Middle Flight

LETTERS TO HARRIET--William Vaughn Moody--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

Men who were schoolboys 25 years ago remember the name of William Vaughn Moody, but not as their elders do, and not as he would have liked to be remembered. With his colleague Robert Morss Lovett, Moody once ground out a textbook History of English Literature, and it is this repository of college entrance board wisdom that keeps his memory a dusty green. Few but his contemporaries now remember his Broadway success, now as dead as David Garrick, nor his poetry, once considered a minor glory of the western world. These letters of Moody's to Mrs. Harriet Converse Brainard, the platonic friend whom he married a year before his early death, reincarnate the likable human figure of a literary man who in a third-rate age might have ranked first.

To 1936 readers Letters to Harriet will bring many a whiff from the plushy past. Hoosier-born (1869), William Vaughn Moody worked his way through Harvard, went on into graduate pastures, then started the climb to Parnassus by the academic path. It was while he was teaching English at the University of Chicago that he met "Harriet," who kept alive the torch of culture by all-night literary conversaziones around a lakeshore bonfire. When his drudged-out textbook's success set him free to travel and write for himself, Moody and Harriet kept their friendship going by mail. His letters were intimate but literary, extremely publishable. They are not love-letters so much as polished exhortations; his emotions lie neatly pressed between these pages. Not Harriet's image but a night sky of frosty stars made him feel "again the sudden impalpable sweet pang, like a harp-string softly struck in the core of my being."

As a sign of their platonic troth, Moody wore a ring which Harriet had given him. Once there was a three-weeks' lapse in his letters from Europe. His shamefaced but still flowery explanation leaves a modern reader in doubt whether he had spent the interim in the gutter or had just not felt like writing: "After a time came rebellion and reckless grasping after life or what bore the semblance and wore the red flower of life, careless whether--nay, even glad if its heart were poisoned. I took--O sweet and noble soul, this will pain you cruelly, but I must tell it--I took the ring from my finger, for it burnt my flesh with its impossible summons and its intolerable reproach." Three weeks later he wrote that he thought he would soon be able to get it back on.

Like Milton, Moody intended to soar with no middle flight. But he was pleased when a play he had written, The Great Divide, pleased Actress Margaret Anglin, liked it even better when the play was a Broadway hit and put his name in U. S. lights. He tried again but never repeated his success. When Harriet finally divorced her husband and married Moody, it was only for a brief honeymoon and a long last illness. After his death she continued to be a friend to the friends of the Muse: her warm-hearted hospitality is still grate fully remembered by many a poet. And before she died (in 1932) she had written a first-rate book that may well outlast her husband's and her husband's memory. Its name: Mrs, William Vaughn Moody's Cook Book.

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