Tragedy of a Preacher*
THREE STEEPLES—LeRoy MacLeod— Covici, Friede ($2.50).
Everybody admitted John Durken was a good man, a good farmer, had done a lot for the little rural community of Midland; but nobody liked him. He was closemouthed, closefisted, a hard worker, a hard master. He wanted to better Midland, give it a Methodist church, a bank, a grain elevator; but Midland did not want to be bettered, was not really sorry when one day the express train killed John Durken. Son Bruce came back from his Methodist college to be Midland's pastor. Better educated, more articulate a fanatic than his father, he raised more hell in Midland than old John had ever dreamed of or wanted.
Bruce and Myrtle had been engaged be fore he went away to college, but had quarreled because she did not want him to be a minister. Myrtle married her second choice. When she died in childbirth of her first baby, Bruce found they still loved each other, realized too late he might have saved her for himself. Too much a zealot for his easy-going townspeople, Bruce was soon unpopular, obviously doomed to failure. Besides, the town was too small for three churches, would never have had the third if it had not been for old John Durken. In trying to convert the only educated man in Midland, a blind man, an intelligent agnostic. Bruce's simple faith was shaken; but he would not admit it, went his narrow way more feverishly than ever. When he had succeeded in taking the joy out of Ab Carver's happy and occasionally lecherous life, Bruce cheered up. staked everything on Ab's imminent conversion. Then one morning Ab's body was found hanging in the barn: Bruce had driven his simple mind to suicide.
Next day, Bruce's own mind almost unhinged, his Christian faith quite gone, he announced to the blind man his conversion to the Truth of Nature, said he would go out and preach under the trees against all churches. But Midland was spared this final apotheosis. That night an idiot boy set fire to the Methodist church, then hid in a barn. The boy's mother, frantic, thought he was still in the burning building. Bruce plunged in to save the idiot and went to glory in the flames.
The Significance. LeRoy MacLeod considers he has written no diatribe against preachers, says: "I hope no one will find in Three Steeples the profession of my beliefs. ... I have . . . painted a landscape and some people—men and women reading the earth under the quandary of the sky." A long novel, many-charactered, Three Steeples gives a broad, detailed, sympathetic picture of the U. S. Middle-Western rural scene. It is serious, ambitious, not as drab as it sounds.
The Author. LeRoy MacLeod, once an adman like Sherwood Anderson, founded the advertising agency of Waters & MacLeod (Los Angeles), retired from it in 1929 to cultivate the thankless muse. Three Steeples is his first novel, but he has also written a book of verse, Driven, which called forth from his great & good friend Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols, English poet, the statement that MacLeod is "the only United States poet I have known with the 'Hardy' quality."
Poet's Wife