A TRICK OF MEMORY
Merton of the Movies. By Harry Leon Wilson. 12mo. 335 pages. Doubleday, Page and Company. $1.75.
THE patient seeker after causes and effects in American fiction has a pleasant prospect in this novel by Harry Leon Wilson. If his memory goes back ten years he is in for a revelation.
Merton of the Movies is a lightly conceived magazine serial, nearly always diverting, and never stupid; that is something. Briefly, it is the story of Merton Gill, a screen-struck grocer's clerk, who goes to Hollywood and, after starving there, makes a succès fou in slapstick in spite of himself.
Here is a plot requiring some delicacy of handling and offering unlimited opportunities for two commodities not common in American magazine fiction: satire and irony. Satire, that is, for the pictures; irony for Merton Gill. In spite of the fact that he has, for the purposes of comedy, made Merton as near to a half-wit as he dared, Mr Wilson has succeeded with him and, it seems to me, has failed with the pictures. The first film, through the mind of Merton, is a dime-novel, not a picture; Miss Tessie Kearns' passion-drama is better:
". . . so in a moment of weakness he gives himself to Corona Bartlett and then sees that he must break up his home and get a divorce and marry Corona to make an honest woman of her: but of course his wife is brought to her senses, so she sees that she has been in the wrong and has a big scene with Corona . . ."
Yet most of the parody is in the vein of "out there in the great open spaces where men are men" and the other obvious things of the serious pictures—the things which Mack Sennett began burlesquing ten years ago and are no longer fair game.
When Mr Wilson gets into his story he is highly diverting. But with a ten years' memory one looks a little closer. The best parts of Merton of the Movies are the first fifty pages presenting Merton's
