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The Significance. This is a very short story; very complete, very intense, very subtle. A rare woman's whole life is told and her time etched in around her with a touch as sure as it is delicate. It adds immensely to the literature of places as well as of people, particularly with a violet, snow-powdered December twilight in old Madison Square, which once was "like an open-air drawing room." What the work represents spiritually, no reader will soon show another, save that the tragedy of a strong, restrained nature, devoid of falsity or baseness, is a moving thing to watch, to experience.
The Author. Willa Sibert Gather spends months on end riding over her brothers' ranches in the Southwest. Then she buries herself for more months, of writing, in New York. The emotional maturity of her characters, their frequent arrival at or tragic necessity for spiritual self-reliance (see A Lost Lady, The Professor's House), must be a reflection of their author's real acquaintance with solitude. Miss Gather is nearly 50 now; sociable when she likes; vigorous, cheerful, charming. But more and more she is a recluse who, having had experience as country girl (Nebraska), college girl (Nebraska State), reporter and editor (Pittsburgh Leader and McClure's Magazine), teacher and archaeologist, enough to "last a lifetime" is increasingly a subtle artist after the Wordsworth formula, "emotion recollected in tranquillity."
Smithness
SMITH EVERLASTING — Dillwyn Parrish — Harper ($2). Pippa did not prevaricate; all's well with the world. Here is a story which begins and ends on that vast plain inhabited by the innumerable Smiths that you see in the telephone book, the Chevrolets, the shaving mirror—the moderately comfortable, easygoing, unawakened small-bore men and their fussing, darning, worrying, loving wives. Martin and Emelie Smith are as concerned over the whereabouts of a pet pipe, moths in the clothes trunk, the working of the front door latch, the "niceness" of a family party (the only kind they ever achieve) as they are convinced of the future greatness of their stupid, bespectacled little boy, Martikins. Then, when the pipe turns up, when the latch is post-poned again, the party over, their everlasting Smithness becomes contented retrospect. Martikins emits a flash of adolescent near-greatness, marries a vivid girl, almost becomes a pianist, and the Smiths are hurt, alarmed, until the flash is extinguished. Everlasting Smithness shows now as endless piddling, now as hope eternal. It ends as everlasting Smithness, a vegetable condition as happily comfortable as it is unadventurous. Symptomatic of the prevalence of Smithness are the prodigious sales, not only of romantic fiction for vicarious thrills, but of American Tragedies, dismal Main Streets and kindred counter-depressants. This book, which mirrors Smithness with shrewd, quaint brightness, will never have such sales. It is not among the Smiths' failings to stare at themselves in a looking glass, though they do like going to Coney Island and seeing how awful they seem in the exaggerating panels of the "crazyhouse."