Tent Culture

MORALLY WE ROLL ALONG--Gay MacLaren--Little, Brown ($2).

When Gay MacLaren was a little girl she decided to become an elocutionist after she heard a Chautauqua performer recite The Bobolink. The high point of this performance was a trill: cheeeeeee, prrrrrrr, cheeeeeeeeeeeeee, which Gay practiced so hard her South Dakota neighbors asked her if she didn't know a piece with some other kind of bird in it. But Gay kept on practicing, studied elocution in Minneapolis, finally got her big chance at the New York Chautauqua. Thereafter she followed the Chautauqua circuit, along with chalk-talk artists, bell ringers, evangelists, yodlers, zither performers, magicians, bagpipe players, ventriloquists and the strange assortment of educators and entertainers who, in brown tents pitched in small towns all over the U. S., spread culture to apathetic audiences before the War.

Her life became a matter of missed trains, hurried meals, bad hotels. Sometimes Chautauqua people went a little batty under the strain of missing trains; one lecturer rushed on the platform, spent the time for his lecture telling the audience how hard it had been for him to get there, announced that he had only ten minutes to make his train, and dashed away. But good-natured provincial audiences seemed to sleep just as contentedly through that sort of performance as any other. Although Gay MacLaren summons up a vanished area of U. S. cultural life in Morally We Roll Along, tells some good stories, the main impression communicated by her book is that in the end she decided that the childhood advice of her South Dakota neighbors was not so bad as she had thought.

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