WALDO FRANK'S HOLIDAY
Holiday. By Waldo Frank. 12mo. 233 pages. Boni and Liveright. $2.
THOUGH southern materials make up the body of this novel, the primary approach to it should not be sectional. Rather, one should come to it through the artistic personality of Waldo Frank. This attitude is natural to those who have experienced the author's Rahab and City Block. For these works frankly eschew geographical and naturalistic fidelity in favour of a reality more individual and more essentialized. In like manner, Holiday is first of all a subjective design; it has utilized certain elements of the South because these seemed most suited to its purposes. Hence whatever local or racial truth or untruth the work may contain, must be considered as a purely secondary factor.
The design is stark and clear enough. It is concerned with repression and release, with repression and expression, as consequent and contrasting realities of human life. But the design, as achieved in novelistic form, is dynamic. Therefore it manipulates the effects and frictions of these realities to create its movement and its climaxes.
Frank is too subtle for an arbitrary portioning of repression, in a block, to the whites of the South; for a rigid symbolizing of the blacks as expression. He sees the Negro as free within a very strict oppression. He sees the white—half, respectably restricted, half, frankly-hypocritically loose—compressed by an equally strict free- dom. Each race then, within itself, contains the contrasting elements. And he knows that the Negro often serves as outlet for the pent energies of the dominant race. In contrast with each other, however, it may be said that in this novel the blacks generally represent a full life; while the whites stand for a denial of it. The black church, the white church; niggertown, whitetown, are similarly opposed. This opposition gets its statement in the opening passage: "Sunset at Nazareth. Niggers go home through the copper-glow of pines. Niggers sing home. White men stand lean in the doors of paintless houses. White men stand still." And by
