Moon-Calf

HOMECOMING--Floyd Dell--Farrar & Rinehart ($3). Generations push each other too fast to allow youth to grow old gracefully or without hurting somebody's feelings. Some 20 years ago--a mere wink of time --Floyd Dell was a promising young writer, one of the literary Lochinvars who came out of the West to startle Chicago and Greenwich Village into a romantic revival. When he wrote Moon-Calf (1920), an autobiographical novel, thousands of adolescent readers found him excitingly like themselves. Sometime practicer of "free love," an editor of the old Masses, a pillar of the Provincetown Players, Floyd Dell used to seem the embodiment of intellectually flaming youth. Times have changed, but not Floyd Dell, 46. In this confidentially candid autobiography, Mooncalf Dell looks back on his generation's brief blooming, feels that it is good to be settled down. Admitting that he is wiser than he was, he says: "I can face the boy of 18 that I once was, without shame. I have gained the courage to love." Floyd Dell's father was a butcher in Illinois, but he lost his job and had to take what he could get. Floyd grew up in respectable but shaming poverty. The family moved restlessly, finally settled in Davenport, Iowa. Bright, delicate, sensitive Floyd was good at school, read everything he could lay hands on. He was soon calling himself an Atheist; at 16 he joined the Socialist Party. He wrote poems at such an alarming rate that he realized it was a bad habit; what chiefly disgusted him was that his verses were so sentimental and God-conscious. College being out of the question, when Floyd finished school he went to work in a candy factory, graduated (often by expulsion) to other jobs, till he gravitated into journalism. At 21 he was a reporter on the Chicago Evening Post, was soon assistant to brilliant young Francis Hackett on the Post's "Friday Literary Review" When Hackett left, Dell succeeded him. In 1913 he felt successful enough to seek his fortune in the wilds of Manhattan's Greenwich Village. He became Max Eastman's assistant editor on the Masses, was a member of the committee that started the bohemian revels in Webster Hall, wrote plays for his friend George Cram ("Jig") Cook's Provincetown Players. In 1917, with the rest of the Masses board, he was tried for conspiracy; the jury disagreed. Next year, having changed his mind about Germany, Dell allowed himself to be drafted and sent to camp at Spartanburg, but since he was still under indictment under the Espionage Act, he was soon discharged.

All this time Floyd Dell "was, and remained incurably. romantic about women." He had had his first serious love affair before he left Davenport, his first marriage before he left Chicago. Like a theme-song through his reminiscences runs the refrain: "And then I fell in love again." Dell and his inamoratas usually parted friends. ''We both cried a little when we said goodbye. We told each other how happy we had been. Like frightened and lonely children, we kissed and parted." All this gave him something of a reputation among his fellow-bohemians. and even began to scare him a little. He tried being psychoanalyzed: the analysis was never completed but it gave him a lot to think about. When he married for the second time (in 1919, one Berta-Marie Gage), Greenwich Village smirked behind its hand. ''Some of our surprised and cynical friends gave our marriage six months. I knew it was forever."

Floyd Dell and his wife, still married, have left an unpleasantly post-War Greenwich Village behind them, live, as post-graduate bohemians now. at Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y.

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