A Plate of Literary Anti-pasto, Some Stale
The Story. Harold Prewett met his father for the first time at the age of 21. His mother had died in childbirth and that shock, and the disappointment occasioned by Harold's not being a girl, had so disappointed Papa that he turned over Harold to Aunt Sadi, who made rather a sissy of him as a boy. Conventional, ingenious, inexperienced, Harold was horrified to find that his father's plans for his future included neither a family reunion nor an entry into the paternal cloak and suit business, but that instead his father proposed flinging him into the waters of life to sink or swim alone, assisted by an unlimited income, a corrupt English butler named Drains and a tutor, Paul Moody, of good character but no moral sense.
Dropped into Paul Moody's circle of super-sophisticates, Harold found himself as bewildered and shocked as an innocent goldfish in a bowl of curacoa. He failed to enjoy the delicate odors of their elegant decadence, and fled into marriage with Alice Blake, whose idea of Heaven was a brand-new Park Avenue apartment. But on his honeymoon he discovered the horrible truth. Father hadn't really wanted him to be charmingly wicked but to disgust him with the pleasant sins of life by throwing them at his head—a plot of which Alice had been cognizant from the first. The honest people were rogues, the scandalous ones merely natural— so he promptly went to the devil with supple Zimbule O'Grady and felt much better. In fact the tale ends with Harold on the way to becoming an out-and-out " roo."
The book, the jacket assures one, is not romance or realism, life or art, fantasy or satire. The author has sworn before a notary public that his only purpose in creating it was to amuse.
The Significance. Geranium trees and alabaster cups—pickled walnuts and plovers' eggs—Darius Milhaud and Ouida—a patchwork of curious names, objects, personages, vices—a plate of literary antipasto, some pleasant, some a little stale. Somewhat affected, somewhat precious, quite amusing, though not nearly as delightful as Peter Whiffle, The Blind Bow-Boy reviews a facile display of intellectual fireworks from under the lacquered eyelids of a superficial sophistication. The fireworks squib out, the performance is over. There were too many pinwheels near the close, perhaps, and the shadow of Ronald Firbank had a way of straying across the scene. But, nevertheless, the avowed purpose of the author has been adequately fulfilled.
The Critics. The New York World: " The Blind Bow-Boy marks to us a certain movement back to the conventional by Mr. Van Vechten. It is sometimes annoying but always readable and entertaining."
New York Evening Post: " Survivors of the Victorian age are not unlikely to echo their queen with a frigid: 'We are not amused'."
The New York Times: "The author . . . demonstrates a fondness for split infinitives. . . . Mr. Van Vechten ought to be able to give us a very much better novel than this rather tedious one."
New York Tribune: " Mr. Van Vechten supplements the work of Mrs. Emily Post [author of the Book of Etiquette] on certain points of etiquette and . . . the author of the Red Classified Telephone Directory on the subject of the location of shops."