THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE
109
delightful fawn who is to be loved and finally relinquished. There are
a few good, simple characters: a sensitive, sympathetic poor-white
father who knows all the ways of bird and beast, a brusque fat mother
who is an infallibly good cook, and some wild, bearded men whose
hearts
are as soft as their manners are uncouth. Naturally, it is a
sentirilental story, for the world it creates is a charmed one: pain
exists,
but there is always an antidote; hardship exists, but there is
not a hint of
m~ry
or squalor.
The Yearling
can be classified as an "escapist" novel, not because
it deals with the past or with an unfamiliar locale, but because it trans–
ports
the reader back to a time in
his
own experience when the father
was an unconquerable and supremely resourceful figure, a kind of
medicine man or rain-maker, who combined potency and accessibility
in
a wonderful satisfying way.
My
Son,
My
Son!,
the best-seller concocted by an English book–
reviewer, also exploits the father theme, but in a quite different way.
Though the greater part of its action takes place before the War, it
is
not one of those anti-macassar novels which specialize in opening
the cedar chest of the past. Written in the first person by a man who
is
supposed to be a stupendously successful English novelist, a sort of
Arnold Bennett, it tells the story of two men who rose from humble
beginnings to stations of wealth and public renown and who try to
give their sons everything that they themselves lacked in childhood
and youth. The first man, the novelist, lacked both love and material
comforts, and he, consequently, showers his son with luxury and in–
dulgent affection. The outcome is unfortunate. The son grows up to
be a cad and is finally hanged for murder. The second man, a gilt–
edged interior decorator of Irish descent; wanted to become an Irish
revolutionary but lacked family encouragement and financial backing;
he, therefore, grooms
his
son to be an Irish rebel, with the result that
the boy is shot in a barn during the Troubles by his childhood play–
mate, the novelist's son, who, in his caddish way, has enlisted after
the War in the Black and Tans. The moral is that no man has two
lives:
if
he tries to mould his son's career to compensate for his own
frustrations, he will be punished for it.
The American reviewers whose opinions are quoted on the jacket
all
speak enthusiastically of this novel's vitality. "Lavish in its sheer
motion and life," says Harold Strauss. "His book is very much alive,"
says Iris Barry. John Cournos goes several steps further. "All of life
is
here," he declares. Certainly, the energy of the book has a great
deal to do with its popularity. It was clearly written at high speed
with a lavish stylistic carelessness. It is full of melodramatic incidents
and highly colored characters. It is a sort of grab-bag into which war,
revolution, business deals, night life, actresses, and sea-captains have
been tossed with small rega:rd for logic or coherence. It does not make
much sense, but, as one of the reviewers quoted above might have
said, it carries you along. The one ingredient it skimps on is sex. The
