Middle West-American Heartland
WILEY, MARGARET L.
Middle West—American Heartland Review by MARGARET L. WILEY ttSK STREAM AMD PRAIRIE: WU-0HUM and Minneeota in Profile. New Yerk', Alfred A. Knopf. 312 payee. JvfoST readers approach a book on any...
...It may sound heretical, but the art of story-tailing, an ancient and noble art, haa in cur day been left almost exclusively to pul-peteers and writers of serial stories for the "slicks...
...Perhaps that Is why they preferred to discard narration altogether...
...Virginia Woolf belonged to the school of modern novelists who have found it necessary to "cease to tell stories...
...In eschewing narration, our Intellectual novelists, with very few exceptions, have sacrificed wholeness and powsr...
...Public Affaire Prre...
...31$ pp...
...What will no doubt happen is that the stereotype will merely lie moved south and east and fitted over Indiana and Illinois until •Ome writer with comparable insight • rises lo salvage these states, too...
...JvfoST readers approach a book on any .f the forty-eight states with about as auM-h enthusiasm as they brine...
...Whoever may have taken the flat prairie seen from a train window for a symbol of equally flat souls of Middle Westerners will need to revise his opinion after reading this book...
...Haicourl, Brace and Company...
...In spite of an air of cautious and judicious appraisal, it ia clear that Mrs...
...The little book rattles you, which is its purpose...
...I missed a more precise description of the feudal state before the Americans opened the doors and of the following transition period...
...One Korean in every ten haa' fled to the hills and slipped across the border...
...It does not say so, it speaks only of the Japanese kind, but it is so damned symptomatic for all kinds...
...But there is store to it: it grow* in the last few chapter* to an accusation against all im-, penalism...
...this has the advantage of defl-niteness, but also the disadvantage of sometimes smothering her own statement...
...The one 'defect which intrudes upon the smooth flow of the narrative is the author's obsession with literary allusions...
...The two skeletons in the closet—the muddy Mississippi and the extremes of climate—James Gray takes in his stride and does his best to make a joke of or to rationalize...
...Mrs...
...to a travel movie...
...consequently the volumes they have produced arc not something hermetically sealed aad labeled "travel" or "geography...
...The fishermen are required to turn over their catch to tho authorities...
...It also means that through at least the first half of the book the reader continually marvels at his good fortune in having found a writer relating the history and analyzing the character of an important section of America and at the same time Writing imaginative and well-ordered prose...
...Woolf nor any other member of tho coterie of "ten sitives" to which she belonged has had the patience to subdue a chaotic rec*rd of living to the demands of narration...
...Bennett is a great admirer of her subject and while no student of the modern novel can dispute the importance of Virginia Woolf's contribution, it is equally clear that Mrs...
...Those who recognize the sources are annoyed, and those who do not recognize them must feel that a mannered and unnatural note has been struck in an otherwise limpid and appropriate style...
...Throughout the peninsula 86 percent of the family income is spent for food...
...Bennett's admiration carries her farther than some might wish to go...
...For it seems to us that the Mississippi is the great essential river, created after some rationale of rivers had been carefully worked out...
...Fishing for oneself is prohibited...
...Foreword by Syngman Rhee...
...Review by BKYLUON FA6IH VIRGINIA WOOLF: HER ART AS A NOVELIST...
...Of 260,000,000 bushels of rice produced, annually 45 percent is exported to Japan...
...They rang* from a dramatic arrangement of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" (by the compiler, whose hand may be seen benea.th other pseudonyms) through' haunted houses and ghost stories to moral lessons in dramatic form like Daniel Reed's "Falsa Alarm...
...Will their independence again be treated as a bargaining point at a conference table...
...Full justice is done to the industries ajid the scenic wonders of this legion, but in addition the careers of its outstanding sons and daughters are sketched, from thinkers like Thorstein Veblen and Frederick Turner to progressive politi-cisns like Victor Berger and Robert LaFolleite...
...This Is a good book for clubs and eatnp...
...200,000 were arrested, not less than 7,000 were killed...
...Novels: Narration or Record...
...Nor are the arts neglected, their practitioners ranging from Joseph W. Beach and Sinclair Lewis to the Lunts at Ten Chimney and Frank Lloyd Wlight at Taliesin...
...The allied powers of 1918 failed them, because the Japanese be longed to the Allies...
...She admits that tho later method employed by Virginia Woolf resulted in a series of episodes rather than parts of a whole, that, ultimately, the reader's attention "is dissipated end diffused," yet the is unwilling to admit K. M. Forter's claim that Mrs...
...Bennett presents tha case far Virginia Woolf quietly and Interestingly...
...1.60...
...Raining, exciting,' amusing," the preface calls them...
...In a way, they have enlarged the novel form...
...The result has been pages of beauty and Illumination, but, too frequently, volumes of dullness and tedium...
...It is valuable as an expotition of Virginia Woolf's aims and methods and interesting as a disclosure of the reactions of one thoughtful and sensitive reader to Virginia Woolf's novels...
...somewhere between, tho novel has become s document, a case history, a record, and has ceased to be a, story...
...Theirs hss boon the art of the psychologist and the science of the novelist...
...But this, after all, is a defect of the book's virtue...
...James Cray has made use of a sensitive and literate imagination in organising aad telling ihe story of Wisconsin and Minnesota from the days of explorers tad traders through the middle period of hWastrial expansion and social experi-aaentation to their present-day emergence from the cloud of isolationism...
...Her little book should serve as an excellent Introduction not only to Mrs...
...By Joan Bennett, New York...
...160 page: $2.00...
...YOUNft MYSTIttfS TWENTY NON-ROYALTY MYSTERY PLAYS...
...2.60...
...Neither Mrs...
...That Cray is a novelist and a teacher of creative writing means that greater than usual attention is paid to the literary tribe — novelists, critics and scholars — of the two states...
...He runs the gamut from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot...
...and there is variety snough for all young groups...
...but in many other ways they have narrowed it down to subjective glimpses, fleeting momenta, moodt, snd isolated episodes...
...bat are an integral part of the best esatemporary writing and thinking...
...HeRE, for tho first time, It a gathering of short mystery plays which amateur groups may freely perform...
...They have, instead, tried to record what life feela like to human beings...
...Woolf's "beings . . . are less memorable than the persons in other great works of fiction...
...The tone of the book is set by a remark of Bernard de Voto that the Middle West is "the American heartland...
...New York: (Sreenherg, 1946...
...86 percent of all capital invested in commerce is owned by Japanese...
...1946...
...They expect the book to da a eioss between a Baedeker and the pablieatkms of the Chamber of Commerce, without any %f the latter's attractiveness and with an appeal chiefly t« residents of the states described...
...To read Pine, Stream and Prairie is to implement Whitman's and Sandburg's fsith in the glory an ihe destiny of America...
...It reads like a very simple sympathetic account of a nation's desire te b* independent again...
...Woolf's novels but also to tho aims and methods of the modei n novel — or a significant branch of it—in general...
...Ihe situation reminds one of Charles l.amh, who said he could never hate anyone he had ever met...
...Because there are in ?he heads of people, who have read about Korea, certain misconceptions which partly from Japanese partly from missionary sources describe the Koreans as a quaint superstitious lot, living tradition-bound, and unable to cope with the impact of the outside world...
...With admirable objectivity, the author defends this thesis by leading his readers through a vast panorama of geography, people, work, play, thought, art and social life of the two states...
...T*HIS little book is sn intelligent study «if a very subtle novelist...
...Some figures in the book are stagger-lag in their implications: There are spproximately 3,000,000 farm families in Korea, with an average of three acres to a family...
...30.000,000 population...
...Meeting Wisconsin and Minnesota under the sponsorship of James Cray means that they can never again be just a couple of states between Chicago and the West Coast...
...Perhaps it will bo followed by another that should bo eagerly awaited: a collection of adult mystery plsys...
...They are, because they are often too many, and because w* live too short a time with any of them...
...Writers of the Knopf series, "The Aran-, lean Scene," have bi ought to their task the equipment of scholars, teachers, ¦avelists, poets and journalists...
...Theirs is tho oldest government in exile, which is hacked by all Koreans...
...J. T. 8...
...Ia it surprising that these people want to lie free...
...Bennett's own method is that of proving her points by means of copious quotation from tho novels...
...The Mississippi ais what a river should be...
...Korea Fights for Independence Review by ftOlffftT KK GKAN MORE A. By Robert T. Oliver...
...Compiled by M. Jagendarf...
Vol. 28 • December 1945 • No. 49
