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The Author of this encyclopedic work, whereof the wit is second only to the scholarly wealth, is Editor of House and Garden, the sedentary sound of which title he dispels forever with a romantic introductory prose-poem: a series of fadeouts from the motor-clogged highways of today to the first faint trails through the trader's forest.
FICTION
Gopher Tundra
DECADENCE—Maxim Gorky—McBride ($2.50). Freely translated, the pen-name, "Gorki," means "bitter."* But in this study of Russian babbitts, Author Gorky is no Sinclair Lewis. He is impassive and even pitying toward those stupid, acquisitive bipeds—serfs before 1861, small-town industrialists thereafter—whose tendency to "make another America" out of Russia was retarded by 20th Century revolutions. This lengthy history of the Artamonov family, father and sons, rising with their big linen factory to as much power as they can control, then losing it all, is not satire or invective. It is honest, impersonal realism, thoughtful though morose.
Bearlike Artamonov Sr. becomes almost lovable during his invasion of the town of Dryomov, with hia masterful bluntness, self-assurance, genuine humility, faith in work; his crude affection for his sons, his bold carnality. Pyotr, the eldest son, is no less stupid than his father except that he knows he is stupid. His endless wondering about the right and wrong of things is what undoes him. Did he kill the clerk's nasty little boy by accident, he asks himself, or in malice, or to save his own son an evil companionship. He cannot decide that and a hundred other matters. Uncertainty makes him surly and surliness alienates his educated children, hastening their departure and his decline from peasant-bourgeois hardheadedness. One turns out an indolent woman's man. The girl is a prig. The other son, bright and gentle, joins the revolutionaries. They are, as Pyotr was, boys without any family tradition. The seed of their difficulty, as of Russia's, was the so sudden liberation and enrichment of their peasant forbear by his aristocratic master at the Emancipation. The Russian bear did not learn to dance in a generation. In two it forgot how to dig for roots and nourishment.
Author Gorky introduces characteristic figures—the hunchback brother who tries to hang himself for hopeless love, later becoming a monk, then losing his faith; women of various shapes and sizes, uniformly brainless except Pyotr's mother-in-law, who became his father's mistress; a pink-faced carpenter, a philosophizing ancient and that creature as indispensable to a Russian novel as are bobbed hair and bachelors to the Saturday Evening Post—the village idiot. But Author Gorky's powers, however fully displayed here, have produced books that were far more readable than this one. The action and atmosphere of Decadence are typified in a single meteorological description from it: "During the daytime an opal cloud of acrid smoke rose in a column above the earth and at night the bald moon looked unpleasantly red, and the stars, shorn of their rays by the mist, loomed out like the heads of copper nails, while the water in the river reflected the troubled sky and gave one the impression of a stream of thick, subterranean smoke."
Gospel Fiction