Male Vegetable*

Male Vegetable-

Gay, Bubbling Author Parrish Wins the Prize

The Story. Victor Campion was born at The Maples on his father's birthday. His advent was hastened by a spring gust off the Delaware that blew a little white shawl from Mamma's neck into the face of Papa's skittish new filly. Papa was pitched on his head in the drive, never to see his heir. Mamma crumpled on the steps.

So "Victor, honey" was brought up by his womenfolks, commandeering their lives. Shallow, placid Mrs. Campion let the estate leak through her plump fingers. A carefully washed and brushed Mr. Lacey sought to be her second husband, and would have been but that Victor had a nightmare of Mr. Lacey as a catfish in a tailcoat and wailed until Mamma promised not to let him be "Victor's dear new Papa."

Dreamy Aunt Priscilla fed Mamma some silvery "mushrooms," which filled The Maples with a thin screaming for three days. That left Victor in charge of his sisters.

Maggie, the oldest, capable and devoted, got precious little help from moony-spoony May, the Campion beauty, or from butter-fingered Lily who couldn't say boo to a goose. But she scrimped and saved and cooked, gave up the lover who would have carried her off to South America, sent Victor to Harvard, petted him when he flunked out and came home to loaf, feet on fender, in wait for a suitable business position and in self-pitying anguish over the rebuff a New York bud had given his rustic advances. While the rest of the country freed the slaves, built fortunes, warred with Spain, the Campions were claimed by frustration, poverty and middle-age.

May, the eager, never did get a man and made her exit as a faded Ophelia in the copper-lined bathtub. Tireless, generous Maggie at last gave birth--to a mortal cancer. Victor fended off decrepitude with cold plunges and Lily's listless adulation, but the Wilmington debutantes thought him more and more an old foolish, with his hoary jokes and palsied, piddling gallantry.

The Significance. The species of male vegetable herein exhibited has dragged out its parasitic existence in every garden of genteel society that ever grew. To Author Parrish, great credit for supplying her specimen with logical antecedents, convincing contemporaries and a setting so carefully cultivated that its chokers and crinolines are not only seen and heard but almost smelled.

More credit to her for never relinquishing, save when artistically imperative, a gay, bubbling spirit that is far to seek these days. The book itself is ripe fruit--juicy pulp, rigid pit, tart kernel.

The Author. A dainty young lady was doing deck sports in the Mediterranean when the steward reached her with a radiogram: "Perennial Bachelor wins second Harper $2,000 novel contest,-" or words to match. Swiftly she informed her husband, Charles A. Corliss, of Englewood, N. J. Joyfully she recalled a visit to her former home, Claremont, Del., when her mother had coined the title. After four years ransacking attics, museums, once-popular song folios, old journals and letters, Peterson's Floral Adornments for the Home of Taste, Friendship Albums, memories of elders and bygone fashion-plates (perhaps too many of these)--she wrote the book. Of which act, says she: "I couldn't keep up with myself--it was glorious ... I really felt drunk." She had published two books previously. A Pocketful of Poses and Semi-Attached.

Last Stratton-Porter

The Keeper of the Bees--Gene Stratton-Porter -- Doubleday Page & Co. ($2.00). The violent conjunction of a limousine and a trolley-car, last year in Los Angeles, (TIME, Dec. 15, MILESTONES) caused this novel to stand as its author's last. The fact that

Freckles, her second book, has sold over 2,000,000 copies since its appearance in 1904 is some index to the degree of sorrow and disappointment the public must feel. A difference exists between a country's literature and its fiction. Mrs. Porter wrote none of the former and a great deal of the latter, sincerely compounding sweet sentiment with what hard-boiled editors call "nature stuff" and giving her main characters capitalized titles that were really poetic to multitudinous readers. The present volume retains this successful formula, telling the story of a Wounded Hero from the Great War who Married a Shamed Girl to give her Baby a Name, effacing himself very Nobly from her Tragic plight and keeping Bees until he Won Her Love. There are also Boy Scouts in the story.

Not "Wet"

GREENERY STREET--Denis Mackail --Houghton Mifflin ($2.00). To make a novel out of commonplace incidents in the first year of a pair of young English newlyweds, and avoid being "wet,"* is something of an achievement. Author MacKail has done it, with a very nice mixture of mock solemnity and featherweight irony. That is all there is to Greenery Street--two charming children, Ian and Felicity, finding their love-nest, scrimmaging with bills, terrified of their servants, diffidently "philosophizing." A very lovely elder sister almost gives the story a serious background by trying to bolt from her husband with another man. But her motives are left shadowy, and the situation is only a foil for some rather splendid precentive heroics by Ian. More than a few times will the reader of Greenery Street be moved to gentle but physical mirth.

Concubinage

Kept -- Alec Waugh -- A. & C. Boni ($2.00) Wherein, at some length, it is demonstrated that many a member of effete English society should take thought upon his own status before casting the pebble of opprobrium at ladies with irregular means of support. There is, for example, the concubinage of inherited wealth. There is the artist "kept" by his early reputation. There is the ex-warrior who established his credit by one act of courage. This story, which is based on the modest estimate that "half London's love affairs take place out of marriage," is the wavering of Marjorie Fairfield, piquant widow, between the financier who has paid her upkeep, a burning young idealist and Ransom Heritage, social realist. Style: faintly affected but mordant. Recommendation : creditable effort, very readable.

*The Perennial Bachelor -- Anne Parrish Harper. ($2.50). - Entered this year by novelists in every state of the Union. Last year's winner: The Able MacLaughlins, by Margaret Wilson. Judges for 1925: Stuart P. Sherman, Carl Van Doren, Jesse Lynch Williams. *Current collegiate slang covering "sentimental," "insipid," "childish" and also "unrefined" or "loud."