BOOKS OF THE MONTH

...And yet if he dared to and could speak he might find that his hidden world was not as unique or exceptional as he imagines...

...men and women ab-' sonbed in competition for things, motor cars, houses, furniture, rotary clubs, boosters' clubs, all symbols of "practical" success...

...Some, indeed, seem completely to suppress this inner world and to escape from solitary questionings in the outward "busyness" of daily events...

...But there is another world hidden behind this obvious' Main Street, a world which many of us who have lived in small American towns have known, but which most of us have not the gift to interpret...

...Recently I journeyed from Washington, D. C, to New York and Zona...

...Aerial mapping has been proved practical, simple and positively accurate...

...For a good many years now she has been writing about these two worlds in a deeply discerning and untheatrical way...

...He cannot communicate to any one his new sense of life and its processes, If Bernard Mead had been orthodoxly religious, he might have found a terminology which would have been acceptable to the orthodox, But the mystic is seldom orthodox in his own day and generation...

...American artists, philosophers, scientists, and poets confess to such preoccupations to be sure, but, though tolerated, they are regarded as a class apart and it is accepted that their professions render them "unpractical" and a little queer...

...These fifty-two years of "experiences" are but the "preface" to his real life...

...x The doctor thereupon leaves Bernard Mead to go downstairs and confer with the family...

...Bernard Mead is an American business man in the year 1925 trying to relate an adventure of the spirit for which there are no words in our present vocabulary, Perhaps it is an experience that will always lie beyond words and must be communicated through other mediums than words...

...As I turned the last page of the book the conductor called out that New York was the "next station," and the announcement seemed incredible, so completely had Zona Gale's novel anaesthetized my sense of time...

...The expensive and dangerous exploration surveys of the past will soon be replaced with comparatively simple mapping methods, conducted entirely by airplanes...

...Sinclair Lewis' interpretation of America as a collection of Main Streets has been generally accepted as the true and complete view of these United States both in this country and abroad...

...Yet in the eyes of his family and friends he has become "queer"—in fact a "little crazy...

...Andrew Johnson was the first president of the United States to have a bodyguard...

...For that is the rare artistry of the book...

...out at the terrible word "crazy," and then inquire quickly, "Will the neighbors have to know...

...People vaTy enormously, of course, in the relative importance which these two worlds hold for them...

...Here from early childhood till the end we dwell, as it were, in solitary confinement with our deeper preoccupations and questionings as to the meaning of life and our relationship to the universe...

...some will undoubtedly agree with his family's interpretation of Bernard Mead's groping efforts to put into words the ineffable new experiencing of life that has come to him...

...I suspect that this story of Bernard Mead is far more general in its application than most "practical" men or women would be willing openly to admit...

...Few are willing even to admit to others that the inward world exists for them lest their fellow mortals think them "queer" or slightly deranged...

...But it is the way of true understanding and illuminating interpretation...

...They have all forgotten the old register cut through the ceiling from the living room to the bedroom...

...Zona Gale knows the obvious Main Street and can portray it too, but she has the discerning eye and the deeper understanding which can see and interpret the other world that lies concealed behind this obvious exterior...

...Woe betide the practical man of affairs who does not suppress nor conceal his inward world, if he wishes to maintain the confidence of the majority of his associates in his capacities...

...don't you see that...

...Gale's "A Preface To a Life" was my companion...

...The story is laid in the little town of Paquette, Wisconsin, and ranges from 1900, when Bernard Mead is a young man, to 1926, when as Miss Gale says "partitions had come down and period furniture had come in...

...It's as if we have a hundred ways to see and feel, and we're using only one of them...

...men and women occupied with "getting on" materially...

...It is a novel to be read consecutively if one would savour completely the cumulative effect of its portrayal of the inner adventure of this man's spirit...

...This is particularly true in America where the problems of developing a new country have, for several generations, placed the emphasis of life so much on the practical and concrete...

...The importance of aerial mapping became recognized during the war, but for some time after the armistice, the results obtained, commercially, were not up to expectations...

...At the end of the book "the morn of life is past...

...Now, however, the art has been reduced pretty much to a science...

...The author has created living characters—people about whom different individuals will have varying interpretations, each according to his own view of life, according to his own knowledge of the two worlds...

...Several very important surveys are now being made by aerial photography, without the necessity of actually setting foot on the ground to be mapped...

...he has experienced what for many seems a complete life, but from his own point of view, and I suspect from that of his author too, he has only just begun his life...

...Bernard Mead is fifty two...

...Bartolommeo di Francesco ChTistofori, an Italian, invented the piano in 1726...

...To attempt to relate in any detail the outline of this story would be to do violence to the exquisite and subtle art with which Zona Gale reveals her characters...

...Some of the latest work performed by airplane mappers includes a survey of the Yaqui River in Mexico and the Everglades of Florida-places where men had never actually set foot...

...They all believe him crazy—therefore everything he does seems crazy...

...Others will accept the noted alienist's vague suggestions that Mead has had a nervous breakdown, that it is the result of the frustration of his imaginative life in the routine of business and the denial of a spontaneous love relationship through a false sense of duty to the woman he married...

...Don't you see that we don't experience anything but the most commonplace sides of life * * * see only the outside —don't even see that...

...He expects that perhaps his daughter Helen may understand for she has said to her mother, "We'd all seem crazy if anybody knew we were...

...We are, on the whole, more ashamed of openly admitting any preoccupation with philosophical questionings of life's purpose and meaning than are Europeans or Orientals...

...This fear and concealment have given us our American "Main Streets" as interpreted by Sinclair Lewis...

...Readers will differ as to Mead's sanity...

...Her new novel entitled "A Preface To a Life," is the story of the outer and the inner life of Bernard Mead, an American business man of Paquette, Wisconsin...

...The airplane plus the camera made the job easy...

...The alienist whom the family called in when Mead began to talk about things they couldn't understand, talks with him about heredity, asks him if he loves his wife, discusses flights into the unconscious, demands for adaptation, and finally suggests that possibly Mead's disturbed condition is due to a "possible concession to the cruder self . . ." There will undoubtedly be some readers who will agree with Bernard Mead's angry retort of "Good God, whatever it is I see belongs to a self I've never reached to yet * * * not to one I've left behind...

...And Mead lies back on his pillows and laughs, saying aloud: "Good God in Heaven...

...I had forgotten my dinner hour and I should have been less surprised to hear that the next station was Baltimore than that it was New York...

...It is a fascinating and revelatory tale of the conflicts between these two worlds in the life of one outwardly "successful" American lumberman...

...Geologists have already adopted the aerial map in the study of their branch of science...

...However, it is conceivable that if more individuals had the daring and the courage to share their inner worlds we might find ourselves saying "That am I." And what does Zona Gale think of Bernard Mead...

...Bernard overhears the doctor's verdict...

...And, for the reader who likes to probe beneath the seeming surface of things, it is the way of delightful and satisfying vicarious experience through the printed page...

...But Helen as well as the others are the victims of her own wise observation...

...He overhears his wife cry...

...It is not a brief for any one view of life...

...the outward, which we share with others, and which is made up of all the obvious details of daily events, and the inward, solitary world which remains, for the majority of us, mysteriously lonely and incommunicable...

...Read the book and find out—if you can...

...He has loved, married, had children, and been "successful" in business, in other words...

...Can't you see that...

...This way is not the way of "best sellers...

...I tell you something has happened to me that lets me see through—and does it occur to you that I may have hit on something that the whole race is going to know ajbout...

...AERIAL MAPPING AERIAL mapping is rapidly coming into prominence...

...Does she agree with the family and the alienist...

...Perhaps this way of knowing and seeing life can only be comprehended through experience, and the effort to communicate it to others must inevitably bring the verdict of "crazy" on the would-be communicator...