Two Boys

Thomas Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are grown-ups now. Oddly enough, they had been simultaneously moved to write about their boyhoods. Neither improves on Mark Twain's version, but autobiography is always edifying.

Huck, as might have been expected, is still shiftless, happy-go-lucky, not very respectable. Always a smooth liar, he took to professional story-telling years ago. Only since respectability went into a decline has he been really successful. On disreputable subjects like night fishing, adultery, peeking in at lighted windows and loafing, he is quite an authority, having had in them a lifelong interest. He can write about them, too, up to a certain incoherent point where the blissful inanity-- or is it miracle?--of "just being alive" turns upon itself and leaves his lazy mind groping for words. Nowadays Huck Finn is called Sherwood Anderson.

Tom, of course, has done very well for himself. By the time he had finished school and college he saw how foolish he had been to hate them. Respectability pays. He learned the printer's trade, managed a Kansas politician's small-town newspaper, took his good manners to Kansas City and worked on the Star. He married a schoolteacher, got his own small-town newspaper, let his girth grow and joined the diligentsia. Eventually he made his voice heard all over the country. He has taken care not to get too slicked up; has preserved a certain loudness and exaggeration which show, even when he discusses national politics or literature, that he is still a small-town man. But he stands for the very best national things: the Y. M. C. A., the Rotarians, Opportunity, the Boy Scouts and the Kingdom of Heaven. Tom Sawyer's grown-up name is William Allen White.

The two books* differ little in subject matter. Both boys lived in midwestern hamlets where the livery stable, the barber's or the harness shop was the centre of culture. The church was either used as a storehouse or ignored. School was prison. The lasting impressions Huck and Tom have of school are the whisperings of bigger boys about differences and relations between men and women. Boys lay under plank bridges to spy up at passing women. Their little brothers were often born just the other side of thin partitions between bedrooms and perhaps only a night or so after they had seen a sow have a litter. Tom remembers how the men of his village shot a horse thief into a pulp. They both remember their "ole swimmin' holes" and the dirty tricks played there.

Neither of their fathers paid much attention to Tom White and Huck Anderson. Their mothers gave them such "raising" as they got, which accounts for some of the differences between Tom and Huck now. Tom's mother was a college graduate and he was her firstborn. Huck's was a village girl (fictionized into a beautiful Italienne) who bore seven "brats" and drudged.

Huck's book is offered as fiction, Tom's as an essay, but the contrast between them is broader than that. For while Huck Anderson is trying to make a work of art, still he is one of the most self-obtrusive of artists and in propounding his way of life he trespasses on sociology; and while Tom is trying to point a social moral (in effect: "Behold, we do, and should, serve youth far more nobly than youth was served yesterday!"), still he implicitly adorns a tale (in effect: "What a wonder that I turned out as fine a man as I am!"). They are on common ground--but going in opposite directions.

Huck Anderson, at 50, finds it "charming" (and so it is) to remember when little Tar Moorehead (so called to pacify Anderson relatives) discovered the great impersonal world of horses, rats, cows, sheep, and tried to join it by eating grass. He has never lost the sense of curiosity, wonder and cosmic humor experienced by little Tar when he saw the bald drug clerk and his lean wife cutting privy antics. He recalls Tar's first frights, shames, loves, possessions, just writing them down and then looking at them as Tar used to, stupidly perhaps but quite happily, saying, "Well, now. What to think of that?" The only sad note in Huck's boyhood came at the end, when his mother died and he cried for her in a freight car, then ran off to sell his papers, to shift for himself, to grow up.

Tom White, on the other hand, at 58, can only shudder, or pretend to, at the "dark and awful things" he saw in barns, woods and alleys. It is not for him to live within himself. He must paint a dismal background against which the present will seem bright. So that he can say: "Those boys of a drab and dirty day, grown mature, have performed a miracle . . . modern civilization ... a great agricultural empire ... a rich industrial commonwealth . . . out of the bottomless cornucopia of Providence," etc., etc. He accuses men his age of overmuch pride in their material achievements and sentimentality over their oldtime virtues. But then he turns around to ballyhoo Progress harder than anyone and to give his contemporaries credit for planting in Modern Youth a virtue greater than ever. This is curious because it reveals in himself a refinement of the very vice he has set out to reform--boasting. Nor does he demonstrate that the "new" virtue is wisdom and not a surface application of mass education, theory, platitudes.

What may redeem Tom is his own first sentence, the generalization: "All men are blowhards." But how far removed from Huck's amiable unmorality is all this Tom-talk of moral credit. How strange that two products of like environments should see things so differently in retrospect. How odd that Huck the outcast should write with such contentment while Tom the respected citizen has loathing in his memory and joy, strident because vicarious, only in perfections yet to be. Both the books are written for middle-aging people. Who shall say which is wiser?

Relaxative

CAPTAINS IN CONFLICT--Robert R. Updegraff--A. W. Shaw Co-- ($2). Author Updegraff has dedicated this industrial romance to "the John Rowntrees of today who are wiping out the memory of the H. B. Lockharts of yesterday." In 1900, aged 25, John Rowntree suddenly inherits his father's nationally advertised stove and range company. Forthwith baldheaded, leather-skinned H. B. ("H. B.") Lockhart, onetime Rowntree employe and now proprietor of a rival stove works, makes an indecent proposal: "Let's combine, juggle the stock, and sell out! Easy money!" Young Rowntree refrains from smashing Mr. Lockhart's face, stalks out of the room. But Lockhart forms the Consolidated (eleven big companies), gets himself elected president, starts a series of dastardy plots to "crush that young damn fool." ("Then, by God, I'll crush him to a pulp!" And Lockhart doubled his knuckled fists into two tight palsied knots.) But Rowntree is never crushed. At two o'clock one morning, pacing his father's library, he clutches at a musty volume. Out drops the secret letter which his father wrote him on the day of his death. So! Lockhart stole the patents, then! But Rowntree Sr. was at one time in love with the young woman who later became Mrs. Lockhart. Therefore no true Rowntree would expose her thief-of-a-husband. And so Rowntree fights Lockhart and beats him in much the same way that St. George beat the Dragon, without going to court. And ultimately (in 1925) Lockhart is ousted from Consolidated. The directors beg John Rowntree to come in and put the eleven stove companies back on their feet again. At the last, Death comes to apoplectic H. B. Lockhart. Significance. The volume has as much literary style as a good sales letter. But action is plentiful and the book 'is informative. It will probably furnish to younger businessmen the inspiration that its jacket advertises. Even as a relaxative its merit is far above most fiction of the idly amorous type. Also, it is probably authentic. (The country's leading stove works are now in combine.) That Villain Lockhart was founded on fact, however, is doubtful. His tactics are consistently those of the mucker football player who not only gouges eyes and kicks groins when on the field, but also spends every waking moment in poisoning coffee, writing fake telegrams, hiring kidnapers, etc., etc. Had such a character ever existed in U. S. business, he would have been notorious far beyond the narrow confines of the stove trade.

*TAR--A Midwest Childhood--Sherwood Anderson--Boni & Liveright ($3). BOYS, THEN AND Now--William Allen White--Macmillan ($1.25).

*Captains of Conflict ran serially in Publisher Archibald W. Shaw's System ("The Magazine of Business"). By coincidence, Hero Rowntree is caused to compliment that magazine in the text.