Sam Smith

FICTION

Sam Smith*

The Story of Sam Smith begins about the hour that news of Lee's surrender reaches New England. While Sam is in the next room receiving his first bath, his mother feels strong enough to explain the one important fact about his antecedents and childhood: his lineage is all-American right back to colonial days.

The father, Theophilus, is patriarchal but bookish. The farm goes to pot. When father and mother are dead and Sam makes his way to and in New York, he is a rangy bumpkin, but Yankee-shrewd, rock-honest and already familiar with the teeth of poverty and hunger. At first he takes kindly to living with his piously affluent Uncle Cyrus and Aunt Sarah and to working in a wholesale hardware store for four dollars a week. Then he branches out for himself, a stout green shoot in a rather tangled thicket.

Friends made in the Young Men's Bible Class at his uncle's church abash his rusticity, put him in touch with the spirit of the time, to Succeed. They introduce him to drink, which he adopts moderately, and to Evelyn, an anemic young lost lady of the bars, whom he idealizes and takes unto himself with comparative propriety. Gaslit love* in a hall bedroom lasts until she gets a chance to go on the road with one of the immoral, new-fangled "leg-shows." Sam celebrates her departure with an attack of pneumonia that cancels his disgrace at home. Recovered, he devotes his disillusioned attention to Succeeding.

He rides a bicycle through New England peddling hardware. One of his German-Jew employers, Faber, is impressed with his warning that the jobber's day is done, that only manufacturers will survive the business slump. Faber's partner dies. Sam marries Faber's daughter Paula, not wholly for her dashing brunette looks. She brings a $25,000 dowry. Affairs at his and Faber's new nail factory in Bayonne, N. J., make him almost late for the wedding. That night he sits up late reading quotations on steel and pig iron.

After a few summers in Bayonne boarding houses, Sam is growing rich and Paula having men friends. He gets into a Chicago nail-and-wire pool, buys a Superba motor. Paula brings his middle name into play, "S. Osgood Smith." He buys Bethlehem Steel stock and some rolling mills. In the last chapters, Paula is employing their millions to make their daughter's Semitic strain fashionable enough for the Junior League. To Sam, profits are unprofitable. Even the recurrent ghost of Evelyn has become meaningless. He endows universities with an absent gesture; lets his secretaries invent his excuses; fiddles with his radio. One program is interrupted by a ship's call, in which his daughter recognizes his initials--S.O.S.

The Significance of this "novel at success" is literary rather than social. Sam Smith is more compelling, as a man than as a "message." And this is strange, for Author Norris writes with more purpose than distinction. Like William Dean Howells, dullness is dear to him. Yet out of a hazy, conventional reconstruction of the Welsbach-burner, balloon-sleeve, trust-forming era of U. S. life, Sam Smith achieves the form and force of actuality. He joins the great company of the memorably commonplace.

The Author, Charles Gilman Norris, a Chicago merchant's son, was brought up in acquiescent eclipse. His "beautiful and restless and ambitious and fiery" mother, denied a stage career by wifehood, centred her hopes in her oldest son, the late Frank Norris (author of The Octopus, The Pit, etc.) Charles, youngest of six, got and sought no encouragement for "his little old solitary dreams" and his school and college writings. His rapid romance and marriage with Kathleen Thompson (author of Mother, The Heart of Rachael, Beloved Woman, Little Ships, The Black Flemings, etc.) are said to have rekindled his literary ambition. After meeting her, he hurried from California to Manhattan and got a job on the American Magazine. In 1915 he found time to write The Amateur, followed shortly by Salt (of young men). After fighting abroad, he wrote Brass (of marriage) and Bread (of business women), both of them big sellers, big cinemas. "This writer's life," says his motherly wife, "has been what, I suppose, all would-be writers like to dream that life might be." It is "full and satisfied." At 45, he has an estate in California, an apartment overlooking Central Park.

Witch

LOLLY WILLOWES, OR THE LOVING HUNTSMAN--Sylvia Townsend Warner--Viking Press ($2). Lolly Willowes, a forgotten maiden, was nearly 50 before she understood the impulses long stirring beneath her life-routine among normal, well- to-do British relatives--impulses that had set her to reading in dusty books about werewolves and spells; to searching for potent, hidden herbs on solitary walks; and to quaint medicinal brewings and distillations in private.

She did not begin to understand until the evening that some Buckinghamshire beech-leaves in a Moscow Road flower-shop smelled like the rustling wood to whose edge she had often come in her autumn imagination. She went at once to live alone at Great Mop in the Chilterns. There, after some months that were not without weirdness, a starved kitten scratched her hand and her own blood sealed her knowledge that she was a witch.

Mrs. Leak, her Great Mop landlady, recognized Lolly's awakening and took her as a matter of course to the very next Witches' Sabbath. It was in a hedged field about midnight, and very vivacious. But village witches and warlocks are a rustic, hysterical lot. They wearied Lolly, before long, and angered her a little. When Satan appeared in a guise suitable to their company, she rebuffed his advances.

This was very wise of her, as events showed. She had her reward later, in another field, just after dawn. There, and at an interview by the tomb of Sir Robert Maulgrave--the Satanic baronet who had drunk from a skull and ridden a zebra about the countryside--Lolly made certain of Satan for what he is--a black knight wandering about succoring decayed gentlewomen; a loving huntsman who affords empty lives some adventure by pursuing their souls in all their windings, patiently, secretly, like a gentleman stalking tigers. . . . Such a delicate perfection in spider-claw prose is not published once in a crooked moon. It is the kind of book that travels from hand to hand more rapidly than news of any other kind, for there is a magic upon it.

NON-FICTION

Black Document

THE NEW NEGRO--Edited by Alain Locke--A. & C. Boni ($5). For 15 years dark waves of population have rolled up from the South to settle in spreading pools in northern cities. Already supplied with universities, churches, newspapers and a financial capital (Durham, N. C.), the Negro has prospered with the rest of the country and in his prosperity built his cultural capital on the upper end of Manhattan Island (Harlem). This volume is an attempt to document, socially and culturally, this "new" Negro--the Negro emancipated economically and intellectually as well as politically. It is written and edited by Negroes. It recommends itself highly to all readers, irrespective of color, who regard the Negro as one of the country's "problems."

There is an essay explanatory of the "new" Negro, by the editor, shedding light on the nature of "the largest Negro community in the world"--Harlem. One pointed paragraph: "The fiction is that the life of the races is separate, and increasingly so. The fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels."

The progress of the Negro from a caricature in, to a creator of, U. S. literature is recorded, with examples. His art and music are discussed and demonstrated. His position in present and future society is defined and forecast. The predominant note of these essays is one of scientific detachment; they are notably free from race-glorification, commiseration and the combative spirit. Perhaps imaginary values are attributed to some of the more obviously imitative works of art but this critical fault is to be preferred to the vein taken by the many white writers who eternally compare Negro creations with those of their own race. Negro spirituals, jazz, the Charleston, Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Florence Mills and other dusky U. S. institutions receive treatment that is for once definitive, not sentimental.

Editor Locke, 39, was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar from Pennsylvania after taking his Harvard B. A. He studied also in Berlin, took a Harvard Ph. D. and teaches philosophy at Howard University (Washington, D. C.). Among the 32 contributors: Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Ph. D. (Fisk '88, Harvard '93), publicity director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Elsie J. McDougald, vice-principal of Public School 89, Manhattan; Principal Robert Russa Moton of Tuskegee Institute; Edi tor Paul Underwood Kellogg (white) of the Survey; Poets Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes.

Onion-Peeling

THOBBING--Henshaw Ward--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50). "When a person THinks without curiosity, has an Opinion because he likes it, Believes what is handy--then he THOBS." Dr. Edwin Grant Conklin, able Princeton biologist, has called it, more simply, "wishful thinking." The inventor of the new word, excusably pleased with himself, hammers for nearly 400 pages to drive it into the language. Before he has done he admits that he is probably thobbing himself.

The book takes the form of a long letter to Cartoonist Clarence Day Jr., in which Mr. Ward exposes a great many exhibitions of thobbing, past and present: Upton Sinclair and his reforming ilk; all Moral Laws and Categorical Imperatives, since they involve a thing called "conscience" unknown to pure science; all sociological dialectics; all philosophical disquisitions and systems., even the most materialistic, since they all promise but never perform modifications of the genus Homo; all religions, calling as they do for the exercise of powers unknown to physics, mathematics and biology; all psychology--even behaviorism, from which the "psyche" is removed--since it has yet to demonstrate its actuality in a finite universe; all shrewd, unassailable Axioms, Methods, Customs, Creative Intellects, magazine articles and learned treatises on Education; all economic theory, which must presuppose an unreal Economic Man to operate; all Law, which is based upon fictitious "rights" and "justice"; all peace proposals, unctuous or bellicose; all "international thought",--etc.

All, in short, is thobbing save: 1) scientific knowledge received through the senses or their extensions (i. e., mathematics); 2) the awareness of thobbing, which is the beginning of wisdom. Even when the intellectual onion is peeled to these ideas, the end is not yet. The mind cannot show that anything exists outside itself. Onions are notoriously coreless.

It is not Mr. Ward's intention to destroy any mental institutions and set up new ones. The tone of raillery adopted throughout is merely "to make the mystery vivid," and "awareness of thobbing" is all that is urged upon the reader. The author is so stuffed-to-the-ears with quotable information on his vast array of thobbers that the moderately learned will make heavy weather of his pages if they try to read all. But trust the author of Evolution for John Doe to make his main point clear and entertaining. Leave it to the erudite to plough through the whole book and decide how much is penetrating, how much inane.

ALERT READERS --are not permitting the season to slip by without having read, or planned to read, books designated by the best current criticism as:

Significant The Intimate Papers of Colonel House -- Edited by Charles Seymour (2 vols., $10).

Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years -- Carl Sandburg (2 vols., $10).

Our Times: The Turn of the Century, 1900-1904 -- Mark Sullivan ($5). Yesterday completely reconstructed.

Brilliant No More Parades--Ford Madox Ford ($2.50). The War regarded as an agapemone.

The Private Life of Helen of Troy--John Erskine ($2.50). Conversational comedy; witty, charming.

Edgar Allan Poe, A Study in Genius--Joseph Wood Krutch ($3).

The facilities of TIME'S book department are at its readers' disposal. To order the above, or any other books, inclose a check or cash with a note to the Book Editor making plain to ivhom you wish your purchases sent.

*PIG IRON--Charles G. Norris--Button ($2). THE PENTON PRESS Co., CLEVELAND