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"There is . . . a curious analogy between Manus society and America. Like America, Manus has not yet turned from the primary business of making a living to the less immediate interest of the conduct of life as an art. As in America, work is respected and industry and economic success is the measure of the man."
Love, even of the unromantic, pagan kind Mrs. Mead found in Samoa, is non-existent among the Manus. Children, like their father, who spoils them, are apt to despise their mother. They are callous about death, birth, the facts of life. Women get no joy out of marriage. Maturity and middle age mean constant debt and hard work. "Above the 35-year-olds comes a divided group—the failures still weak and dependent, and the successes who dare again to indulge in the violence of childhood, who stamp and scream at their debtors, and give way to uncontrolled hysterical rage when crossed."
Anthropologist Mead is no preacher, but her comparative study in anthropology is pointed, needs no extra sharpening.
The Author. Margaret Mead, 28, daughter of Economics Professor Edward Sherwood Mead (University of Pennsylvania), wife of British Anthropologist Reo Fortune, is Assistant Curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Between voyages of anthropological discovery she lives in Manhattan. She has no children.
Odyssey of a Woman
THE DEEPENING STREAM—Dorothy Canfield—Harcourt, Brace ($2).
Author Canfield bends the truism that woman's place is in the home to her own fell purpose. She seems to show that adult life and marriage are indistinguishable, scores many a point but fails to get full marks.
Matey, youngest daughter of a clever, ineffectual professor in a Midwestern college, suffers like her brother and sister from the constant but never recognized warfare between her father and mother. Francis pretends not to notice, Priscilla becomes a terrified invert, Matey says nothing but notices everything. When her father dies, Matey goes to Rustdorf, sleepy Hudson River town, to collect a legacy, meets her distant cousin Adrian, marries him and settles down. But both have lived in France ; when the War comes, both feel a duty to help. They take their children abroad, Adrian drives an ambulance, Matey helps her old friends. When they finally get home again to Rustdorf, middle age has nearly got them, but they are still happy. The Deepening Stream is a quiet book, meanders somewhat, is sometimes a little too limpidly pastoral to be believed, takes you nowhere in particular. But it was a pleasant trip.
The Author. Dorothy Canfield (Mrs. John R. Fisher) lives and writes on a Vermont farm but loves to go to France. Like her hero and heroine, she and her husband took their children to France during the War, did relief work till 1919. In 1921 Mrs. Fisher was appointed a member of Vermont's State Board of Education. She is one of the five judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Other books: The Brimming Cup, Rough-Hewn, Raw Material, The Home-Maker, Her Son's Wife.
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