Living With Books

...There is that belligerent Coughlinite, Mr...

...What shapes the tragedy??and this is as truly tragic a novel as one can find??is the fact that the heroine is transposed from a world in which her whole being is fulfilled to one in which she is thwarted, incapacitated and destroyed...

...many people can do that sort of thing very well indeed...

...It does, to be sure, present a sociological phenomenon, and it presents it so vividly that the reader is bound to think seriously about the quality of life in contemporary America...

...The book begins in the Kentucky hills, where Mrs...

...Although Clovis is making good money, she does not know how to spend it, and the family is badly clothed and badly fed...

...But Detroit robs her of this, too, and in the most typical fashion??by pressure to mechanize and commercialize her art...

...There is the touching picture of Mrs...

...The whole effect of the novel hinges on the fact that Gertie is a really great character...

...Reluctantly, under pressures she cannot resist, Gertie eventually joins him, and her ordeal begins...

...It may be said that the life of the housing project is rendered in too much detail...

...I have spoken of certain scenes of remarkable dramatic force, but there are scores of lesser scenes that are as carefully observed and as skilfully written...

...A few episodes have an arbitrary air, as if they grew out of some private concern of Mrs...

...The skills that counted for so much in the hills??her deftness with an axe or a hoe or any other kind of farm tool??count for nothing in the city, and she has not the skills that city life requires...

...The first comes when Reuben, the oldest child, runs away: and, though he turns up safely enough at home in Kentucky, Gertie has the bitter knowledge that she has failed him...

...On her own ground, as the first chapter dramatically shows, she is capable of the most decisive and heroic action, and she is as competent in small matters as in great...

...and there is Mrs...

...A housing project in a great city in time of war sums up, I suppose, the most evil aspects of life in our industrial-urban civilization, and Mrs...

...There are criticisms that can legitimately be made of The Dollmaker...

...It is painful enough for her to carve dolls and crucifixes for money, but when Clevis rigs up a motor-driven jigsaw to cut out jumping jacks, she feels degraded...

...The other children "adjust" all too well, and Gertie has the pain of watching them as they increasingly accept values she believes to be false...

...One of my jobs is reading manuscripts for the Macmillan Company, and it was nearly nine years ago that Macmillan sent me the first part of a novel by Harriette Arrow that was then entitled End of the Gravel...

...I don't think so...

...Which of these kinds of life the author prefers soon becomes clear to the reader, but that is not the point...

...But these are not the only evils for Gertie...

...the women of the Kentucky settlement waiting at the post office for their men...

...Arnow depicts them all: the noise, the dirt, the hazards of traffic, the jerry-built houses, the crowding, the lack of privacy...

...But Gertie has never been stronger than in this act of self-abnegation, and her moment of tragedy is also a moment of triumph...

...And then the great Detroit scenes: Gertie at the steel mill when Reuben is missing, the death of Cassie Lou, the destruction of the cherry block...

...There are the several descriptions of the schools??descriptions to dismay anybody with children of school age...

...Arnow's...

...On the whole, however, there is very little of the book that isn't imbued with life, and it is a big book...

...There is the account of a V-J Day in which the joy of victory is overshadowed by the fear of depression...

...She still has, however, one object on which she can expend her creative powers??an unfinished cherry block she has brought from home...

...That she should become, to paraphrase Housman, a stranger and afraid in a world she never made is the more horrible because she has lived in a world of which she was a secure and competent native...

...Daly, who is at some moments a holy terror and at others the best of neighbors...

...Daly poring over the hope chest she has assembled for the daughter who has become a nun...

...There are other strangers in that Detroit world, some of whom think they have mastered it, while others know they haven't...

...There is Max, who is miserable because she has lost a baby and because her husband is a devout Catholic...

...Arnow, it seems to me, has handled a large theme as well as certain highly esteemed writers??esteemed by me among others??have handled small ones...

...There is Mr...

...The Dollmaker describes two kinds of life, both of which Mrs...

...Arnow contributed short stories to such magazines as the Southern Review, and her first novel, Mountain Path, had a succes d'estime...

...The question of large and small is, I know, a thorny one, and I am not going to argue that The Dollmaker deserves special consideration because it is an ambitious novel...

...Her whittling, about which she is outwardly so casual, is, as Mrs...

...Arrow's own life began and where Hunter's Horn was laid, but most of the action takes place in a Detroit housing project??just such a project as Mrs...

...Gertie's tragedy, however, is not a matter of external events but of what happens to her as a person...

...I think The Dollmaker is both big and good...

...Anderson, who is genteel even in her neuroticism...

...The story moves from climax to climax...

...She has an eye for beauty and a creative talent: the skill in wood-carving from which the book gets its name...

...there is no turning back, for there is nothing to turn back to...

...All I am objecting to is the assumption, which I think is prevalent in highbrow circles today, that "big" novels can't be good...

...Arnow skilfully shows us, the most genuine kind of creativity and, as such, a mighty bulwark in her times of trouble...

...Arnow's great achievement is to have recorded so truly, with all its misery and all its grandeur, the ordeal of a human spirit...

...Daly, who would like to believe that he is cock of the walk but finds that the belief comes easier when he has had a few drinks...

...Arnow herself lived in during the war...

...Anderson, a white-collar worker on the make, and there is Mrs...

...Then, after a long interval, she published Hunter's Horn, which sold well but received little attention from the highbrow critics, who presumably dismissed it as being folksy...

...This is the woman who, by force of circumstance, is moved to Detroit just as she is about to achieve the one thing her life lacks??the ownership of a piece of land...

...Clovis, her husband, instead of being drafted, is told to get a job in an essential industry...

...Mrs...

...And there are dozens of fiendishly alert and terrifying children...

...In The Dollmaker, there are many such scenes: the opening chapter, in which Gertie saves her baby's life...

...she is an affectionate and thoughtful mother...

...Arrow knows well...

...There is Whit, who is Clovis's friend and a staunch union man, and there is his wife Sophronie, for whom the strain of Detroit is sometimes too much...

...But without a good deal of detail the effect of density could not have been achieved...

...As for Clovis, his participation in labor violence is a source of fear and anguish...

...When she began writing, twenty-odd years ago, Mrs...

...Callie Lou, the next to the youngest, also fails to "adjust"??a word Gertie comes to hate from hearing it so much from the lips of Detroit schoolteachers??and takes refuge in a world of fantasy...

...I was strongly impressed by these chapters, and in the next two or three years I not only read several versions of the novel, which was eventually published as Hunter's Horn, but corresponded constantly with its author...

...It may therefore be that I am prejudiced in the book's favor...

...When she sacrifices that, her tragedy is complete...

...But there are things she can be afraid of, and the drama of the novel lies in the fact that she is confronted with them...

...A year and a half ago, I was sent the manuscript of her new novel, The Dollmaker, as it neared completion, and again we carried on considerable correspondence...

...But the reader had better be warned that I am not approaching the book in the spirit of utter detachment that is supposed to befit the critic...

...There is, for instance, the first Christmas in Detroit, when Clevis, like a good Detroit husband, gives Gertie an Icy Heart refrigerator and she stands aghast before it...

...Arnow has the rare ability to create a background that is as solid and irrefutable as the hills of Kentucky and, at the same time, to present a succession of unbearably intense and unforgettable scenes, such as the description of the first fox hunt in Hunter's Horn...

...Not only is she a hard worker, strong as a man and a better farmer than many men, including her husband...

...The heroine is Gertie Nevels, a big, raw-boned woman in middle age, the mother of five children...

...I think I am better able to appreciate it because I lived closely with it over a period of time and know something of the author's struggles to do what she wanted to do...

...It would be hard to exaggerate the patient observation, personal anguish and literary effort that have gone into the book...

...Perhaps the same critics will dismiss The Dollmaker as sociological, but they will be making a serious mistake if they do...

...and, being a man who is good with machines, goes willingly enough to Detroit...

...She hates the refrigerators, washing machines and radios that mean so much to her neighbors, and she hates paying for them on the instalment plan...

...And as one watches Gertie go her way, strong and skilful and resolute and joyous, one can only echo the soldier's words...

...She cannot practice the tricks of black-market shopping or cope with the pressure of the sellers of gewgaws and trash and "chances...

...Gertie with the Negro girl on the train...

...At the end of the wonderful first chapter, in which she cuts a slit in her baby's throat to save it from suffocation in typhoid, a soldier who has watched the operation says, "Lady, you can't be afraid of nothing...

...Sometimes, in between the memorable scenes, there are pages in which the effort to indicate the passage of time seems laborious...

...Gertie, unwillingly yielding to the pressure of her children and the neighbors, tries to break Collie Lou of the habit of talking to an imaginary playmate, and in this way becomes indirectly responsible for her death...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS The Tragedy of a Sturdy Country Woman Displaced to an Alien World By Granville Hicks One of the most interesting and moving novels I have read since I have been writing this column is Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker (Macmillan, $5.00), and I do not intend to be kept from saying so simply because I have a special interest in the book...

...But that is only a secondary achievement...

...Max is always asking Gertie for a dream, and Gertie, who knows nothing about the numbers racket, knows a great deal about Max...