upon their bones what cunning eyes." And when he notes the rapid growth of Chicago as illustrated by the marks of a lumberman's ax on logs which, once part of an adjacent grove, now remain buried under the debris of a slum district crowded with warehouses, he presents with an economy of means a convincing picture which the tediousness of his later descriptions comes near to obliterating altogether. He phrases graciously his sensitiveness to country scenes, to "the smell of violets beside woodland paths, of little fragile mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the bellies of insects. . . ." Or he shows us an old woman by likening her hands as they hold a mop or broom handle to "the dried stems of a creeping vine clinging to a tree." But these chance felicities although indicative of a certain poetic sensibility in Mr Anderson are mere by-products and do not convey the real tone and temper of his work.
With the possible exception of Poor White one feels that in his Mr Anderson is subject to an ever recurring species of shell shock projects him volte face towards the prickly actualities of life, and in his efforts to regain his spiritual poise he drags one about with him in a cloud of splintering conventions and mysterious clogged desires through passages too cluttered to permit of escape into the clear light of day. Or is it, perhaps, to change our metaphor, as if Mr Anderson in a moment of somnambulism had put to sea in a row boat and being suddenly tipped over in mid-ocean manages to reach shore on a raft, having discovered in his process of escape that he has a soul, and likewise through the loss of his clothes, a body? These two facts he evulgates in his latest novel through many pages to his readers while admonishing them anxiously to help him solve the suddenly reared conflicts which sentiency always deposits at the threshold of adolescence and which only maturity through an informed scepticism can deal with adequately. And it was at this darkest moment of his maimed awakening, so one feels, that, turning to more articulate authors in search of solutions and methods, Mr Anderson permitted his own native talent to become blighted by inattention, to wilt under the glaze formed over it by the betraying phrases, thought processes, and attitudes of others. For surely this author would never have conceived alone the possibility of a mid-Western manufacturer making unmistakable love, "raping" is the word used, to his own daughter.
