Precis Grotesques*

Precise Grotesques*

Mr. Robinson, Laconic Analyst, Is Once More Too Much At Ease With Nemesis

The Book.

Where the long shadows of the wind had rolled,

The wheat was yielding to the change assigned,

And as by some vast magic undivined

The world was turning slowly into gold;

Like nothing that was ever bought or sold

It waited there, the body and the mind,

And with a mighty meaning of a kind

That tells the more the more it is not told.

So in a land where all days are not fair,

Fair days went on until another day

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,

Shining and still, but not for long to stay--

As if a thousand girls with golden hair

Might rise from where they slept and go away.

Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, whom many critics have laureled as America's most formidable poet, rarely permits himself such lyricism as that and when he does, it is with a strangely deprecating air. There is a bleakness in his blood, commonly supposed to be the temper of New England.

Where the wind is always north-northeast

And children learn to walk on frozen toes.

that will let him, like the hero of She Stoops to Conquer, make terms with beauty as the housemaid, but not as the mistress.

This book contains four long poems, Dionysus in Doubt, Genevieve and Alexandra, Mortmain, Demos and Dionysus, elaborate philosophic acros tics, graphs of spiritual collisions; many sonnets, some like a goldsmith's gargoyles, precise in horror, some mere laconic footnotes to metaphysical debate, some that are compressed short stories:

"IF THE LORD WOULD MAKE WINDOWS IN HEAVEN"

She who had eyes but had not wherewithal

To see that he was doomed to his own way,

Dishonored his illusions day by day,

And year by year was more angelical.

Flaunting an injured instinct for the small,

She stifled always more than she would say;

Nursing a fear too futile to betray,

She sewed, and waited for the roof to fall.

A seer at home, she saw that his high lights

That were not shining, and were not afire,

Were such as never would be seen from there;

A saint abroad, she saw him on the heights,

And feared for him -- who, if he went much higher,

Might one day not be seen from anywhere.

Karma relates, in the same incredibly economic fashion, the story of a Pharisee who, having bankrupted a friend, absolved himself by giving a dime to "a slowly freezing Santa Claus"; A Man in Our Town introduces "one too much at ease with Nemesis" whose futility made him beloved; Glass House's suggests an inversion of the saw to the effect that those who inhabit such domiciles should use missiles of putty. Each of the poems is an almost perfectly fulfilled intention. Each has a measured perfection of phrase, marvellous compactness of structure.

The Significance. Edwin Arlington Robinson was, last week, awarded the Pulitzer prize (see THE PRESS) for the best volume of verse published during the year--The Man Who Died Twice. It is a tribute to the discrimination of the judges who made the award that they, ignoring popular regard for those poets who affirm, with painstaking fanfaronade, that the grave is not our goal have bestowed one more notable honor upon a man whose message is the curtest, the chilliest ever uttered by a great poet: humanity cannot succeed. This refusal to blow upon ashes in which finds no seed of any saving fire has given Mr. Robinson's verse a dark, austere magnificence peculiarly its own; but he falls short of being a supreme poet when he tries to make poetry more than the great and simple thing it is fitted to do--in excess of striving for compact expression, he becomes obscure. He possesses that degree of human intelligence which is commonly called genius. He has been able to impress his intellect upon language as have few writers of this time. But he is himself too much at case with Nemesis.

The Author. Edwin Arlington Robinson--thin, stooping figure, dark mustache, high forehead, taciturn mouth --came to fame in 1905 when Theodore Roosevelt, then President, reviewed his second book, The Children of the Night which had been written in a barn at Gardiner, Maine. Roosevelt secured him a job in the Manhattan Customs House where, for several years, he supported himself. On his 50th birthday, a symposium of famed authors acclaimed him in The New York Times as the greatest living U. S. poet. He lives in Manhattan, shuns women wears a soft hat, carries a cane, never speaks in public. His works include Lancelot, Merlin, The Three Taverns The Man Against the Sky, Roman Bartholow, The Man Who Died Twice.

Average Plus

From the days of Poe, when the detective story was literature, it has de generated. Today, it is usually, writer and reader alike, a mere intel lectual concoction, a puzzle, dependent for interest entirely on its solution, but cast in literary form, with perhaps few thrills of horror thrown in for good measure. The two following examples belong to the latter development but, in their group, they are considerably above the average.

THE MYSTERY OE THE SINGING WALLS-- William Averill Stowell--Ap pleton ($2.00). A young engineer comes down from Alaska to marry an heiress. In Manhattan, going to me her guardian, the source of her wealth the engineer encounters him drugged and near death in his automobile before his house. Detectives are called. In their presence and that of his family the guardian, about to revive, is shot dead. No one sees the murderer. The search amid exciting intrigue continues all night in a house guarded by a cordon of detectives. Towards morning the murderer is discovered and the book ends.

To those versed in detective-story ways, the murderer is evident during the latter two-thirds of the book; but, because the plot is still going on, in terest continues to the end. The writer's attempt to be literary is cen tred on his similes -- one on nearly every page. The prize examples: "He carried his left hand upright like a bouquet and through the bandages a spot of red stood out like a scarlet snow-flower on a mountain slope."

Rating: insolubility, 5%; interest, 90% ; plausibility, 75% ; horror, 80% ; literary merit, 40%.

THE EAMES-ERSKINE CASE --A. Fielding-- Knotf ($2.00). An unknown man is found dead from an overdose of morphine, locked (from the inside) in the wardrobe of a hotel room in London. There is a balcony before the room window, so that anyone on the same floor of the hotel and of another hotel adjoining might have committed the murder. The clues are spread out before the reader with commendable fairness, but in baffling number. Two plots are so skilfully woven together that one has to wait for the writer to unravel them. Not until two-thirds of the way through the book does the writer find it necessary to conceal from the reader the surmises in the detective's mind. The writing is workman like ; only the proofreading is slipshod.

Rating: insolubility, 95%; interest, 90%; plausibility, 60%; horror, 70%; literary merit, 60%.

Harold Bell Wright

A Man Was Found Who Had Not Heard of Him

Recently, I have been traveling a good deal on trains, and watching the books men read in the smoking cars. On a fast train to the West the other day, I noted The End of the House of Alard by Sheila Kaye-Smith, A Room with a View (pocket edition) by E. M. Forster, The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy, The Reckless Lady by Philip Gibbs "and a book called After All, whose author I could not discover. From this odd group I shall attempt no generalizations. Certainly a higher class of novel than one would expect. On the train coming back, however, there was only one volume, and that an effusion from the colorful pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I sat me down by the gentleman with that volume, and he told me that his favorite stories were those by Sax Rohmer, that he considered Mrs. Rinehart's K the best book he had ever read, that Joseph Conrad was his delight. He didn't like the novels of Zane Grey because they were all so much alike, and he'd never heard of Harold Bell Wright. This last piece of information gave me a start.

Is there anyone else in the U. S. who has not heard of Harold Bell Wright? I met him for the first time last week, and found him a gentleman of dignity and opinions, tall, rawboned, looking somewhat like the preacher he used to be, and, at the moment I glimpsed him, very much interested in problems of the American Indian. He is always interested in problems. That is the secret of the success of his books. He knows how to preach, and he preaches well in fiction. His novels are primarily religious, although he might deny that fact. I rather think, however, that he wouldn't.

Wherever the name of popular writing is given, Mr. Wright stands as a symbol. From what some folk write of him, you would see him as a violent newspaper man sitting at his typewriter, spinning out stories to catch the popular mind and fill his own pocketbook. Long before one meets him, one is sure that he is nothing of the sort. Reading his novels is enough to convince any thinking person of his sincerity. Then, too, how could a man born in Rome, N.Y., who has been both landscape-gardener and preacher, be totally lacking in sincerity? No, Mr. Wright is sincere, and there is no question in my mind that his books have done a lot of good in the world. If there are those who consider them sentimental, and there are, they cannot be denied such an opinion; but it is sentimentality based on the real sentiment of the many, which, perhaps, is not sentimentality at all, when you come right down to the point. Then, too, how many people have read a story of Mr. Wright's among the many who discuss him? Read The Winning of Barbara Worth, and find out why it is that this man reaches the millions.

J.F.

*Dionysus IN DOUBT -- Edwin Arlington Robinson--Macmillan ($1.75).