Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1935-08-25
Bv Marv.Carfer Roberts.

" N OR11E Ol Ille ldCI GIldI Wills
novel has won a prize, it Is a
grand piece of reading. To be
i sure, the prize which has been
awarded it Is dignifed one-the
Harper Prize. But even so. such
works labor under prejudice. To the
intelligent reader they are apt to
bring the same melancholia that in
FAINT musical prodigies bring to lovers
of Bach. 1t takes a mighty fine piece
OF writing to live down the stigma.
Mr.. Davis opus. however, need not
make anybody blench. On the con-
trary, it may we'll make those of us
who are sick and tired of the genre
novel about rural American life sit up
and pluck the bedspread. For it departs
utterly from any of the formulate
which have been so devotedly fol-
lowed by our depicters of country ex-
istence for something like the past 20
years. and goes gorgeously off along
a track which. if not new, was
abandoned shortly after the publica-
ton of Life on the Lower Missis-
sippi." Mr.. Davis is without doubt
the lineal descendant of Mark Twain.
His story deals with life in the
State of Oregon in the homesteading
period, which. in case you do not
know, was from 1906 TO 1908. 1t is
told through the adventures OF a
young man who differs so widely
from the heroes of other rural novels
that he has neither an Oedipus COM
pick nor a yearning Ito escape" nor
an overpowering sense Of being "one
with the soil" He is. on the con-
trary, a sensible creature Of his en-
vironment and adequate 10 live in it.
And there have been precious few
novels of country life in recent years
that have contained such creature.
Indeed, it has gotten so, in the
case OF these novels, that a reviewer
could just look at the jacket and
sketch the plot. If that covering
carried a picture OF deep-chested
male in and-tailored overalls march
ing like a conQueror down his furrow
behind a pair of startlingly blocky
PercheronS. then you knew that YOU
were getting a tale of good whole
some strength, with perhaps heart
break at the end just to show you
that man is not omnipotent, after all
(hot news, of course, so don't get the
idea that he Is.
If. on the other hand. your jacket
showed a weedy youth with sunken
head stumbling off into the sunset
with freSco of SiloS and hencoops TO
windward, you knew that you had a
story in which man is pitted against
Nature, and Nature, the old meanie,
has stacked the kyards. Anyway, you
were pretty sure of one or the other.
You got the impression, after a time,
that all these works were written by
indignant, consumptive youths out in
Pittsburgh. That seemed the best
way to explain them-pallid esthetic
wrath emanating from cloud OF
smoke
Mr.. Davis is not indignant and he
most certainly is not conSumptive
and one doubts that he is youth,
for he writes with heartening self
anu IllOI
than many men ever develop. If he
has accepted any master in making
his Honey in the Horn" 1t must
have been the old writers of plea
resques, but he has wisely avoided let
ting even that much of a formula
cloud his individual outlook. One
foresees a horde of imitators for him,
to be sure, but he has initiated no
one.
The young man of the story starts
his career as sheep herder. Then
he takes the roads with the family
of an itinerant horse trader, then
spends a Winter with the coast In
dams, then joins a wagon train of
settlers in search of land land, oh,
the Joy of this train after the Holly
wood perfectoes), gets himself mixed
up in several killings, assists at a
lynching, harvests wheat, tries a turn
of steamboating, goes into the grass
lands to cut hay, runs into his wagon
train friends again and finds that
they have lost everything and can
use an extra man. He falls in with
them. That, in short, is the plot,
barring a reticent and curiously ap-
pealing love story. And that is just
q minor fraction of the book.
For Mr.. Davis has splendid flair
for episodes and he has studded his
chapters thickly with irresistibly good
stories. He is plainly not afraid of
wasting material" There is such a
wealth of incident in his book as
would have been spread by our ordi-
nary business writer's over half a
dozen full-length novels and a hun
bred little pale green stillborn short
stories" Yet in no sense does this
elaborate background clutter up the
main tale. which is of the young
mans desire to reach an understand
ing with his girl. On the contrary
the simplicity of that theme stands
out the holder for the crowded real
ism of its setting.
Needless to say, the style of a
writer who can do all this, is as
individual as his form. Mr.. Davis is
not humorist, but he has found life
comic. He seems to have found, in
deed. that while tragedy and pathos
come and go throughout the human
existence. comicality is pretty con-
slant. And he has informed his style
with that spirit.
His book is, as has been said, grand
reading. Let us hope that it marks
q swing away from the Pittsburgh
school, back to a realistic interpre-
tation of the great inarticulate popu-
lation of America. And 1t does seem
certain that so trenchant a style will
be copied. Many of our writing
youths could take a far worse model.
DEATH IN THE DESERT. BY Paul
I. Wellman. New York: The Mac
milan Co.
THIS is highly readable history OF
- the winning Of the Southwestern
Desert from the Indians. 1t deals
chiefly with the Apache wars, but also
describes the Pueblo outbreak and the
Modoc rebellion. 1t is carefully docu-
mented and would seem to be ac-
sn,,rota