When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 5

did Miss Amy Wellington write a sprightly article for the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post. Miss Wellington referred to this mysterious Regina Miriam Bloch who had stunned everybody by her early articles written under the name of one of Ibsen's most formidable heroines; but unfortunately Miss West wrote a letter in disclaimer. She cannot help Mr.

Ibsen. It may be a collision in names, but it is not a collusion. The truth about Rebecca West, who has written _The Judge_, seems to be dependably derivable from the English _Who's Who_, a standard work always worth consulting. This estimable authority says that Rebecca West was born on Christmas in 1892, and is the youngest daughter of the late Charles Fairfield of County Kerry. It further says that she was educated at George Watson's Ladies' College, Edinburgh. It states that she joined the staff of The Freewoman as a reviewer in 1911. Her club is the International Women's Franchise. Her residence is 36 Queen's Gate Terrace, London S. W.

7. Her telephone is Kensington 7285.

Now is there anything mythical left? What excuse, O everybody, is there any longer for the legend of Regina Miriam Bloch?

But I do not believe Miss West objects to legends. I imagine she loves them. The legend of a name is perhaps unimportant; the legend of a personality is of the highest importance. That Miss West has a personality is evident to anyone familiar with her work. A personality, however, is not three-dimensionally revealed except in that form of work which comes closest to the heart and life of the worker. To write pungent and terrifyingly sane criticisms is a notable thing; but to write novels of tender insight and intimate revelation is a far more convincing thing.

_The Judge_ is such a novel.

=iii=

There is a prefatory sentence, as follows:

"Every mother is a Judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father."

There is a dedication. It is:

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

_The Judge_ is a study of the claim of a mother upon her son. The circ.u.mstances of Mrs. Yaverland's life were such as peculiarly to strengthen the tie between her and Richard. On the other hand, she had always disliked and even hated her son Roger.

The first part of the book, however, does not bring in Richard Yaverland's mother. It is a picture of Ellen Melville, the girl in Edinburgh, the girl whose craving for the colour of existence has gone unsatisfied until Richard Yaverland enters her life. Yaverland, with his stories of Spain, and his imaginative appeal for that young girl, is the fulcrum of Ellen Melville's destiny.

That destiny, carried by the forces of human character to its strange termination, is handled by Miss West in a long novel the chapters of which are a series of delineative emotions. I do not mean that Miss West shrinks from externalised action, as did Henry James whom she has admired and studied. She perceives the immense value of introspection, but is not lost in its quicksands. She can devote a whole chapter to a train of thought in the mind of Ellen Melville, sitting inattentively at a public meeting; and she can follow it with another long chapter giving the sequence of thoughts in the mind of Richard Yaverland; and she can bring each chapter to a period with the words: "She (he) glanced across the hall. Their eyes met." It might be thought that this const.i.tutes a waste of narrative s.p.a.ce; not so. As a matter of fact, without the insight accorded by these disclosures of things thought and felt, we should be unable to understand the behaviour of these two young people.

All the first half of the book is a truly marvelous story of young lovers; all the latter end of the book is a relation scarcely paralleled in fiction of the conflict between the mother's claim and the claim of the younger woman.

Of subsidiary portraits there are plenty. Ellen's mother and Mr. Mactavish James and Mr. Philip James are like full-lengths by Velasquez. In the closing chapters of the book we have the extraordinary figure of the brother and son, Roger, accompanied by the depressing girl whom he has picked up the Lord knows where.

And, after all, this is not a first novel--that promise, which so often fails of fulfilment--but a second novel; and I have in many a day not read anything that seemed to me to get deeper into the secrets of life than this study of a man who, at the last, spoke triumphantly, "as if he had found a hidden staircase out of destiny," and a woman who, at the last, "knew that though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies, the insane s.e.xual caprice of men, the not less mad excessive steadfastness of women."

BOOKS BY REBECCA WEST

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER THE JUDGE

SOURCES ON REBECCA WEST

Who's Who. [In England].

Rebecca West: Article by Amy Wellington in the LITERARY REVIEW OF THE NEW YORK EVENING POST, 1921.

Articles by Rebecca West in various English publications, frequently reprinted by THE LIVING AGE. See the READERS' GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

CHAPTER VI

SHAMELESS FUN

=i=

One way to write about Nina Wilc.o.x Putnam would be in the way she writes about everything. It's not so hard. As thus:

Some dull day in the office. We look up and whom should we see standing right there before us but Nina Wilc.o.x Putnam! Falling over backwards, that being what our swivel chair is made for, we say: "Well, well, well! So today is May 3, 1922! Where from? West Broadway?"

"I should not say so! South Broadway, I guess. I've just motored up from Florida. But your speaking of West Broadway reminds me: I've written a piece for George Lorimer of Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. You see my book, _West Broadway_, brought me so many letters my arm ached from answering them.

What car did you drive? Where d'y' get gas in the desert? What's the best route? And thus et cetera. So now I have wrote me a slender essay answering everything that anybody can ask on this or other transcontinental subjects. Mr. Lorimer will publish, and who knows--as they say in fiction--it might make a book afterward."

"How's Florida?"

"I left it fine, if it doesn't get in trouble while I'm away. I've bought a ranch, for fruit only, on the East Coast, between Palm Beach and Miami, but not paying these expensive prices, no, not never. And I shall live there for better but not for worse, for richer, but most positively not for poorer. I pick my own alligator pears off my own tree unless I want to sell them for fifteen cents on the tree. Bathing, one-half mile east by motor."

"Been reading your piece, 'How I Have Got So Far So Good,' in John Siddall's American Magazine."

"Yes, I thought I would join the autobiographists--Benvenuto Cellini, Margot Asquith, Benjamin Franklin, et Al, as Ring Lardner would insist. Do you know Ring? He and I are going to have one of these amicable literary duels soon, like the famous _Isn't That Just Like a Man? Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!_ which Mrs. Rinehart and Irvin Cobb fought to a finish. But speaking of sport, I have discovered my grandest favourite sport, in spite of motoring, which is deep sea fishing, nothing less. Let me inform you that I landed a 9-pound dolphin which he is like fire-opals all over and will grace the wall of my dining-room no matter if all my friends suffer with him the rest of their lives. He was a male dolphin; get that! It makes a difference from the deep sea fishing sportsman's standpoint. And this place of mine at the end of South Broadway where I can roll cocoanuts the rest of my life if I want to is at, in or about Delray, Florida. D-e-l-r-a-y; you've spelled it."

"We're publishing your new book on how to get thin, _Tomorrow We Diet_."

"Oh, yes. Well, I am several laps ahead of that. Now, I am going up to my home in Madison, Connecticut, to work. Later, I'll maybe drive out to Yellowstone Park or some place. Well, I might stay here at the Brevoort for a month; run down to Philadelphia, maybe. Did you know I once wrote a book for children that has sold 500,000 copies? And, besides a young son whom I am capable of entertaining if you'll let him tell you, I have a few ideas...."

Hold on! This isn't so easy as it looked.

Probably Nina Wilc.o.x Putnam is inimitable. This one and that may steal Ring W. Lardner's stuff, but there is a sort of Yale lock effect about the slang (American slanguage) in such books as _West Broadway_ which is not picked so easily. As for the new Nina Wilc.o.x Putnam novel, _Laughter Limited_--if you don't believe what we say about N.W.P. inimitableness just open that book and see for yourself. The story of a movie actress?

Yes, and considerable more. Just as _West Broadway_ was a great deal more than an amusing story, being actually the best hunch extant on transcontinental motoring, outside of the automobile blue books, which are not nearly such good reading.

And then there's _Tomorrow We Diet_, in which Nina Wilc.o.x Putnam tells how she reduced fifty pounds in seven months without exercising anything but her intelligence. But if you want to know about Nina Wilc.o.x Putnam, read her story in her own words that appeared in the American Magazine for May, 1922. Here is a bit of it:

"Believe you me, considering the fact that they are mostly men, which it would hardly be right to hold that up against them, Editors in my experience has been an unusually fine race, and it is my contracts with them has made me what I am today, I'm sure I'm satisfied. And when a fellow or sister writer commences hollering about how Editors in America don't know anything about what is style or English, well anyways not enough to publish it when they see it, why all I can say is that I could show them living proof to the contrary, only modesty and good manners forbids me pointing, even at myself. I am also sure that the checks these hollerers have received from said Editors is more apt to read the Editor regrets than pay to the order of, if you get what I mean.

"Well, I have had it pretty soft, I will admit, because all the work I done to get where I am, is never over eight hours a day penal servitude, locked up in my study and fighting against only such minor odds and intrusions as please may I have a dollar and a quarter for the laundry, or now dear you have been writing long enough, I have brought you a nice cup of tea, just when I am going strong on a important third chapter. But my work is of course not really work since it is done in the home, as my relations often remind me. At least they did until I got George, that's my pres. husband, and he never lets me be interrupted unless he wants to interrupt me himself for a clean collar or something.

"Also besides working these short hours, four of which is generally what us authors calls straight creative work, I have it soft in another way. I got a pretty good market for my stuff and always had, and this of course has got me so's I can draw checks as neat and quick as anybody in the family and they love to see me do it.

"All kidding to one side it is the straight dope when I say that from being merely the daughter of honest and only moderately poor parents I have now a house of my own, the very one in our town which I most admired as a child; and the quit-claim deed come out of my own easy money. I also got a car or two--and a few pieces of the sort of second-hand stuff which successful people generally commence cluttering up their house with as a sign of outward and visible success. I mean the junk one moves in when one moves the golden oak out....

"I never commenced going over really big until it was up to me to make good every time I delivered, and this was not until my husband died and left me with a small son, which I may say in pa.s.sing, that I consider he is the best thing I have ever published. Well, there I was, a widow with a child, and no visible means of support except when I looked into the mirror. Of course, before then I had been earning good money, but only when I wanted something, or felt like it. Now I had to want to feel like it three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

"I'll tell the world it was some jolt."

=ii=

_Perfect Behaviour_ is the calmly confident t.i.tle of the new book by Donald Ogden Stewart--a work which will rejoice the readers of _A Parody Outline of History_. Behaviour is the great obstacle to happiness. One may overcome all the ordinary complexes. One may kill his cousins and get his nephews and nieces deported, and refuse to perform Honest Work--yet remain a hopeless slave to the _Book of Etiquette_. In a Pullman car, with a ticket for the lower berth, he will take the seat facing backward, only to tremble and blush with shame on learning his social error. Who has not suffered the mortification of picking up the fork that was on the floor and then finding out afterward that it was the function of the waiter to pick up the fork? What is a girl to do if, escorted home at night from the dance, she finds the hour is rather late and yet her folks are still up?

Whether she should invite the young man in or ask him to call again, she is sure to do the wrong thing. Then there are those wedding days, the proudest and happiest of a girl's life, when she slips her hand into the arm of the wrong man or otherwise gives herself away before she is given away. Tragedy lurks in such trifles. Don Stewart, who has suffered countless mortifications and heartbreaks from just such little things as these, determined that something shall be done to spare others his own unfortunate experiences.

_Perfect Behaviour_ is the result of his brave determination. It is a book that will be constantly in demand until society is abolished. Then, too, there is that new behaviouristic psychology. You have not heard of that? I can only a.s.sure you that Mr. Stewart's great work is founded upon all the most recent principles of behaviouristic psychology. Noted scientists will undoubtedly endorse it. You will endorse it yourself, and you will be able to cash in on it.

Stewart wrote _A Parody Outline of History_ for The Bookman. When the idea was broached, John Farrar, editor of The Bookman, was about the only person who saw the possibilities. Response to the _Parody Outline of History_ was immediate, spontaneous and unanimous. When the chapters appeared as a book, this magnificent take-off of contemporary American writers as well as of H. G. Wells leaped at once into the place of a best seller. It remains one. The thing that it accomplished is not likely to be well done again for years.