Page Twelve TP ERSPECTI VES BOOKS IN SEASON .. . D/e fac 7Tone New England: Indian Summer By Van Wyck Brooks Dutton, pp. 557, $3.75 (The writer offers no apology for the for the tone or the harshness of-the fol- lowing review. It is intended as an irri- tant, solely.) Van Wyck Brooks has scored another triumph. New England: Indian Summer is a best seller; it has been blurbed "ex- citing," "fascinating," "remarkable"; it has achieved the distinction of a pictor- ial news story in LIFE; it would garner, had its predecesor, The Flowering of New England, not already done so, all the literary awards in sight. Scholarship, American readers are told for the hun- dredth time, can be fun. The not unexpected reception accorded Mr. Brooks in his second volume in his projected history of American literature ONCE IN 649,740 TIMES fast, big pieces of the margin fading into the dark dry smoothness of the wood. First one side seemed to go fastest, then the other, until when there was just a small sweat circle left the whole thing seemed to go at once, shrinking in fast from every side. "Yeah," John said. "If he hadn't dealt it himself - " Red didn't look up from the place where the spot had been. He didn't move, or speak, but John shivered and shut up. The three sat there silent for long minutes. No one moved. The right hand, the one without a little finger, closed the royal flush into a neat heap, then shoved it into the discard pile, John wanted to get out. If he had lost a pot like that. Carnahan couldn't scare him, but he wanted to get out. He shouldn't have made that crack - But John didn't move Brit didn't move. He could sit there now the rest of his life. This chair suit- ed him fine. It was cold outside. Rag walked up the deck. He rolled a little because the steel plates were wet and slick. The fog had come down thick. It shut away the bow, and the lights on the after cabin were holes in the grayness. Alongside the hull, just beyond the two strands of cable that was the rail, the water was oily black running swiftly aft, coming up very slowly, then going down again. From out in the fog where you couldn't see the water or anything there came now and then a tiny splash, a wave or a fish. In his pants pocket Rag's fist clenched 'tightly a small ball of bills. His face was wet from the fog. He walked along, his rubber-soled shoes going squeech, squeech on the greasy damp deck. Charley felt the heat of the stove on his face as he tumbled the kettle of potatoes into the big oven. It was warm and good smelling in the galley, the coal fire in the stove snapped, and the round plate in the center was glowing red hot. "How'd ypu come out?" the cook asked him. "Aw, hell, I didn't get a decent hand once," Charley said. He turned back to the sink and clattered in the dish water, running more hot water into the pan, the smell of the cook's apple pies baking in the other oven made his mouth water. He whistled. Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie. Red looked up, not at John or Brit. "Well, I guess that's all," he said. is attributable to three factors: the un- usual success of the first volume; the grace and charm of the author's style; the concern, during European crises, for things American. The Flowering of New England, contrary to most predictions (made also about this book), did not lead its readers to an avid perrusal of primary works in American literature; instead, it led them to desire even more secondary, and piquant, accounts filled with the "great men have been among us" theme; the same stylistic qualities attract readers to the second, and now, more than in 1936, America's attention is turned inward, - none too critically - upon itself, its past achieve- ment, its native culture. Since the pub- lic is reading the book, one wishes that it provided insight as well as pleasure, un derstanding as well as amusement. The wish will scarcely be fulfilled. Mr. Brooks in New England: Indian Summer (not a particularly happy title, as the book goes on through the winter of our discontent and into a sec- ond spring) continues the cycloramic representation of New England's "liter- ary history" from 1865 to 1915, thus recording in two volumes a century of cultural achievement. Adequate criticism of New England: Indian Summer is impossible in the space available, but some attention must be given to structure and interpretation. Despite its charm, the book lacks struc- ture. For obvious reasons Mr. Brooks has abandoned the pseudo-Spenserian cul- ture brought together in the Flowering of New England. That hypothesis, sound or unsound affords the necessary coord- ination of arrangement anu meaning to make the book a structural whole. Now Mr. Brooks says, somewhat lamely that he has emphasized Boston again in order to achieve "unity of place indispensable in any attempt to picture a phase of literary history so confused and complex and marked by such multifarious com- ings and goings." Surely, amid all this complexity and confusion, some more valid unifying principle than mere place could be discovered. A unifying princi- ple, it would be logical to expect, should reflect the scholar's probings into the complex pattern, of cause and effect, or forces and reactions. "Boston" does not unify. not even artificially. It is just another place like Newport, Cambridge, Beverly, Amesbury. The work is sprawl- ing, disjointed. One chapter may center The Brewer's Big Horses. A By Mildred Walker. 441 pp. Harcourt, Brace, New York. S7.50. When Mildred Walker's third novel 'Doctor Norton's Wife" became a best seller last year, the University's Hop- wood Committee rightfully sat back and beamed with pride. Miss Walker won -her first literary fame in 1934 when "Fireweed," her Hopwood winner was published. This summer Miss Walker triumphed again in her fourth novel "The Brewer's Big Horses," - a powerful story of America's decadent mauve decade. "The Brewer's Big Horses" is a fine picture of life in a Michigan town at the turn of the century. The society, the customs, the mores, the bigotry, the prejudices, the surge of developing America is all obviously a subjective one, and subjective presentation includes criticism. But her criticism is of too little value to a turbulent American society today. The novel that could be a motivating story of America today, yes, even as strong as Steinbeck's young classic, be- comes a mere background, and the novel becomes a story of one character who is about place, the next time, and the next upon a person. Mr. Brooks does, however, attempt in- terpretation of his facts; he suggests, more frequently than he states, that post-war materialism, post-transcen- dental disillusion, philosophic and econ- omic determinism, feminization of taste, aesthetic barrenness, urbanization of the New England spirit, European immigra- tion and consequent dislocation of popu- lation, the uprooting of men of educa- tion and culture from this oil of popular life, the lack of causes to champion were responsible for New England's cultural decline. But, just as the first volume failed to give a satisfactory analysis of either the meaning or the value of the "flowering", so the second fails to set forth a principle underlying all these "causes of sterility." Once, in 1915 (America's Coming Age), Mr. Brooks was constructive; he gave us the idea of a "usable" past", the concept of "energy in life." Before there could be cultural advance: revolution. The trouble with America between 1865 and 1915 lay in its inability and disinclination to destroy the social forms - political psychologi- cal, economic, and aesthetic-which so- lidified around the creative spirit. Mr. Brooks might have made this point for his readers had he turned to his premises of twenty-five years ago. Rather, he carefully, almost sadistically, uses pages to describe the frustration, the defeat- ism, the pettiness, the emptiness, the be- wilderment, the futility of the artist in the Gilded Age. It is a chronicle of "hol- low men"; they failed because they could not help themselves. Is it to be ever thus? No. The New England writers of the first two decades of this cen- tury derived their strength from region- alization, from planting themselves again in the soil of New England! It is with this innocent assertion, the old Jamesian pilgrimage thesis, that Brooks concludes his book. The personalities, the verbal images, and the tone are fascinating to the cas- ual reader. The erudition, the antiquar- ianism, the allusions and the quotations are delightful to one who knows the lit- erature of New England. But the person who would know about either the lit- erature or the history of the literature must await a later historian. Let us hope that when he arrives he will be possesed of the urbanity and the gusto of Van Wyck Brooks. - Mentor L. Williams not an important person. as interesting and human as she might be. The vividness with which she draws characters. the ease with which she em- bodies the spirit of a whole town in a chapter, the subtlety with which she re- veals feeling and emotion are evidence of ability. Mildred Walker needs only to lose the slight tinge of effeminate timid- ity with which she looks at the world, and she will quickly leave the "goods" and take her place among the "greats". She tries hard to be bold, to be strong, to be virile in her approach to life. But through it all comes the hint of an au- thor inherently of a gentle nature. The story itself is the story of Sara Bolster, darling of a Main Street "Four Hundred" who crosses the tracks to marry a young German doctor, and finds herself running a brewery to sup- port her children, her in-laws and her own family which clings to its pride and predjudices but not its money. One flaw stands out in the plot. Although Sara becomes a shrewd business woman, worldly and wise, and old in years she remains somehow the naive youngster who was first awed by the Brewer's Big Horses. After twenty years she has fail- ed to orient herself to life, she still mourns (in attitude) the death of her husband that will leave you upset for chapters-but not for twenty years. -Morton C. Jampel You Can't Go Home Again, By Thomas Wolfe When Thomas Wolfe died in 1938 critics disagreed on whether or not America had lost a great writer. Some said he was a bastard child of literature who spewed out torrents of words with- out any objective purpose, without gny concept of total form. Others saw him as a man of genius struggling for def- inition and felt that his death left a job undone. The publication of "You Can't Go Home Again' must satisfy all that Thom- as Wolfe was a wonderful artist who worked through a confusion of fears and uncertainties toward an under- standing of his existence and who, in this last novel, found faith in living. I've read all four of Wolfe's novels to get at what is printed in "You Can't Go Home Again," and now that Wolfe does come through with what living taught him, the lesson is a simple one. He had learned that there is a common brotherhood among men; that neither he nor any other man is different from the people with whom he eats and sleeps and talks and works; that the soul which tortured him through more than half of his life was the soul of every man sharpened and intensified in his own individuality. Wolfe is not talking about himself alone but about all people. He is like Whitman, finding in himself all men and feeling in himself the purpose that there is in every man's life. There is no wounded faun in "You Can't Go Home Again." The self-pity and cries of injustice which you read in "Look Homeward Angel" are gone from this book. Wolfe's lesson taught him that the artist is a man like other men. The publishers say this is the story of a lost modern who found himself, and that is about as good a way to put it as any. He was lost in all the confusion of an America booming through the frenzied period of paper prosperity. He was lost among people who he saw were themselves lost in a fight which was a fight for nothing. He saw his home town burst into zealous activity; real- estate skyrocketing, fortunes written in- to mortgages, greedy madness shining in the faces of the people. When the market broke he heard America denying the truth; trying des- perately to assure itself that the old or- der was not shattered but only shaken and that soon there would be a return. But he had learned to know that you can't go home again. There is no going back. There is only progress. He derived his faith from the passion- ate love which he felt for life- and which he knew was felt by everyone. The old order was gone and there was some- thing new to be built. That is where he found himself. He found that Ameri- ca was young and had a destiny and that every man had a destiny. He saw that if men could find a purpose in living that destiny would be fulfilled. He saw that men would have to look at truth with fresh eyes and ungreedy faces. "I believe that we are lost here in Ameri- ca," he wrote, "but I believe we 5halt be found." This is no novel that Wolfe wrote. I don't know what to call it. It is writ- ing about a life and the process of learn- ing. It may be the last part of a great novel which comprises four volumes. The only long essay comes in a letter which closes the book, a letter from George Webber to a friend in which he explains his life and announces his faith in living. This essay is the essence of all that Wolfe has ever written. It is all he learned of life. It is clean, simple prose, well-ordered, definitive. If you have Wolfe's four novels you have an entire life lived for you. I think that is all there is to be said. -Gerald Burns