Evening star., 1935-09-15

of the intelligentsia, wherever they are
lurking. 1t ought, indeed, to be sure
fire stuff on a number Of counts. 1t
is chronicle of an American family"
1t is saga of the soil'-the dear old
soil 1t is tale of the rise of
typical American town" 1t is also an
"epic of the frontier" 1t is, in a
manner of speaking, all of those
things. And it is serious and we'll
written. in the grammatical sense.
But there is one thing that it is not
and that is an interesting book.
Verify, it is saddening that so many
experienced writers, knowing perfectly
the proved ingredients that in combi-
nation make a good novel, sitting
down to write with definite schemes
for suiting the components to their
individual work, should sweat with
the anguish of artistic conscience and
lay words end 70 end for 400 pages
and produce mechanics. 1t is sad, it
is even bitter, that knowledge should
not be enough. But it is true. There
must also be flash, there must be a
fire, there must be genius-alack-as
we'll as skill. And the two have been
distributed in most unfair proportion.
The fault with "A House Too Old"
would seem to be in this very lack OF
life. The chronicle is there-the
chronicle of that typical American
town" which has so caught the literary
imagination. But it has no signifi-
canoe. 1t is carefully without dra-
matte incident, for Mr.. Schorer shows
us plainly that his towns rise was due
to the typical penny -grubbing habits
of its citizens But that typicalness-
which ought to give it its meaning-is
not pointed with the requisite irony.
There is nothing, as the reader views
the horrid blank insectivorouS vii
layers, to make him cry, They are my
brothers!" There is nothing, indeed,
to make him feel that they belong to
the same species at all. They are
isolated and objective. And the book
is correspondingly cold and unrelated.
SOUTH. BY Frederick Wight. New
York: Farrar g. Rinehart.
A FTER reading many novels which
are not bad without being par
ticularly good, it is a distinct relief
to come upon book about which one
can say something positive. That is
the case with South" 1t is a work
OF some vision; it is not conventional
lied in concept; its authors mind,
obviously, has been right against his
materials and not befogged by the
existence of any formula between him
and them. For these reasons one can
regard the book with genuine respect,
even if not entirely with liking.
1t is the story of q young artist and
his wife wintering among friends in
one of the Carolinas. Their adven-
lures are chiefly psychological efforts
to find themselves as lovers again
after Is months Of happy married
life. In this the book Is convincing
enough, but not particularly valuable:
the reader. however, cannot help being
aware that these adventures are only
the skeletonic structure about which
an elaborate series of pictures is hung,
these pictures being the real meat of
the book. The author indeed is a
painter and his hero is painter. His
novel is painters novel and its title
is well chosen. It is his vision of the
South, or small section of it, that.he
has been setting down, rather than the
adventures Of any set of flctional
characters.
So he writes Of the town and people
surrounding his young couple. We
see, visually see, the cotton mills, the
workers homes, the colony of rich
Northerners. the Yerious types of ma