Small President

A PRESIDENT is BORN--Fannie Hurst--Harper ($2.50).

The Story. "Twenty-two sat down to dinner on a Thanksgiving afternoon at four, 1903, in the House on Sycamore Street." These were the sons and daughters, the grandsons and granddaughters of Mathilda Schuyler and the Old Gentleman, her husband. It was this coarse, fibrous old man who, at the end of dinner, told the family which he had planted so securely in fertile Ohio: "Your mother, children, God bless her, is going to have a baby."

This baby was David Schuyler. He grew up with his nephews and nieces who were older than himself. In a sense, he was like them, carrying on in his small person many of those clan qualities that made the Schuylers a tough and strenuous unit. But he had added to his mother's wiry energy and to his father's clumsy power a delicacy of mind that had never been developed in either of them. Early in his life he began to read books not for amusement, although they excited him beyond all games or merriments, but because he possessed that most delicious of all hungers, an unsurfeitable desire to gorge his mind upon facts. His mother kept for her last child a name that had never belonged to any one else in the family; so, also, she reserved a special tenderness for David.

As David grew up in Centralia he began more and more to understand the broad tolerance, the bitter and sympathetic scepticism that, had they been alloyed with ambition, would have made his brother Henry great as well as splendid. David, possessing that ambition, strengthened it upon his brother's wisdom. He looked at the World War with the wise critical eyes of early adolescence; he watched the branches of his family twist and struggle along trellises of suffering and achievement. He worked in the fields of the great farm, fell in love with Dora Tarkington, filled his mind with knowledge. Then a day came when, with Dora and his mother he rode to the station, carrying a shoe box full of sandwiches. When the train came in, David said goodby and boarded it for Springfield. There he would work, study and, afterward, practice law. On that day the story ends.

The Method. Author Hurst, desiring to write down a narrative of embryonic genius, was faced with a dilemma. To explicate the later prowess of the boy she writes about, to give to the man's career, after her history of his boyhood has been concluded, the semblance of truth, to make her fiction about his youth appear to be a biographical rather than an invented recountal, she imagines herself writing the book long after David Schuyler has become President of the U. S. It can be supposed that he became President in about 1950, that the book is written perhaps 25 years after this. To supply a background of later events that are not included in her story of David Schuyler's boyhood, Author Hurst quotes, in footnotes, from the imagined diaries of David Schuyler's sister. The advantages of this somewhat televisionary technique outweigh its defects; perhaps in this book a precedent is born for those pseudo-biographers who bend the lives of great men into bizarre and unlikely curlicues.

Aside from its difficult and complex pattern, A President Is Born has all the features of Author I previous and famed works. Emotions are always to be translated into an idiom which, if ambiguous, is graphic and spectacular. When a mother looks at her half-wit child, Author Hurst does not describe the mother's emotions but says instead that her eyes: ". . . seemed to pour inward, leaving them staring, like empty lake beds." There are, as well, the obvious and persistent oddities of style. "Mucilaginous" describes a "miscellany of stuffed gobbler" and then, before the sticky word has had time to dry, it is applied to an "ooze of mud."

The Author, a plump lady, was born in Hamilton, Ohio, and there began to write stories which she concealed from the very kind but uncomprehending eye of her family. Twenty-one fictions which had been rejected by the Saturday Evening Post, she published in the literary magazine which she edited at Washington University. After that, she lived in Manhattan upon a generous allowance of checks from her family and rejection slips from magazines, while she studied at Columbia. Author Hurst has a way of practising what she sets about to preach. For the sake of getting accurate material, she has been a waitress, a saleslady, a steerage passenger on an ocean liner. Her best known short story is Humoresque; her best known previous novel, Lummox, about a Swedish cook.