Our Free Country

Our Free Country*

Hoosier Lad Broke, Makes Big Money Out of Women and the U. S. Gov't

The Story. Ralph Dolan was a healthy, handsome young adventurer with a taste for good living, success and light amours. Born and brought up in Indiana, the death of his father left him penniless and he vagabonded around the United States for some years, selling bonds or real estate or fraternity jewelry with equal indifference and success and falling back on odd jobs as a waiter or laborer when broke. He was an easy spender and a rolling stone and his Wander-jahre brought him the knowledge of three things--that he had a certain gift as a smoking-car or pool-parlor raconteur, that he was attractive to women, and that, as he grew older, he wanted some more permanent success than his roving habits offered him.

A comic accident stranded him in Washington in 1912. At first he thought it a very dead town indeed, but his discovery of the Government caused him to change his mind. There was opportunity there. The Government, he saw, had oceans of money to spend, and, being a Government, it was a good deal easier to take money away from it than from any sort of private business, if you were clever and tactful. He decided he must have his finger in that golden pie.

From a mechanical job folding Congressional speeches and putting them into envelopes he became secretary to one Congressman, then to another--a more successful one. Things were booming. Then a love affair cost him his job. He turned to newspaper work and discovered how many anxious organizations and individuals are ready to pay to get their names in the papers and how valuable a young, presentable bachelor may make himself in the incessant social life of Washington. He capitalized both discoveries and soon made connections with a large, conservative, lobbying organization while doing unofficial press agent work for a few semi-prominent personalities on the side.

The war came and he went into the Red Cross as a publicity man. Meanwhile his social life prospered--he met and befriended Gwendolyn Shorts (nee Schwartz), the only daughter of a wealthy Middle Western mother, who was doing her best to " debut" her daughter into Washington society. Gwendolyn's debut flivvered, but Ralph did not. He was canny, waited and won her and her fortune. He had grown a trifle tubby with the passage of years--he would grow more corpulent still, but he had succeeded. The fleshpots were his. He ends, for the present, as Executive Secretary of the National Commercial (lobbying) Association, at a salary of $25,000 a year. Before he dies, one imagines, he will have become so prominent that he may write the story of " his battle for success."

The Significance. A rapid, interesting story, revealing, with satire and veracity, the hidden, unacknowledged mechanics of our governmental machine--centered about a typically American character not much dealt with in recent fiction, the vivacious modern buccaneer who neither saves his pennies nor makes any genuine contribution to the world, but is enormously successful nevertheless.

The Critics. H. L. Mencken: " The first novel of Washington life that attempts to describe genuinely typical Washingtonians and the essential Washington."

The New York Times: "There has never been a truer picture of the practicing American idealism."

The Author. Harvey Fergusson, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1890, went to school there and in Washington, D. C. For the past few years he has been writing feature stories for a Washington news syndicate. Mr. Fergusson's first novel, The Blood of the Conquerors, received high critical praise from various sources.

The Quality of Fancy Light and Airy, She Will Not Yield to the Laborious Wooer

In literature, as in life, the quality of fancy is rare--as rare as radium. A little pinch of golden salt administered to the tail of an invisible bird, it may not be one of the greatest artistic qualities, but it is one of the most inimitable. It cannot be captured by labor. The moth, ferociously pursued, turns back into a caterpillar. And fancy has this attribute of a goddess, that it will not yield to an embrace unless it chooses. Disdainful of heavy-footed wooing, it changes into wind or cloud--into air, most likely, for fancy, of all the elements of the mind, most nearly resembles air.

It seems to come oftener to poets than to writers of prose--poets being supposed to have more air in their composition, warm or chilly, than others. Nor does it seem to be very much regarded, nowadays. We prefer the Real, the Gripping, the Vital--things that fancy prefers to flee. True, Walter de la Mare possesses real fancy--its voice, frail and distinct as the voice of a crystal bell, repeats through nearly all of his work its little ethereal melody. And James Stephens has the fancy of a leprechaun at ease. But who else, among the writers of our day, has captured it?

Most of our American writers have lacked fancy--which is no extreme disparagement for, as was said, it is not a necessary attribute of genius. Herman Melville could display, at times, a somewhat iron fancy with rather more of grandioseness and terror in its fibre than genuine fancy admits. Hawthorne knew fancy, often a gloomy fancy but sometimes true. Emily Dickinson achieved a cryptic fancy--a Japanese cricket in a cage of bamboo. But few, if any, of our more regarded contemporaries seem to have fancy at all. Humor and wit and satire they can attain--but not fancy. Where the Blue Begins had a certain air of it, but it is not condemnation to say that the fancy was hardly full-grown.

Sometimes, beneath the flood of reality under which we move and breathe like creatures perpetually condemned to a brisk, incessant, cold shower, one could wish for more of this quality--for the touch, light as shaken pollen, of its idle, inconsequent gayety--the accent of its clear, small flute. But the door into its particular domain, through the books of our day that we read, no longer stands ajar.

Rupert Hughes

An Articulate and Well-Colored Encyclopedia

Few authors have been successful at the business of creating motion pictures. This may be for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the present legendry and technique of the moving picture is partly blamable. Rupert Hughes, however (whose Souls for Sale was the recent nine days' talk of Broadway), has proved to be exceedingly able in the Hollywood studios. He not only writes his stories and his scenarios, but he directs his pictures.

Rupert Hughes, short, stocky, quick in his movements, almost jumpy, has an unusual store of nervous energy and mental vitality. His life has been a succession of quick successes; but these have been backed by tremendous effort. After his regular college course at Western Reserve University he took an M.A. degree at Yale, There are dozens of successful novels to his credit and at least a half-dozen plays, among them the markedly successful Excuse Me. He has an extraordinary memory for facts and to talk with him is almost like talking to an articulate and well-colored encyclopedia. His ability to create things is due in large measure to his absolute belief that whatever he is doing is worth while. The moving pictures to him are a new art. He is proud to be one of those associated with the early development of this art. That his pictures have been in the eyes of the critics more popular than artistic does not worry him greatly. Here the business of writing is at its most efficient. Rupert Hughes has been hailed by some critics as a fine writer of the realistic school.' Others have patronized him as a popular author of sensational novels. The truth lies, perhaps, somewhere between the two. He has the art of being able to tell a story well. He has a sense of the details of life. He does not always write his best. Who does ?

The new Rupert Hughes novel is called Within These Walls. It is the story of a house and the many happenings within it--the story of how a family fought for generations to preserve the outward respectability of its home, only to have it flooded by the onrush of the water which destroyed towns and valleys and hills at the birth of the great Croton water system above New York City. It is the romance of this great engineering feat that led Mr. Hughes to make it the focal point of his novel. Flooded towns, broken walls, rushing waters! What a movie! J. F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books most in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion.

A POCKETFUL OF POSES--Anne Parrish--Doran ($2.00). A delightful first novel, intelligent, humorous and civilized, concerned with the first twenty-odd years or so of the life of Marigold Trent, whose " guiding impulses " were " politeness and a feeling for the dramatic." She posed to herself, her relatives, her suitors, her friends, her husband--always charmingly, always quite believing the pose of the moment--and nearly always getting herself and all around her into bushels of trouble. The ingrained human fondness for self-dramatization has seldom been more ingratiatingly described than in this charming and sometimes poignant comedy of the impulses and poses of a highly attractive young American.

THE SEVEN CONUNDRUMS--E. Phillips Oppenheim--Little, Brown ($2.00). Two young men and a girl, partners in a wandering amateur-vaudeville act, meet dismal failure and are rescued by a polite and cryptic gentleman who " buys their souls," or their services, for a year, for adequate bread-and-cheese. They follow his instructions blindly through a number of exciting adventures, never quite sure until the denouement whether they are working for a master-criminal or Scotland Yard. A slight love story binds the unrelated incidents together and Mr. Oppenheim proves as ingenious a contriver of puzzles as ever.

THROUGH THE WHEAT--Thomas Boyd-Scribner ($1.75). The experiences of a squad of Marines in general and Private William Hicks in particular during certain events of the Great War. Somewhat reminiscent of Barbusse's Le Feu in its general plan, this book presents a series of sharp, vivid scenes with remarkable fidelity. It is not propaganda, though it is touched with irony and bitterness--the tone of the narrator is almost detached--and the impact of its succession of unretouched pictures is very powerful indeed. A notebook of experience rather than a novel, it is consistently truthful, and unlike many " war books," it has no axe whatever to grind.

SUZANNE AND THE PACIFIC--Jean Giraudoux--Putnam ($2.00). Extremely well translated by Ben Ray Redman, this fantastic tale is about-well, practically nothing at all. True, there is a heroine, and she is shipwrecked and lives for years on a desert island, and at last is rescued and returned to France--but all that doesn't particularly matter. What matters is the manner of telling the story, a manner saturated with light and grace; humorous, delicate, magic and absurd.

*CAPITOL HILL--Harvey Fergusson--Knopf ($2.50).