The Fippanys*

Author Barry Benefield Tortures the Inveterate Reader

The Story is pecked out on a wheezy Remington by the long Emergency Man (reporter retained for odd jobs) in the city room of The New York Morning Star. After the last copyreader has gone home, before dawn and the scrubwomen have come, he stays there alone, writing the story of his life. You quickly get the impression that the Long Emergency Man (his name is Jim Pickett) is rather a fine person, very gentle and whimsical, very hopeless, aging, wistful. The staff regards him as a mysterious but beloved failure.

He takes you back to his graduation from a college in Texas and forth upon the moonlit road he chose to follow into the world. Soon you meet the Chicken-Wagon Family, camped for the night by a pine-fringed Louisiana bayou, and thereafter their story and Jim Pickett's are one.

That evening, Jean Paul Baptiste Yvonne Fippany, the chicken-wagon man, had surrendered to portly, black-eyed Mrs. Fippany about going to a town to live. She had long hinted at it (in a quiet voice, sweet as distant bells) and finally, just before supper, openly rebelled. It was because of the child, Addie, of course, not Mrs. Fippany's health at all. And Mr. Fippany surrendered by telling Breaksteel, the beagle puppy, they would give up trading tin pans and cups and gaudy Bibles and lithographs and pain-killers and perfumed hair-kink removers for chickens and eggs and milk and things, and go to the biggest town there was--New York.

Which they all did, by slow stages, Jim Pickett teaching grave little Addie her sums and reading and geography, placing with her, bathing in creeks, he being as much a part of the chicken-wagon family as Breaksteel or Kit and Luce, the mouse-colored mules. They all reached and drove down that old country road, Broadway, jamming traffic for fair as they hunted for a wagon yard, raged at by police-men until late in the rainy night, when kind Mr. Hibbard, a cop from Missouri, showed them into. a deserted fire-engine house.

The Fippanys could not have stayed there long if Jim Pickett had not paid down all his savings at the public auction. After that they lived there always. Mr. Fippany found some trucking to do. Jim got on the Transcript. Addie went to school. Mrs. Fippany took in, not boarders, but "remunerative guests".

The city agreed with Addie--regular hours, meals with green vegetables, sliding down the brass fireman's-pole and running upstairs to do it again. As years went by and she still came and perched on his bed in her nightie to kiss him good morning, Jim trembled to see her French blood fast rounding and ripening her into a woman. The city agreed with Mr. Fippany, too. Long a jaunty gambler, he pulled his hat devilishly over one brown eye and drove about the city, his two mules and a string of ravishing bells marking him for no ordinary junk dealer. He compassed a great coup with 317 second-hand bath-tubs, became a wholesale bargain man with a Long Island City warehouse, and his slogan was known to all the city: "Fippany for Any Old Thing".

Mrs. Fippany fared not so well. On one occasion she nearly died of appendicitis. Before the operation she asked Jim to take Addie as his wife, and Jim promised, with the mental reservation that Addie should choose for herself when she grew up.

Addie had already chosen, with all her young heart; she wore Jim's ring and thought about him every moment. Jim had to thunder at himself to withstand her and make her go to college.

There was a voluptuous and most unscrupulous model among the "guests" Minnie Febber. Unable to seduce Jim, she made a dead set for Mr. Fippany, wealthy now and in his dangerous forties. Jim, always an idler, watched the danger menacing his friends' happiness until it was almost too late. How he acted at the last moment, what he staked, at what odds, and lost, is too finely and poignantly told in the book to repeat here. Suffice it that Jim seems too good to be true and yet is true; and that there is a last chapter, where the Star's scrubwomen come in, which will torture the most inveterate reader of novels between a sob and a smile.

Significance. Stories so simple and unimposing, so "sentimental", as this one are very rarely told in public. When they are they seldom ring true. Sir James Barrie can do them, child that he is. Bonn Byrne's wistful blarney gets astonishing effects. Christopher Morley's vein is more magical; the tail of his kindly eye is almost mystically acute. This Barry Benefield, whom one cannot help identifying with Jim Pickett, seems to have no unusual gifts or tricks. Yet he is quite as irresistible as the others. An unforgettable book!

The Author. Being at the head of his publisher's publicity department, modest Barry Benefield occupies a strategic but embarrassing position. Strategic, because he can refuse to let more be known of himself than that he was born in Jefferson, Tex., went to school and college in "that prodigious state", worked on The Dallas News and The New York Times, had short stories in Scribner's, Collier's and other magazines. Embarrassing, because he is obliged to tout his own work for the good of his employers, and to send out pictures of a countenance, whose ascetic air he would denounce as false-seeming. The embarrassment should end speedily; the work will tout itself. The strategy will soon fail; people will want to known more.

Frown

THE PENCILED FROWN--James Gray--Scribner's ($2.00)--It was penciled on the self-conscious countenance of Timothy Wynkoop, hardly weaned from college and already dramatic critic of The Indian City (Ia.) Leader. It was meant to convey the wearer's enormous intelligence, his artistic nature, his critical acumen. It often appeared when Timothy was planning his "major" novels and was always there when he sat, scornfully dignified, at visiting shows. Gradually it was erased by employers, women and the flopping of Timothy's first play. When the last line disappeared and Timothy became a humble cub reporter, his best best-girl was glad. The doings of the local Hyacinth Club contribute juicy bits of satire on small-town "artiness", but for the most part it appears that the indulgent Messrs. Scribner have given light to an unimpressive autobiography.

*THE CHICKEN-WAGON FAMILY--Barry Benefleld--Century ($2.00).