Judge — January 21, 1922 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE BOYS—GOD BLESS THEM! HE younger crowd entering American >) T letters has produced a stack of unusually f good books this year. The boys have done a good day’s work. What they write is interesting, craftsman-like and much as they dislike the term, it is wholesome. Probably no other year in the history of American book making have the boys brought in such a splendid armload of books. Benchley’s “Of All Things,” Dos © Passos’s “Three Soldiers,” Christopher Morley’s “Modern Essays” and his “Chimney Smoke,” Donald Ogden Stewart’s “Parody Outline of History,” Heywood Broun’s “Seeing Things at Night,” and Don Marquis’s “Noah and Jonah and Cap’n John Smith” make about as fine a sheaf of American books upon letters and manners and life as any young crowd ever laid at the feet of posterity. One need not be afraid for the future of the writing business in America if these young men survive in it. They give promise moreover of a definite turn or quirk to our American expression in letters: they are gay, blithely gay and hopeful for the most part. Barring Dos Passos there is little gloom in their attitude. They are satirical rather than sardonic. They laugh with life, rather than at it, and smile in joy, rather than derision, which is probably the American way of making and taking humor. They have no reason to come pulling their forelocks or with their hats in their hands before posterity. Benchley has as many tricks in his bag as Mark Twain had in his, before Mark Twain went to Europe. Morley and Don Marquis are the equal of Lowell in any of his prose performances, and the superior of most of his verse. Dos Passos, a bit unhappy perhaps, stating a thesis rather than reproducing life, is at least as naturalistic as Mr. Howells and probably bites a bit deeper into life with his vitriol. Broun is as delightful as Holmes was in his break- fast table days, and as much reflects the life that now is as the elder essayist reflects his time. The young crowd, and it includes a dozen names that cannot be listed here, is doing work of which all Americans should be proud. As good work as writers in English are doing anywhere. Having said this, however, an old-timer would like to submit these friendly warning words to the boys. Don’t get too badly excited when you make the important dis- covery that you and the beasts of the field have the same equipment for carrying the torch of life. Too many young men in the business of writing, painting, sculpture or music get so impressed with the fact that sex is a physical endowment of man that they forget all about man’s spirit- ual endowment. This old, old fact of life, someway always seems new. So too often youngsters come running out of the nursery with naughty words, and naughty pictures, and naughty noises, which are intended to prove that life is basically a succession of idle and casual concupiscence, sometimes perhaps rising spiritually to the dignity of adultery. They get the fool notion that any other account EDITORIAL By Witi1am ALLEN WHITE of life is ugly and untrue and prudish. Of course, a cer- tain, perhaps a considerable, part of the life of man is given to considering the caprices of his more emotional intestines, but he is also a hungry creature. He likes food, and what with food and babies a whole wide world of pleasurable and not necessarily wicked emotions arise. And in the gorgeous play of these emotions the aspirations of man are vastly more important in life than his failures. It is in following dreams of men and not in following their sex complexes that humanity has built civilization in the earth. The boys with their books under their arms and their typewriters before them. are bouncing into a new and puzzled world. They must tell about it, and in the telling they will help to remake it. They need omit nothing. They may even go to the alley and read the chalk scrawls on the barn, and if they feel like it, reprint them. But they should remember that after all the short and simple annals on the barn do not make literature and they represent only a little of life. To restrict literature to the expressions of adolescent yearnings is not art; for it is only one phase of human consciousness. And alas! to omit all account of the struggle of man with his earthy partner and to forget the achievements that arise from the struggle, and to exalt our failures as natural and final, is to limit one’s self most miserably. Fortunately the boys, God bless them, of 1922 in the writing business in America seem to have no need for this advice. Only a few have joined the back alley school of literary pornography. But boys will be boys, and sometimes they limit themselves to their adolescence. And to take the tuck out of the: whole passel of kids one may as well call their attention to the fact that the best novel of the year coming from the younger crowd is not written by the boys at all. It is a novel called “The Girls,” by one of them. Edna Ferber is plain spoken enough, but in “The Girls’ she is also something else, something big and fine and aspiring. And the boys, in spite of the fact that they are “young marsters” of creation, will do well to realize that this year little sister has shown them the color of her pretty suede heels—back view. AND THE ANGELS GIGGLE HAT a funny game is politics! Here is President Harding, nominated by the grace of George Harvey and elected to spite Wilson, lining out messages that sound liberal enough for Roosevelt. If the convention that nominated Harding could have known that he would advocate a “flexible tariff” more or less established by the tariff commission; would stand for “the abolition of poverty”; would declare that he would not denounce the treaties which Wilson established to stabilize world trade; would ask for ship subsidies and demand the enactment of a law like that established by the Shepherd Towner Bill, Harding would have got fewer votes than Hoover. Politicians think they are smart. They nominate their men, and then find the people controlling the officers who are elected. Every time the angels see the politicians get- ting ready to stem the inexorable tide of human progress,