Evening star., 1938-06-26

Party Discussed by Two Magazines With Question Contendna
That Election Returns Might Divide Country Into Those
Who Pay and Work and Those Who Receive,

anu loss Oh commence among business.
men. The measures are as follows:
The N. r. A.; the purchase Of mort
cages by the H. o. l.. c.; the farm
loan business; crop regulation; the
Wagner Labor Act; the court-packing
bill; the wages and hours bill; the
Patman bill; the reorganization bill
and the Glass-Steagall bill. And,
having listed these, he comments
scathingly on the recent appropriations
for a renewal of pump priming"
"The main consoling feature of the
present situation" he concludes, may
lie in the fact that the small business
men OF America finally have aroused
themselves to dangers sufficiently sim
liar TO those advanced by the leaders
in such countries as Russia and Ger
many, to demand united action.
Small business reaches straight
down into the grass roots of the cleo.
torate. II the voice OF small busi-
ness can be sufficiently amplified, it
may serve to check and to abolish
those obvious efforts toward the OBJ
struction Of those principles that have
made this Nation the most enlight-
ened Of the earth"
II leaders OF this page who re-
member the reviewers recent fun
poking at the modern novelists may
be amused by an article on the same
subject now appearing in the Allan
tlc Monthly. 1t is called Relief From
Murder" and is by Howard Mumford
Jones. AS a critic, Mr. Jones does a
great deal of novel reading, and now.
oppressed by the grim determination
OF the hctioneers to show us Life AS
1t Is Really Lived, he calls a sit-down
strike among novel readers.
When he takes up a novel, saws
ne, he can expect to find authors
creating characters only to destroy
them, physically or morally as the
case may be. Or, if the characters
are not thus destroyed, I may safely
expect them to be strong, violent men
or weak, frustrated human beings. I
shall expect them to commit rape
or suffer seduction, just as I have
learned to expect that fictional we'd
dings are but the opening scenes in
a long series of unhappy episodes for
husband and wife know from nov
els that children are born to be mis-
cradle and that old people are
burden to themselves and to others.
NO one In novel who has a lob is
satisfied or contented with his work
and good many characters are sure
to lose their jobs"
And he adds, Il am bored by these
novels"
Not only you, Mr. Jones! The novel
tooay Is stereotyped to the point of
complete lifelessness. and any one who
loves its great tradition and delights
IN the examples of its magnifcence
is gong to be bored by these works
OF the moment, of which the most
that can be said is that they are con-
scientious, and that only OCCASION
ally Any reasonably practiced reader
can recognize the types for what they
are on the first page-you get that de-
temlned drab work which shows you
that small bookkeepers lead small
bookkeepers' lives, or you get the glee-
fully Immoral account of the home
life OF share-croppers. or you get
the maudlin piece of tosh which DEM
onstrates how sensitive young man
suffers IN a Misunderstanding So
ciety, or you get the story of the
woman who has an emotional upset
and then goes on to rebuild her life
tas they phrase it,, or-most madden
Ing OF all-you get the plot where
two totally uninteresting people won-
der blankly for $50 pages whether or
not they will get divorce. And who
cares about any of it? And then. of
course, there is the novel about the
strike down at the shoe factory. Yes,
there is the novel about the strike.
The reviewer recently picked up a
work Of fiction for review purposes
and put 1t down again after about
an hour. There were guests in the
house, and one of them exclaimed
Can you read it all so soon?" The
answer, Of course. is that the reviewer
did not have to read it all, that she
had already read it so times, that its
contents were as familiar to her as
the ad wherein the weeping girl is
told to use deodorant and cheer up.
For so they were. An hour was more
than sufficient.
Yet the trouble is not with the
plots, for any plot is as good as the
man using it. The trouble is a great
deal more serious than that Fiction
today suffers from a lack of genius.
We have gotten a generation of slick
stylists and artistic rubber stamps.
From somewhere these entrepreneurs
have picked up the idea of what they
are pleased to call social injustice;
translated into their works, that shows
nothing but feeble sadistic love Of
tearing the weak to pieces or an
equally feeble and sadistic joy in
maligning the strong. 1t is all mega
tive. There isn't a vestige of evi-
dence of positive reaction to life in a
library full of such works. And genius
is always positive; the so-called de
structive' geniuses especially have
been passionately positive Well. a
sit-down strike of readers may not be
a bad idea. While sitting they could
reread their Thackeray.