Crumbs*

Crumbs--

A New Novel By The Author of Miss Lulu Bett

The Story. By the death in unexpected poverty of her father, Leda Perrin was left at the mercy of her cousins, the Crumbs, of the town of Prospect. The Crumbs are "good folk who are wicked." They need no description. There are Crumbs everywhere--the intolerable product of the standardization of humanity. They think the same thoughts, eat the same food, do the same things and do them always in groups. A Crumb, finding himself alone in anything would very possibly go mad. They are gross, suffocating vulgarians. Among them are Orrin, the Gideonite salesman, bristling with esprit de corps; Tweet, his wife, "a fair thick being"; Mama Crumb, passive housewife ; Pearl, "a lovely, listless sister, a too mellow fruit"; Richmiel, sleek and perfumed, "whose body had seemed nine-tenths of her being" Grandfather Crumb, old, defeated, hopeless, ignored by the other Crumbs, but rising above them. Leda's defenses were being beaten down by the sheer gross weight of the Crumbs when Barnaby came. He was the divorced husband of Richmiel, and he came to take from her silken clutch their boy Oliver. It was inevitable that Leda should find in the imaginative nobility of Barnaby a possible release. And it was equally inevitable that Barnaby should find in the clear glass of Leda's sensitive beauty the reflection of his need. Richmiel, feline in her jealousies, refused to let Barnaby have his son unless he would go away, leaving Leda behind. He goes. But he comes back, just as the Crumb morass is closing again over Leda's head, and in the end they find happiness in a spiritual union. The Significance. Miss Gale has made her study by taking two extremes, the extremely sensitive and the extremely coarse, and putting the former at the mercy of the latter There is in this book something more than a minute and ruthless picture of Babbitts at play. Miss Gale is more romantic than realistic. She likes to look at the other side of the picture, even though it may be turned to the wall. There is no tragedy here except the unconscious tragedy of the Crumbs. The beauty of Leda and Barnaby, and the "faint perfume" of their love, rises above all the reek and crassness of the Crumb materialism. If anything, Miss Gale errs on the side of the sentimental. She does not allow the Crumbs the inevitable victory of the harsh over the delicate.

The Critics. Dr. Henry Seidel Canby, of The Literary Review, calls Faint Perfume " one of the interesting books in the history of American fiction." Heywood Broun remarks in The New York World: "We do not know any modern novelist who has achieved such admirable compression." Other commentators have protested at the "happy ending." But the book has generally been received as a masterpiece of its kind and as in most respects greatly superior to tne much-praised Miss Lulu Bett.

The Author. Miss Gale was born in 1874. She began in newspaper work first on Milwaukee papers, later on The New York World. Her most successful work heretofore was Miss Lulu Bett, a dramatization of which was awarded the Pulitzer prize of $1,000 as the best play produced in New York in 1920. Her present home is her birthplace, Portage, Wis.

She is an occasional contributor to periodicals. As a rule she is classified, rather astonishingly, as a "romantic realist," or a " sentimental satirist."

Some books to have read: Many Marriages (Anderson) ; Black Oxen (Atherton) ; Things That Have Interested Me (Bennett); The Enchant- ed April (Elizabeth) ; Faint Perfume (Gale) ; Essays at Large (Squire).

The Intimate Touch

The Obstacle of Unreality in Fiction When old Mrs. Plunkett dropped her grandchild accidentally from the second story window of her house on South Main Street, the episode was a source of considerable satisfaction to her neighbors. They gathered in little agitated groups to discuss the child, the grandmother, the window, the space between the window and the street, a crack in the pavement supposed (erroneously) to be due to the sudden contact of child and concrete. The whole town, from barber shop to post office, buzzed with commentary.

Not that there was anything extraordinary or particularly significant about the occurrence. If he had merely read about it in the papers, no one would have given it a second thought. But inasmuch as every one knew Mrs. Plunkett, knew that she liked spinach for lunch and suspected that a square bottle figured prominently in her evening's routine, inasmuch as they had all sworn at and played with and tripped over the infant, the whole incident gave them talking material for weeks.

This is just another of those unexpected parallelisms between life and literature. In a book, if the characters are themselves real to you their smallest gestures will be of interest. If in Mr. Babbitt you recognize Uncle Ted or Cousin Ephraim, the process of Mr. Babbitt's morning toilet will take on new beauties.

In the ordinary popular novel, characters have very much the aspect of vague and distorted shadows on a distant horizon. It is hard to be interested in a vague and distorted shadow, as long as it does nothing more than brush its shadowy teeth, kiss its shadowy wife good morning, spank its shadowy children and scratch its shadowy itch. If on the other hand the shadow suddenly seizes eight Colt .45's in as many sinewy hands and begins popping away at an army or two of shadowy redskins, the procedure begins to awaken a certain interest.

That, roughly, is why the works of Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ethel Dell share the best-seller lists with those of Sinclair Lewis, Zona Gale and Anzia Yezierska. It is a question of emphasis. When the character is not in himself interesting, interest must be developed by underscoring his doings.

A real cow in a field is interesting. But so is any cow, real or unreal, jumping over the moon. J. A. T.

Kathleen Norris

A Lady of Importance

The Kathleen Norris of today is a strikingly handsome woman who looks like a duchess and, fortunately, isn't one. "The greatest fun in life," she told me, "is being forty." One of the most highly paid and the most popular of American women writers, she has pleased the critics as well as the public with at least two of her books, Mother and the recent Certain People of Importance. This tall, aquiline-featured, dominant woman is of literary family. Her husband, a brother of Frank Norris, is Charles Norris, whose Salt and Brass are both American novels of worth, and she is aunt to the children of William Rose Benet, the poet. Her life has been a varied one, and it shows in her keen understanding of women's hearts and minds, and in her unfailing observation of detail. About to be a debutante in San Francisco, the death of her father and mother, and a reversal of family fortune, made her seek independence. She tried various occupations--with a hardware house, as a librarian, as a reporter. At twentythree, however, she had made her first successful effort as a writer. She sold a story. From then on in the field of journalism and of fiction she has been progressing steadily. For most of the year the Norrises live on a ranch in California. What an amazing pair they must be to be able to exist in the same house! One writer in a family is difficult enough, I hear; but not so with the Norrises. They not only work well in the same house, but they help each other. Apparently their methods of procedure are quite different. Mr. Norris is hard-pressed during the period of creation. He fights for the right word. Mrs. Norris, on the other hand, says that the enjoys every moment of putting pencil to paper. At her best Kathleen Norris can present a fine, moving, startlingly real picture of life. At her worst she becomes caught in describing the minutiae of daily routine. A blue pencil would greatly have improved Certain People of Importance. Possibly Mrs. Norris knows this now. She is working, in addition to her usually generous output of short novels and short stories, on a new long novel. It will be all about the Irish, not the Irish question, and by the time it is finished she will perhaps have learned not to tell us every piece of meat and every slice of vegetable that goes to make up the daily Irish stew! J. F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books most in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion: POOR PINNEY--Marian Chapman --Boni ($2.00). Poor Pinney is an inoffensive, pathetic and extremely objectionable little commuter. He is a tyrant in his own home and keeps up a brave front over his abysmal internal hollowness. He looks up to the local Babbitts with a marked awe, which he refuses to acknowledge to himself. His ship is always on its way in and never docks. His story is told with meticulous attention to the detail of his vulgarisms. THE GIRL NEXT DOOR--Lee Wilson Dodd--Button ($2.00). Mr. Dodd calls his book "the crabbed chronicle of a misanthrope." That is an authoritative statement of what it isn't. It is one of the pleasantest, most amiable of melodramas --an account of the life and opinions of an incomparable quartet in a suburban "Garden City" built over an unwholesome marsh. ESSAYS AT LARGE. BOOKS REVIEWED--Two books by J. C. Squire --Doran ($2.00, $2.00). Mr. J. C.' Squire (Solomon Eagle), Editor of The London Mercury, is at once distinguished poet, parodist and critic. With the lightest possible touch, he conveys the most penetrating criticism. In Essays at Large, he gives unlimited scope to his varied interests. In Books Reviewed, as the title indicates, he restricts himself more closely to themes literary. THE FLOWER IN DRAMA--Stark Young--Scribner's ($1.50). Mr. Young, critic for The New Republic, observes the current drama with a more leisurely eye than the critics of the daily press. His speculations are always interesting, frequently fundamental. Among other phases of the drama under his analysis are acting in general, that of Ben Ami, Charles Chaplin and Duse in particular, the cinema, the effect of poetic drama on the actor, the Theatre Guild's production of He Who Gets Slapped. THE TYRANNY OF POWER -- D. Thomas Curtin. Little, Brown ($2.00). This book is valuable chiefly as a study of melancholy conditions existing in the West Virginia coal mines. It is a careful and considered examination of the problems of Labor and Capital. Unfortunately, there is also a good deal of love interest, which does not seem to be the author's chief concern and is no concern whatever of the reader's.

*Paint Perfume -Zona Gale -- Appleton ($1.75).