Julian Street

He Is at One with Booth Tarkington Julian (Leonard) Street left Manhattan and went to live in Princeton, where his young son attends college. He does not miss the clatter of town, he says. He enjoys being away from dinners and teas. He is fond of the undergraduate viewpoint. He finds that he can work better in comparatively rural surroundings. But, after all, Princeton is not inaccessible to the lights of Times Square, and last week Mr. Street came on to New York City to assist in the final cutting and revision of the cinema version of his novel, Eita Coventry, which William de Mille directed, in which the exotic Nita Naldi will soon be seen.

Eita Coventry was Julian Street's first novel. He waited until middle life to write it because he believes that balance and experience are necessary for the production of long fiction. Perhaps the first characteristic of this sane, pleasant gentleman is his belief in the absolute necessity for an author to regard his craft as something sacred and worthy of the greatest effort both in the de-velopment of an idea and the setting of it on paper. Mr. Street's short stories are many of them examples of the finest use of short fictional technique. They have appeared in magazines of varying types: The Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, The Century, etc., etc. The latest collection of them was made this Autumn under the title Cross-Sections, Julian Street was born in Chicago, but he is thoroughly metropolitan in manner and instinct. He is quiet, slow moving, tall, with dark, graying hair and a slow, almost drawling voice. His master is obviously Booth Tarkington, of whom he talks much, whom he admires exceedingly. They once wrote a play together, The Country Cousin. Their attitude toward modern life is much the same --both are tolerant, interested, but a trifle surprised at some of its phases, perhaps a trifle withdrawn from it. To them, realism consists of the painting of life as something which has its morbid moments; but these moments they find it better in their art to suggest rather than to display. When Sherwood Anderson's hero in Many Marriages divests himself of his clothes and parades naked before a glass, he is not only symbolical of the idea of Mr. Anderson's novel but of the strange and exaggerated narcissism of the younger realists. In the face of such aberrations, a pen such as Julian Street's or Booth Tarkington's takes on the aspect of an Excalibur.