Evening star., 1937-05-29
By Mary.Carter Roberts.


Doran & Co.
rR. BURTON RASCOE of Ken
N n lucky and Oklahoma writes
V here his autobiography. Mr..
4 i Rascoe Is, Of course, well
known. He is a literary critic who
made a reputation in the heyday of
American criticism-the late teens
and early twenties, those good years
when criticism was still alive in
America, and had not, as it has today,
sunk to the level of polite appreciation,
stage managing and back-patting.
Mr.. Rascoe, indeed, although still
one Of the younger men OF letters,
comes to us veteran Scared with the
battles of many books and shining
with the glory Of one who took part
in the wars of the literary Titans-at
least of such Titans as our age has yet
produced. For In the days Of his
early career criticism was war and
the field OF criticism was battle place
on which blows were delivered-or, If
you please, reviews were Written-With
all the heat and fury Of crusaders en-
gagged in saving something. The critics
then, not only those of the literary
magazines, but those Of the daily
papers, girded on their armour when
ever they produced a column. The
issues were many, but the great diW-
sion was art against Puritanism, and
the Nation was lined up, pretty solidly,
as pro or anti Mencken. How amaz-
ing 1t is today to consider that litera-
ture (not a particular book) was once
news in America, and that battles
crudely sincere and paSSionate-Were
fought out over an artistic matter in
the columns of newspapers! But there
It is Mr.. Rascoe was through it and
he has made an account of 1t part of
his book heretofore, as he says, he
forgets.
His book, Of course, covers more
than that. 1t covers the period COW
cred by 10 many recent autobiogra-
phies of newspaper men after it gets
to the years of its authors maturity
the late teens and tWenties, but it diff
fers from most of the others in that
Mr.. Rascoe did not Cd cover the
World War, or CD become a disillu-
stoned eX-patriot in Paris. The book
indeed seems well in accord with its
title; it is apparently the effort of a
man in middle years to write down the
bright glamour of boyhood and youth
while 1t is still a living part of his
memories.
The boyhood part OF it Is unremark-
able but pleasantly entertaining. How
the Rascoe family lived in Fulton,
KY, and later in Shawnee, Okla,
what these towns were, how young
Burton went to school and fell In
love with various girls and teachers,
how he discovered his taste in litera-
ture-all the routine passages of the
current fashion in autobiography are
here, told either with equally routine
humor or by means of excerpts from
the schoolboy diary.
Similarly, when he writes of his
university days, Mr.. Roscoe follows
pretty much the orthodox formula
THE educational process" he says,
sas had seen it at that beautiful
and wealthy university (Chicago), in
80 far as it was represented by the
College OF Liberal Arts, was largely a
wasteful farce. =" And elsewhere:
what I had been able to learn in
the class room had been very little;
what had been able to learn out
side, in the Harper Library, Crerar
Library and the Chicago Public Lii
brary under my own direction and of
my own volition had really consti-
tuted whatever progress I had made
IN my education during two years as
a registered student" This would
seem to have been the typical attitude
OF intellectual young men and women
toward formal education as it existed
at that time. At this point he left
school and went as a reporter to the
Chicago Tribune, where, after a while,
he became literary editor and entered
on that stormy period of defending
young genius and fighting taboos
which, to date, is the most interesting
time in American letters of the
century.
He adopted writing tactics in
his wosk as critic, big headlines,
catchy phrases, pugnacity. Today,
as one reads his work, one sees that
tendency still in him. He is the in
durable enthusiast still, but two things
work against him now-the fact that
his enthusiasm has become something
of habit with him and the circum-
stance that we are in a slick age,
Iterarlly speaking. The crusading
critic In the teens and twenties had
something to go on. There was real
Issue then, between new genius and
old tradition. There were figures on
both sides OF sufficient size to make
the fight worth fighting. Today, we
have vast general ton Of clever
mediocrities. The boys and girls who
were growing up when Mr.. Rascoe
31rst blasted his guns at smugness
with new handlettered engraved
streamers across the pages, new type
faces, line drawings and caricatures."
developed in an atmosphere of literary
conversation and litertary interest,"
thanks to such critics as himself, Of
course. And it has only been natural
that an unparalleled number of these
SoAAA6ccSAo olAOully ClIClLSClftS, kQTU
their hands to writing, after having
heard books discussed as the daily
news all through their impressionable
years. And so they have.
But literary interest does not mean
literary genius, and 1t is undeniable
that the giants have gone. That fine
flair for battle which young Burton
RAScOp carried into critiricn, vno re On
seems somehow pathetically pointless
today; his enthusiastic discoveries
from month to month are saddening
figures to place beside the Cabell,
Dresser, Anderson, Lewis and F1tz-
gerald, whom he championed IS years
ago. But that does not mean that
his story Of his youthful war on big
wig critics" and militant upholders
OF the genteel tradition in literature"
"a not an exciting record aS he tolls