.
The tall man looking much like a
badly groomed policeman turned out
to be Carl Sandbarg. the roet Of the
streets and of the prairie" "iil take
you to hear Carl preach some time.
Oh, he breaches. all right"
And SO he did In one Of the uni
versity halls Carl Sandbarg stood
twanging his guitar and singing the
gutter songs of America. Out of a
"raucous. believing. swee ring
world" he brought them. the garnered
folk songs of this country, "elbowing
aside the stately verse of the an
clients" He trampled upon the pref
erences and pretenses of his refined
audience. He won their hearts by
the cadenced melody of his tones
even while their overtutored minds
denied him any claim to serious con
sideration. Coarse songs, these. roll
ing from the lips of roustabouts and
CLEANED from the earth Itself and
from the wide spaces Of rough and
unkempt world, and yet the bulk of
our great American world. neyertne-
less. And these gutter songs were
the text Of this preachers sermon.
campa .gn. These folk songs are
America, It's native soil, the rootage
OF much Of its common life. And cut
of these he argued for a sincerer ap-
proach to the heart and soul of the
country. repudiatine meanw hHe the
commonly accepted literary tradition
as alien, concealing, peryerting. a
barrier set up to shut US out from
our only source Of revelation ard
self-revelation, naked life itself And
turned out that whether Carl
was chanting folk songs
or frtoning poems of the prairie or
telling to his children the new kind
OF fairy tale embodied in "Rootabaga
Stories his sole preoccupation has
never been complete sincerity
stance and his own heart have led
him to see life chiefly in terms Of
broken men and bcrdened women, so
1t is of these twisted gargoylee'
that he most frequently sings. Free
verse? Broken prose? Bo n. maybe
Neither. possibly. No matter. All
that does matter Is a native form
adequate to deliver our native life.
AS with Carl Sandburg, 80 with the
others. So with Sherwood Anderson,
dreamer, philosopher, corn-fed rnys-
tic; so with Ben Hecht, "Pagliacci of
the fire escape. singing his heart out
over the streets and alleys of a city
whose very stones he loves but whose
people fill him with sad and mourn
full soliloquies"; so with Lew Sarett.
wilderness guide, then poet. who.
when writing of the Thunderdrums
can see the smoke rising from the
wigwams of the Chippewas, who.
when wooing the wind in the pines,
the mist OF the mesa or the timber
line cedar. Is close to the heart Of
things in Shoshone or along the
Absaroka range: 50 with Edgar Lee
Mas ers and Floyd Dell and Wallace
Smith; so with surprising list Of
others. We never guessed there were
so many OF them til they were gath
,red here. All possessed of pas
sion OF protest against pretense. all
,reoccupied with the living reality
Of common human life, all working
n endless ingenuity Of invention to
perfect q completely transparent me-
'rost Of them. Bad hammered many
Of them; overtalkative, insulting, OBJ
noxious upon occasion. What mat
'ar? The thing that they are doing
| 'ooks as II 1t my be so stupendous
in effect as to discount utterly anv
superficial lapses along the way Of
their ultimate supreme achievem ent
4 y y
"T observed to Keith Preston"
Harry Hansen says about the writ
ing OF Midwest Portraits" that
thirty or forty years hence, when we
were frail and toothless. we would
stir the embers Of a dying FIRE and
try to rekindle the fame that once
burned brightly In our hearts. These
our cotemporaries would no longer
be subject to abuse or laudation:
their stars would be fixed, and a
Younger generation OF artists would
be waging war upon q materialfSttc
world under banner not vet unfurled.
into what legendary stuff, thought I.
will the dawning years transform
Sherwood Anderson's boyishness, Ben
uerhtS vivacious cynicism. Carl
Sandburg's sIow-spoken Philosophy.
Edgar Lee Masters unwilling aioof-
ness? why wait until these living
men have passed to transmit the
story Of how they lived, or how they