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THE MICHIGAN DAILY MAGAZINE SUNDAE, NOVEMBFRt , 1921
Reviewing The Reviewers
(By It. D. S.) and the remarks concerning it are anyone would have been arrested for writing 'Three Soldiers' was to ex-
When Sinclair Lewis wrote 'Main extraordinarily varied, ranging from writing while the war was in progress. pose what he considered a nation-
Street' he stepped into a fair sized utter damnation, through a long It purports to be the 'Now It Can be wide injustice, he seems to this re-
hornet's nest. The 'Main Street' hub- stretch of praise with, reservations, Told' of the enlisted man in the Am- viewer to have achieved a nation-wire
bub has kept up for almost a year, to unqaulified approval. erican armies. It is either a base insult."
but we may expect it soon to be quiet- The New York Times book review libel or a hideous truth. It is so In much the same tenor is the ar-
ed as the frenzied discussion of John section, usually a quiet and spineless savagely explicit in its accusations ticle, "One Soldier On "'Three Sol-
Dos Passos's war novel, 'Three Sol- sheet, has risen from its hibernation that it deserves no quarter at the diers' ", by Harold Norman Denny
diers,' gains in momentum. Dos Pas- and has led the attack on "Three Sol- hands of the reading public. You which appeared in The Times the fol-
sos, a young author who drove an diers" with two front page reviews. must be either for or against it." He lowing week. Denny accuses Dos Pas-
ambulance during the war, has paint- The first is by Coningsby Dawson then goes on to show why he is 'sos of "combing the army for every
ed a graphic, if not a pretty, picture who, after passing out such martial against it. He says the men it de- rotten incident that happened, could
of the struggle, and has shown how lollypops as "Carry On" and "Out to picted were "spineless, self-centred have happened, or could be imagined
it has completely crushed three sol- Win," naturally has to defend his weaklings" and that "they got out of as having happened, and welding it
diers, especially John Andrews the position by harling imprecations at the war what they brought to it- into a compelling narrative:" Denny
artist, who is the hero of the novel. such a materialistic description of low ideals and bitterness." He con- then proceeds to look up Dos Passos's
Already the book has been reviewed war as that of Mr. Dos Passos's. "This cludes with the statement: "If the war record. Being rather surprised
bv nearlyeveary critic in the coun+r ie nd fa n snk" a v ,'ltha ne f Mr Jnh D Patn in . ;A+- so,+,,
Uy LLvc6lly cvcly %,A lulu lu LlAU uVULLLty xt3 Lau KILLU UL tt T)UUK, - IIe says "Lna7C
purpose of ir. jon n os r n u
I 1
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Prices *25 to $75
to Tind that the latter was by no means
a slacker, he tries nevertheless to dis-
parage the author by a comparison of
war records, a rather cheap way of
belittling Dos Passos: Denny is small-
er than Dawson and his ethics are to
be questioned when he indulges in
personalities. His article ends with
this: "Perhaps it is malicious to point
it out, but the ,aper cover surround-
ing 'Three Soldiers' is of an intense
passionate yellow."
I do not want to outdo Denny in
smallness but it might be pertinent to
point out that the cover in question
is a bright and decided orange.
Following the two embittered scribes
of The Times comes a host of more
rational critics who praise the bpok
with reservations. D. Kenneth Laub,
the literary editor of The Detroit
News, admires the story but believes
it incomplete. "It is," he says, "just
as if, instead of the photograph of the
well-groomed, spectacled, apparently
mild-mannered and not obviously soul-
crushed, young man, with his hair
neatly parted, that adorns this page,
we had used a hypothetical photo-
graph taken after one of the drunken
orgies he describes with the feeling of
an artist and the exactitude of inti-
mate knowledge, that photograph
might be a true picture of Mr. Dos
Passos in one aspect."
Elizabeth Frazer, a special war cor-
respondent for the Saturday Evening
Post, writing in the New York Globe,
finds much the same fault. She sums
it up in this manner: "The trouble
with this well-written, brilliant, and
often poignant and moving book is
that it is lop-sided. Its author did
not see life in the army as an artist
should see life anywhere, intensely
and as a whole. He saw only one
thing, and he saw that so passionately
that he was unable to see the rest of
the circle at all. And the thing he
saw with such passionate intensity,
and resented with such bitterness,
was, in a word, restraint-He has
strung together a series of distorted,
exceptional, embittered episodes to re-
present the norm. In thus distorting
the real truth, he is, possibly, a good
propagandist, but a bad artist, for he
has judged as an artist in order to
prove his propagandist theme. Which
is the chief defect in most propagand-
ist literature."
Sidney Howard, a playwright and a
member of the A. E. F., writing in the
same paper, praises the book but
wishes that the author "had loved life
more immediately and less individual-
ly." But "for all that," he hastens to
say, "it is very nearly a great book
and the war has not, I think, been
better done in any other way."
Walter Pritchard Eaton, reviewing
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