Points of View (Sherman)/Where There Are No Rotarians
For the realistic novel which enlarges and quickens our consciousness of the world we live in—especially for the novel in which the characters, setting, and "problems" possess a genuine representative value—I have an almost insatiable appetite. Since the New Year's night when I sat up till two o'clock feasting on Main Street, exulting from chapter to chapter in my sharpening sense of the characteristics of my countrymen, I have read many more or less satisfactory tales of provincial life, more or less inspired by the man from Minnesota; yet few of them have prevented my dropping off to sleep at my customary hour. The fictional gleaners in the small towns have not gone into the field with the gusto of discoverers. They have appeared rather to regard Main Street as a harvest which any industrious writer could duplicate by driving Mr. Lewis's mowing machine along the parkings of any midwestern small town and gathering up the results with an ordinary hay rake. "Yes," one began to mutter, "still another bale of that midwestern hay. The second crop is not up to the first." There seemed to be little more to say about the small town, just now—at least, from the point of view of a satirical intellectual; and Mr. Lewis himself, leaving the mowing machine to rust in Gopher Prairie, had promptly "twitched his mantle blue," and moved upon Zenith, the booming stronghold of the Rotarians.
Then came Edith Summers Kelly with Weeds, and I discovered under the midnight lamp that we hadn't done with the provinces yet, and that the satirical Intellectuals were attempting to dispose of our yokelry and our Rotarians in altogether too summary a fashion. This is another "social study," that is, a picture of an American community from a critical point of view, somewhere outside it. But it is no mere aftermath of Main Street. It is a fresh harvest in a new field. The scene is rural Kentucky. The characters are small tobacco growers. The manners are not those of materialized mid-western "puritans"—New Englanders pushing grimly westward. No; from the first page you feel yourself in the presence of another spirit. A softer and warmer air caresses the cheek. You are touched by a breath of the South. You find yourself in a community of a slower tempo. You are subtly invaded and surrounded by impressions of a certain lovable slackness and leisure and lazy kindliness and hospitality and easygoing humor. Of modern literature, romantic hungers, and scientific curiosity these good people are as innocent as our first parents in Eden. They are not within hailing distance of the rural civilization denoted by the possession of Ford cars and victrola. They are still at the accordion and lumber wagon stage, where they were left by their great-grandfathers, and there is no "drive" in them to indicate that they will ever emerge from it. On the contrary, their old stock is degenerating from intermarriage and excessive childbearing and malnutrition and corn whiskey and too long and too exclusive association with "hawgs" and mules. The community as a whole is slowly falling below its own traditional folk standards—it is running to weeds.
Except in the biting monosyllabic title, this conclusion is not preached at you in any didactic fashion. It emerges with gradual cumulative force as the inner significance of a singularly intimate and vital artistic representation. Of Bill Pippinger's weedy family, one daughter, Judith, receives by the incalculable chances of heredity far more than a Pippinger's share of vital energy, mental and physical. A vivid little jet of passionate animation, she darts out early in the story to rescue a tortured cat from the neighborhood boys: "Naow, then, one of you jes dass come near here an' I'll run this knife right in yer guts! See if I don't!" As Wordsworth so sweetly sings, "the floating clouds," "the stars of midnight"—the various other aspects of holy nature not noted by the poet—"mold the maiden's form by silent sympathy." Eager, fearless, self-reliant, she finds her man when her mating season comes, and together they enjoy a brief period of lively affection and high spirits as they settle upon their farm. Then, little by little, they become serfs of the soil and slaves of circumstances. The heavy routine of daily life beats at them and drags them down. Children, too soon and too many; ignorance of housekeeping and farm management; sickness and ignorance of hygiene; drudgery; crop failure and high prices, and abundant crops and no market; corn bread and salt pork, whiskey and patent medicines; cold and hunger and labor and hopelessness, break them down and wear them out and defeat them. The characters do very little wailing—like sheep before the shearers they are pretty dumb. They feel themselves lapsing into defeat by irresistible processes which they don't understand. They accept defeat with the mild querulousness with which we accept bald heads, false teeth, and old age—as the unlovely but inevitable order of nature.
Neither does the author wail much over her tragedy. I think, in fact, that she is curiously and secretly smiling over it. She is not smiling with the derisive smile of the satirist; her book is full of an intimate but quite unsentimental sympathy with her Kentucky farmers—a sympathy and humor which steadily preserve the narrative from drabness and oppressiveness. She knows that these Kentuckians, unlike Mr. Lewis's hard-shelled midwesterners, are not fit subjects for satire. They are not complacent. They are not impervious. They are not hidebound. They are merely desperately ignorant and helpless. Before they can become proper subjects for satirical comedy, something must be done by a power not themselves; they must be connected by some kind of State road with—Main Street.
I did not unadvisedly begin the discussion of this book by a reference to Main Street and the Rotarians. And one who will take the trouble to read Weeds, Main Street, and Babbitt in succession will find himself willy nilly becoming a sociologist. The three books represent three distinct stages in the "march of civilization"—only the Kentucky community hasn't begun to march. The author of Weeds must forgive me if I state baldly what seem to me some of the more obvious social implications of her book.
First, it strikes me as perfectly obvious that her *. Kentucky community is degenerating precisely from the lack of such efficient internal organization as is effected by an ordinarily intelligent band of Rotarians, Kiwanis, or Lions. Second, it seems obvious that the most serious economic need of the small tobacco growers is some system of coöperative marketing which shall make it more profitable to haul in their crop than to burn it in the dooryard. Third, it is clear that the Kentucky legislators, instead of debating whether the doctrine of evolution should be taught in the schools, had better employ their leisure in devising some means of giving country boys and girls an education in household science and scientific agriculture. Fourth, in Kentucky and elsewhere it will be very profitable for legislators to consider whether scientific birth control or primitive methods of abortion furnish the better solution of the problem of a degenerating physical stock, due to excessive childbearing.
When the rural community has reached the level of Main Street, then we may begin to talk satirically about the "culture" of its inhabitants; then we may begin to ship in carloads of Maeterlinck and Dunsany and Max Beerbohm. But while the rural community remains in the condition so powerfully depicted in Weeds let us quite unabashedly thank God for the Rotarians.