FICTION

What's In a Name

The Story.* Weighed down yet upheld by their generations, observed by rows of ancestors in bleak oils, slowly being embalmed in a portentous, self-righteous genealogy by their last and most sterile scion, live the Pentlands of "Pentlands" on the Massachusetts coast. There have been Pentland shopkeepers, witch-burners, privateers; shrewd makers and hoarders of money and family tradition. Now the Pentlands are old John, a rugged figure with a wild red mare and a study smelling of woodsmoke, dogs, apples and whiskey; his wife, a wretched lunatic shut in the mansion's east wing since the birth of her son; Anson Pentland, that son, the scrimshank genealogist; Olivia, the Chicago politician's daughter whom Anson only married to produce the necessary heir; Sybil, their alert daughter, and Jack, the sickly heir, whose funeral is celebrated with fitting Pentland pomp on a stony hill in his sixteenth year.

When Anson Pentland was a boy, there was a homely girl with green eyes and red hair in the neighborhood, who one day spoiled a game of "house" by saying: "It's a silly game to pretend muddy water is claret." Later she fled New England and took what she wanted from life. Now she returns, hard, triumphant Sabine Callendar, with a passion and a perfected genius for revealing unpleasant truths. She revisits the scene of her unhappy girlhood to while away a summer, to wreck the house of Pentland.

Olivia and Sybil are inevitably Sabine's accomplices and beneficiaries. As a young girl, Olivia knew something of life; she is still young at 39, still quietly beautiful, but dark with despair at the slow withering of her spirit by a tradition which has reached its evil autumn. She is resolved to save Sybil from the blight, and perhaps herself. She recognizes Sabine as cruel and dangerous, but welcomes her as the antithesis of human decay.

Sabine's instruments are three men: Jean de Cyon, virile, talented, cosmopolitan, the natural son of red-haired Lily Shane; Michael O'Hara, another "out-sider," the tan-cheeked, black-headed Catholic politician to whom Sabine sold her estate; and old John Pentland's bowlegged groom, Higgins, the Priapus of the story, keeper of the red mare and seducer of willing housemaids in midnight lanes about the countryside.

Sybil elopes successfully with young de Cyon and Olivia's deliverance through O'Hara seems assured by her discovery that no Pentland has really been a Pentland for three generations, the sole issue of a key ancestress having been the fruit of nocturnal meetings with just such a bold interloper as O'Hara. But that power in the Pentland name which has held old John, even after he knew the name was false, holds Olivia too. The day old John rides the red mare to his death, she leaves her love in a bright autumn thicket and follows the corpse to the house.

The Significance. Early Autumn is the third successive demonstration that among U. S. writers Author Bromfield stands second to none in creating large casts of memorable characters whose secret forces are rooted deeply in the generations behind them and in U. S. soil. His creative powers are not, however, quite equaled by his technique. Master of dramatic intensity, atmosphere, character drawing, he writes a rich, flowing period which occasionally overflows, swamping the reader with reiterated description and florid psychology.

The Author. Boston and Maryland stock; the public schools and newspaper of Mansfield, Ohio; the Cornell School of Agriculture; French army sectors from Switzerland to the North Sea; Paris; Manhattan journalism; publishing; marriage--these constitute Louis Bromfield's background for novel-writing. To them add great industry and a humility most unusual in one so successful so young. He is, at scarce 30, self-proved and free to scour Europe from his summer base at St. Jean de Luz, where he swims, fishes, golfs with able Author Edna Ferber, debates whether to renew his lease or return to his home at Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y., for Christmas.

Hard-Hearted Hattie

THE DARK DAWN--Martha Ostenso--Dodd, Mead ($2). Martha Ostenso is the schoolteaching miss from our northwestern wheatlands who last year won a prize with Wild Geese, her fairly sound novel of monotonous black acres with a gnarled old man moving bitterly across them to his doom. Again she presents the monotonous expanses, but now the acres are barren. The doomed figure is this time a woman, hard-hearted Hattie Murker, who, failing to move by herself, after many dreary chapters, gets pushed by her creator over the edge of a quarry. Lucia Dorrit, irresolute prairie strong man, is annexed by Hattie in her youthful innocence. Thereafter hopelessly a husband, he does the sensitive suffering opposite a talented but pure prairie flower, Karen Strand. Dr. Muller, prairie saw bones, drives his nags, Sodom and Gomorrah, back and forth over the dirt roads, philosophizing heavily about the strangely fluctuating populace, which in one chapter is numerous enough to have social "sets," while in another it is genteelly illiterate and numbers only; "a scant handful of bleak little lives," in a few frame houses ty the railroad water tank.

-EARLY AUTUMN--Louis Bromfield--Stokes

"Heroine of The Green Bay Tree" (1923), which was the first of a projected "screen" of novels in which Early Autumn is the third "panel."