Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1947-08-24


Mr.. Candy modestly disclaims
and sum up his personal impress
sions. His book Is not, he insists,
a history, because memoir records
what seemed important at the mo-
ment," history what was impor-
talt for the future" Nor has he
written biography. he points out.
It's true that he has not written
formal history of the two fields
in which he has been leading fig
ure and an important influence. Yet
this book tells more about the
changes, for good or i'll, in customs,
ideas, ways of living, in teaching
and writing, than you might gain
from many ponderous, documented
history of this fateful half century.
We can be grateful, too, that Mr..
Candy has turned away from stand
ardized biography. He has brought
in his own experiences whenever
they Illustrated what he is describ-
ing. We've been spared long &C
counts of the eccentricities of Uncle
Jim, of the parsimony of Aunt
Sally; a genealogical chart and
chronology of the subjects days at
home and at school.
Newspaper Days.
Mr.. Candy spent rs maturing and
productive years at Yale as a stu
dent and as teacher of English
literature. In his later years he
quit the protected seclusion of the
campus for the turbulence of the
transitional literary scene in the
New York of the '20s. He founded
the Literary Review, which became.
Saturday supplement to the New
York Evening Post, then superbly
edited paper with cultural, even
scholarly interests. When the Post,
which was too highbrow for most
New Workers, was sold to a more
commercial minded management,
the Literary Review didn't last long.
But it was reborn, through the
ministrations of Mr.. Candy, as a |
new Literary Review, an independ-
ent magazine, later known as the
Saturday Review of Literature, the
present publication. Mr.. Candy was
editor of the Review, under one
name or the other, for Is years, and
he still is chairman of its board.
The Review broke a trail through
the literary underbrush of the era,
making new paths in book review
ing and critical essays and featuring
original poetry. More than 20 years
ago, Mr.. Candy was a founder of
the Book of the Month Club, and
he is still one of the editors who
selects its books.
Progressive and Tolerant.
During his years as an editor and
a critic, Mr.. Candy has been an
influence, sane and at the same
time progressive and tolerant. He
always welcomed new ideas, yet he
kept his feet in an age torn this
way and that by schools of new
writing, swept by violent controver-
sy. He was not fooled by the liter
airy totalitarians, whether they
called themselves Communists or
something far to the right. But he
rejected most of them because they
wrote bad novels, not because he
disagreed with them politically. He
was one of the first to acclaim the
fresh talents of writer's like Sher-
wood Anderson, Hemingway and
Steinbeck, and he could see great
gifts in experimentalists like Joyce
and Gertrude Stein.
The first section of the book, called
1.-THE Age of Confidence" is indeed
refreshing. Mr.. Candy Is the only
contemporary writer I know with a
memory of the closing years OF the
10Th century who can write about
that period without either ridicule
or sentimental nostalgia. He sums
up the era sanely and delightfully."-.
He does not think it was such bad
time for children to grow up in, de-
spite it's conventions and pruderles,
and he sees a real loss in the passing
of the old-fashioned American home,
the close knit family.
q Criticizes System.
In the section called Alma
Mater" describing his years at Yale,
his urbane accounts bristle at times
with criticism of the system. In his
years as a student and a young
teacher, he says, few of the boys who
graduated got an education, though
they gained something else from
college life that was little concerned
with study-a certain preparation for
the rough-and-tumble battle for
money, which then was the goal OF
most young Americans. What am
surest of isl he says Of his expert
ence as a professor, that what II
You Can't Believe
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