BOOKS
THREE URBAN STUDIES
Great writers are generally born in the wombs of great
crises" they reflect all the colorfulness and all the restless
dynamics of the crisis, and the main spring of their work is
their anxiety to find some kind of solution, a consoling
answer to the burning questions of life.
A.
LUNACHARSKY
THE YOUNG MANHOOD OF STUDS LaNIGAN,
by James T. Farrell.
The
Vanguard Press, New York.
$2.50.
ON THE SHORE,
by Albert Halper. The Viking Press, New York. $2.00.
SUCH
Is
My
BELOVED,
by Morley Callaghan.
Charles Scribner's Sons,
New York.
$2.00.
The crisis has changed the center of gravity in American literature.
The milieu of the past decade was rural or provincial; Winesburg, Ohio
and Gopher Prairie were the nodes.
The classic character was that of
the sensitive, sorrowful young Werther in the insensible bourgeois world.
It was a literature of selfconsciousness and though it masked itself in the
naturalist costume it was secretly wed to the romantic idealist tradition.
One thousand nine hundred twenty-nine fractured the world these
young men sought to conquer. It ruffled the complacency of the romantic-
aesthete gesture that was a counterpart of the smugness of the social and
economic perspectives of the bourgeoisie.
The febrile philistinism of self-
consciousness was exposed to the merciless glare of reality; it died. Social
consciousness replaced it; slowly this is settling into class moulds, crys-
tallizing into a purposive probing of the world and its organization.
The three books here under consideration are examples of the
process
rather than the
fulfillment
of this phenomenon.
In varying degrees they
reflect this ferment, they betray the umbilic relation to the naturalist and
romantic traditions, of the past decade. Insofar as they have reacted to
the immediate world they have brought something fresh and powerful
into American literature; where they have not been able to destroy their
yesterdays they have failed.
Their books contain two worlds.
Their
greatest value is in their breathtaking promise. To the writer who will
dare create "a consoling answer to the burning questions of life" belongs
the future.
Farrell has chosen a large and detailed canvas for
The Young M an-
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