Judge — March 1933 — page 23: what you’re looking at

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

JUDGING rue BOOKS RSKINE CALDWELL, one of our Young Writers, stems from Hem- , the bad man of Illinois and Paris, and is a literary brother to William Faulkner. But where Papa Hemingway had a few restraints, as the old Folks have, Son Caldwell shoots the works. Where Papa was a sort of Marie Corelli hiding behind a whiskey sour front, Son has no duplex nature. He comes out straight like a man for the Life Force. He, like his Brother Faulkner, puts sex in capital letters out in the fields. But where Brother Faulkner is a shade to the bizarre, as in his quaint use of the corncob, Brother Caldwell is pretty simple like the daisies and the rabbits. A splendid pair of boys, these Hemingway lads, and, with Brother Morley Callaghan, who is more sullen than sexy, lads that any father should be proud of. Naturally Papa Hemingway isn’t as young as he used to be (the old folks do go in the joints, don’t they?) but such stalwart sons ought to do him proud in his old age! What their literary children will be like, I shudder to think. We therefore don’t know whether Erskine Caldwell’s “God's Little Acre” is for your eyes or not. For, however calloused your glims may be, this one is bound to tear the scales from them. You've just got to have an artistic conscience and a shock- proof chassis to stick it. “God’s Little Acre” strips life down to the skin and keeps it there ina kind of savage and glorified state. It concerns the rutting and sold-digging fevers of a family of Georgia barbarians. They are the Waldens and live jn an Adam and Eve sort of state. Their problems are on the biblical or, if you wish, the arly Piltdown plan:—with incest, and cain-and-abel misunderstandings their chief concerns in life. If Mr, Caldwell hadn’t given them the Ziegfeld touch, we might have recognized them as a Southern off- shoot of the Jutes, those friends of Mr. Darrow’s. But they are, in all their lustful, ignorant depravity an honest, strange, savage bunch and We liked them and what they did. Whether they exist in Georgia to- day or not we wouldn’t know. We suspect they do, even tho Mr. Cald- Well has put them into a state of his own private Hound and Hornish artistic idiom. The only fault of the book is that- at odd moments, Mr. Caldwell stops talking out of the corner of his mouth and goes softy. It is one of those books professional Southerners tar and feather and hang to public trees. By the way, what has become of the old Southern writer who knew Chivalry, Juleps and Fair Womanhood, suh? Rr. H. G. WELLS is still fighting the good fight for Science. Give Mr. Wells his way and this would be a world of Direct Thinkers, whose minds burn with the clear blue flame of a bunsen burner. No nonsense, no romance, no gilt and tinsel, no slushy balderdash, no “aesthetics’—only hard, tested Facts. In Mr. Wells’ ideal world, the music of the spheres would be the sound of. celestial geo- metric theorems. The stars would shine with mathematical astrono- mical, formulas. Kissing would be strictly chemo-biological, and very aseptic. “The Bulpington of Blup” is an- other sermon on this idea. In it Mr. Wells mercilessly sketches the de- velopment of a romanticist:—a falsi- fier of History and Truth. He is Theodore Bulpington, a caricature of a man not after Mr. Wells’ heart. Poor Bulpy is born into a smoothy literary family of the ’90’s. He is exposed to the awakening scientific attitude of the turn of the century; is immersed in all the clean intellectual Gas to which Mr. Wells has added his share; goes thru the War—but comes out unscathed mentally. De- spite this scientific and realistic bap- tism, Bulpy remains an artistic weakling. You know he is going in the coming years, to defeat the scien- tific attitude towards History and glorify the war for the school his- tories, © Curiously Mr. Wells (probably un- intentionally) makes you like poor Bulpington for more than half the book. He has been idling along in his dislike of the fellow. Suddenly he steps on the accelerator and dashes the poor fellow over the cliffs, destroying him completely by book end. Tho we understood Mr. Wells’ dislike, we couldn’t help feeling very sorry for Bulpy and that Mr. Wells had been a little harsh. He might have gained his ends more sympa- thetically. We like heroes, of stern stuff, in our books, Still, while not a great book or one you lay down with a satisfied sigh, a capital one. It makes a marvelous outline of the intelligentsia for the past fifty years; and it records the intellectual gab fest that has been going on all these contemporary years beautifully. —TeED SHANE 21 | | It’s 15—awp rrs MiDER PIPE can make or break a home. 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