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Fan-mail. Nothing but fan-mail. And the whole human comedy — — tragedy — farce — exultation — despair—coming in every morning to the breakfast-tables of a score or fifty not-so-very-extraordinary citizens of these states, done up in all sorts of envelopes, postmarked with the names of places of which in many cases the recipients have never even heard.
Joseph Anthony
The Greatest Sin—" Giant" Hardy— The Doll Business
Recently returned from a year in London is Joseph Anthony, a young American writer whose two novels are not so well known as they should be. Anthony is a quiet man, with slow speech, slow dreams; but they are profound. He has, too, a profound artistic creed which was manifest in the care shown in the writing of his novels. The Gang, a picture of boy life and street life in Manhattan, was received with unusual praise in England as well as in the United States. Of his new novel, he has already destroyed one draft. He says that to him the greatest of America's literary sins is that a novelist seems to be expected to publish at least one book a year. He tried in The Gang to present a faithful picture of the folkways of New York City—extraordinary, colorful folkways, as native as the customs of gypsies, or of South African tribes, or of the dwellers in Thomas Hardy's Wessex.
As a matter of fact, Anthony was filled with enthusiasm over an afternoon spent with the great English novelist and poet. He found him, he says, a wise and tolerant man, viewing, with clarity and profound wisdom, life and literature as he now sees them about him. This giant of the Nineteenth Century finds himself faithful to his gods; but interested in the facts of life as they are changing before him. He is not querulous; but of an absorbed old age which is akin to an eager youth. Among English writers, he advises both Walter de la Mare and John Galsworthy. These, he thinks, are the giants of today's literary England, if giants there be.
" What," asked Anthony, " is a young novelist who wants to write books that measure up to his own standards to do ? "
What, indeed! Here is one of the few professions in which, if a man does his best work, he is likely to starve. However, there are compromises to be made. A young novelist brought his manuscript to me last week. He was a boy I had met at a meeting of some down town settlement club. " What am I to do?" he asked. " I'm in the doll business. There's no excitement in that and no one to whom I can talk! " What a gift it is to the world to find the sort of person to whom one can talk, who suddenly impresses one as being all-wise and trustworthy, whose eyes have looked on life and have not been terrified by its secrets. Such, to the young novelist, is Thomas Hardy, the veteran. J. F.
Good Books
The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion: