Dead Scott

BREAD AND A SWORD--Evelyn Scott-- Scribner ($2.75).

Readers of Evelyn Scott's The Wave (1929) were much impressed, ranked it among the best Civil War novels vet written. Her books since then have been a continuous disappointment. Last week she annoyed, depressed and bored nearly everyone in sight with a 488-page novel "on the artist and the creative problem." Bread and a Sword was Evelyn Scott's third exhaustive mangling of the same unpopular theme; readers cheered her announcement that it was likely to be her last word on the subject.

With great earnestness, no sense of humor, an entirely undisciplined style Evelyn Scott attempted to raise from the dead the following peacefully slumbering corpse: how shall a second-rate writer support a wife, two children and his own self-respect during an economic depression? Though Evelyn Scott lists herself with the great minority of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, few readers will count her their equal. While they may give her solemn approbation for her attempt "to convey something of the nightmare negation of the human by the machine," they will close her book without much fellow feeling for her unfortunate examples.

Alec had written several novels, and one of them had sold as many as 15,000 copies. To get away from U. S. crassness --and expense--he had taken himself, his wife and their two sons to a Pyrenean village in the south of France. When royalty checks stopped coming, and Kate was pregnant once again, and credit at the butcher's and baker's grew narrower, Alec's creative flow dried up to nearly nothing. As household chores became major problems, his and Kate's intercourse became a continuous quarrel. At last he threw up the dry sponge, gave up his thankless Art, took them all home to find a more comfortable way to live.

It was a poor time to return to the U. S. In Depression times, even lavish Manhattan publishers had no use for a non-commercial author. Alec had to take his family to live with his in-laws, narrow middle-class people in a narrow middle-class New Jersey suburb. He quickly found that the sacrifice of his talent and a willingness to work at anything were not sufficient qualifications. At last he got work as a farmhand. He was not very good at it, worked with a chip on his shoulder that eventually lost him the job. Then he took anything he could get: cutting down trees, playing the piano in a cinema, shovelling off sidewalks. When he rose to be part-time gardener for rich suburbanites, it was easily the best thing in sight.

Meantime his family lived in a shack. Kate's health grew steadily worse, his sons' education was not of the best. When snobbish Lily, the wife of Alec's employer, found out he was a fairly distinguished author and fell in love with him, Alec could not resist taking advantage of her. He borrowed money, made love to her, used the connections she brought him for all they were worth. For a while it looked as if he could buy Kate the treatment she needed, fight his way back into the literary arena. And then it all came to nothing, or less, when Kate died in the hospital, when Alec's first literary job helped to send his benefactress' husband to jail. Evelyn Scott is against propaganda in art, thinks human beings should be reported as they are, talk, act. Readers will applaud her theory, deplore her practice. Sample of passionate dialog, as reported by Scott: "Honey, I want to! Please give me a chance! It's all so unexpected--as Jane Austin's [sic]; confreres used to say! We mustn't make a hash of other people's feelings--we must think about it carefully!". . ."You're sure consideration isn't just a cloak of plain reluctance?"

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