Crumbs—
A New Novel By The Author of Miss Lulu Bett
The Story. By the death in unexpected poverty of her father, Leda Perrin was left at the mercy of her cousins, the Crumbs, of the town of Prospect. The Crumbs are "good folk who are wicked." They need no description. There are Crumbs everywhere—the intolerable product of the standardization of humanity. They think the same thoughts, eat the same food, do the same things and do them always in groups. A Crumb, finding himself alone in anything would very possibly go mad. They are gross, suffocating vulgarians. Among them are Orrin, the Gideonite salesman, bristling with esprit de corps; Tweet, his wife, "a fair thick being"; Mama Crumb, passive housewife ; Pearl, "a lovely, listless sister, a too mellow fruit"; Richmiel, sleek and perfumed, "whose body had seemed nine-tenths of her being" Grandfather Crumb, old, defeated, hopeless, ignored by the other Crumbs, but rising above them. Leda's defenses were being beaten down by the sheer gross weight of the Crumbs when Barnaby came. He was the divorced husband of Richmiel, and he came to take from her silken clutch their boy Oliver. It was inevitable that Leda should find in the imaginative nobility of Barnaby a possible release. And it was equally inevitable that Barnaby should find in the clear glass of Leda's sensitive beauty the reflection of his need. Richmiel, feline in her jealousies, refused to let Barnaby have his son unless he would go away, leaving Leda behind. He goes. But he comes back, just as the Crumb morass is closing again over Leda's head, and in the end they find happiness in a spiritual union. The Significance. Miss Gale has made her study by taking two extremes, the extremely sensitive and the extremely coarse, and putting the former at the mercy of the latter There is in this book something more than a minute and ruthless picture of Babbitts at play. Miss Gale is more romantic than realistic. She likes to look at the other side of the picture, even though it may be turned to the wall. There is no tragedy here except the unconscious tragedy of the Crumbs. The beauty of Leda and Barnaby, and the "faint perfume" of their love, rises above all the reek and crassness of the Crumb materialism. If anything, Miss Gale errs on the side of the sentimental. She does not allow the Crumbs the inevitable victory of the harsh over the delicate.
The Critics. Dr. Henry Seidel Canby, of The Literary Review, calls Faint Perfume " one of the interesting books in the history of American fiction." Heywood Broun remarks in The New York World: "We do not know any modern novelist who has achieved such admirable compression." Other commentators have protested at the "happy ending." But the book has generally been received as a masterpiece of its kind and as in most respects greatly superior to tne much-praised Miss Lulu Bett.
The Author. Miss Gale was born in 1874. She began in newspaper work first on Milwaukee papers, later on The New York World. Her most successful work heretofore was Miss Lulu Bett, a dramatization of which was awarded the Pulitzer prize of $1,000 as the best play produced in New York in 1920. Her present home is her birthplace, Portage, Wis.