Bludgeonings of Love

They Knocked Out Guy Plummer in the First Round

The Story.* Guy Plummer was the brightest boy in Junction City; Bee Chew, the prettiest and most interesting girl. Guy's father was a minister and poor, while Lawyer Chew lived in the only " mansion " in town and preferred Robert Ingersoll to Henry Ward Beecher--but that didn't make any difference to Guy and Bee. They quoted Browning and Henley to each other and thought the biggest thing in life must be to grow old together, like the picture in the advertising calendar of the stately old man and the silver-haired lady, holding hands and smiling.

Unfortunately, they loved too well rather than wisely--with the usual consequences. So Guy burgled a local store for the money to send Bee away to her Aunt Grace's in Kansas City and discovered that he wasn't quite such a noble character as he had thought he was. When Bee returned with the consequences --a red little infant named Cecil-- the trouble began. And the scandal and finger-pointing was much increased by the fact that Adrian Plummer, Guy's highly Old Testament father, proclaimed his son's sin from the pulpit and confessed that he, too, had done likewise in his young, irreligious days.

As for Guy, he was simply baffled by the way things were turning out. He offered to marry Bee, but she wouldn't accept--she wasn't asking for charity. He knew he ought to be devoted to Cecil--but he just didn't feel that way. The child estranged them. To cap the climax, he found himself arrested and convicted for theft--out on the rock-pile making big ones into little ones. Life had knocked him out in the first round.

But he didn't stay down. He neither ran away nor went to the gutter. He lived through it-- ostracism, poverty, his father's gradual collapse after finding his son to be a sinner, Bee's departure with Cecil for parts unknown. He came back--and was all ready to marry the respectable if somewhat withered Bessie Arnhalt--when Bee returned.

Cecil had died in San Antonio-- Bee had passed through much, including an unhappy love-affair. She and Guy met almost as strangers-- but he knew from the first moment that he could never be happy with anybody else. So he told the dessicated Dessie that all was off between them--and she went right out and married the man he had robbed.

Another flare-up of small-town spite against Guy--and then, at last, the change. A great automobile road was to pass through the state. Junction City wanted to be on. Who to send to St. Louis as the city's representative to convince the commissioners of Junction City's importance? Guy was the only able orator in town--he had "a bad record"--yes, but they had to have him. So they gave him a presentation traveling-bag and sent him off-- the speech Bee had helped him write in his inside pocket--the deservedly prominent citizen of his boyhood dreams at last.

The Significance. A solid, truthful portrayal of American life in a town that is neither Gopher Prarie nor Zenith but just as typical as either-- written without shrieking or melo-dramatics--native as Dakota wheat.

The Critics. Harry Leon Wilson in The New York Tribune: "Vivid, touching, poignant,"

Fanny Butcher in the Chicago Tribune: "Has an inherent beauty of reality."

The New York Times: "A fine American novel of a mid-western community. Given his environment, Guy Plummer is quite as truly painted as was, say, Hardy's Jude the Obscure or Angel Clare."

The Author. West of the Water Tower has been published anonymously. The names of several prominent contemporary novelists have been mentioned in connection with the authorship of West of the Water Tower--but, both from the subject-matter itself and certain resemblances in style, TIME points a tentative finger of suspicion at E. W. Howe, well known Kansan editor and publicist, and author, in The Story of a Country Town, of one of the most interesting American novels of our time.

*WEST OF THE WATER TOWEB--Anonymous --Harper ($2.00).