BOOKS
A SIGNIFICANT REVOLUTIONARY NOVEL
THE
EXECUTIONER WAITS,
by Josephine Herbst. Harcourt,
Brace.
$2.50.
The title of Miss Herbst's latest novel means, I take it, that the
executioner waits for the great middle class. So many Americans belong
to this class by descent and by income that the implications of
t~is
book
make it one of the most absorbing novels of the season. It is a more
faithful reproduction of our actual experiences during the years of depres–
sion than Sinclair Lewis was for the years of prosperity, since it is free
from the distortion both of satire and of conscious propaganda. It pictures
the progress of impoverishment in the way in which it is coming to most
of us, so gradually that we are loath to admit it. Our incomes are periodi–
cally reduced. The rents from our little properties are so uncertain as to
leave scant profit after increasing taxes are paid. We find it harder to
get new jobs at the same time that we contribute to the support of a larger
number of relatives, most of whom are neither aged nor infirm. The
adage to be thrifty, to labor incessantly and thus guarantee the reward
of a tranquil old age; the old adages no longer work. At this point we
visit our really prosperous relatives, only to find them repeating the advice
and keeping their incomes to themselves. vVe become conscious that class
distinctions are gradually and with a cruelty that is often unrecognized
supplanting the ties of blood once believed so sacred and now generally
functioning in proportion to mutual poverty.
The Executioner Waits
is
the most damaging criticism yet published in the form of fiction of the
theory of capitalistic individualism as applied to the petty bourgeoisie.
But the value of the book is not simply that these sociological reflec–
tions are embedded in it. It is rather that they are embedded in it after
the manner appropriate to fiction as an esthetic medium. Nowhere, to
my recollection, are these statements actually made in the book, but they
lie behind the action of the novel and give form to its accumulation. Miss
Herbst is .writing of the family of Anne Wendell and of those of her
brothers and sisters, her brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and her cousins
and her aunts. It would be impossible for her within the limits of a single
volume to philosophize successfully about the activities of so many people.
Where philosophy intrudes, it is in the conversation of her characters.
For she knows better than most novelists that people do "talk philosophy,"
and better than most propagandists that when they do, it is normally a
generalization of their own experiences with the aid of whatever formal
philosophy in the air at the moment seems to explain them. She has doubt–
less been led to this insight by another shrewd observation from life: that
persons without the leisure of the wealthy actually do find other matters
vital besides sex and recreation and culture. Mr. Galsworthy rarely
82
