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Baskett Major professor \T n , Date ..ovember 10, 1967 O~169 ABSTRACT THE FICTIONAL WRITINGS OF HERBERT QUICK by Carl L. Keen Once recognized for his writings (and even cele— brated for some of them) as well as for his work in the Federal Farm Bureau, Herbert Quick (1861—1925) is all but forgotten today. His writings, nonfiction as well as fiction, have been out of print since 1925. The central question is, should the fiction of this political figure and writer from Iowa continue to be neglected? In order to answer this question, the present dissertation does what has not been done before. It conducts a systematic chronological examination of all twelve of Quick's fictional books: In the Fairxland 9: America (1901), Aladdin a go; (1904), Double Trouble (1906), The Broken Lange (1907), Virginia of the Air Lanes (1909), Yellowstone Nights (1911), The Brown Mouse (1915), The Fairview Idea (1919), fig Have Changed All That (1921), and the "Midland Trilogy" which was celebrated in Quick's own day--Vandemark's Folly (1922), The Hawkexe (1923), and The Invisible Woman (1924). In addition, this dissertation draws upon Quick's nonfictional books and articles, his Carl L. Keen correspondence, and various other materials that shed light on his fictional writings. The principal findings of this comprehensive survey are that Quick's fiction was indebted to other authors (notably Robert Louis Stevenson, in Double Trouble; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry George, in Thh Broken hghhh; Geoffrey Chaucer, in Yellowstone Nights; Mark Twain and Moses, in Vandemark's Egllx; and Moses, in all) and that Quick was repeatedly concerned with the problem of the American identity. The typical hero of Quick's fiction is an innocent youth, but often this youth lacks a clear sense of his philosophical or occupational identity. In most of the pro-Trilogy works, set in twentieth-century America, Quick's hero is befuddled by the major issues of capital- istic individualism vs. socialistic cooperation, and the city vs. the country. The lack of a clear identity for the hero-~in addition to Quick's awkward mixture of literary realism and melodramatic romanticism, and his enthusiastic but undisciplined use of other authors-—kept these early works from being reprinted. It was not until he wrote Yellowstone Nights (1911), which is a coherent work of fiction and the only pre-Trilogy book that should command the interest of literary critics today, that Quick clarified what he believed was the proper American identity. In this exceptional work and in the two semifictional books which followed, $22.§£EEEMMEE§2 (1915) and The Fairview Idea (1919), Quick made clear that the Carl L. Keen farm was the appropriate place for his youthful, innocent, Adamic hero, for on the farm this American hero should have no fear of the sophistication which Quick associated with the seductive capitalism of the wicked city; on the farm the American would pursue a pragmatic and agricultural education, cooperate with his fellow farmers in a social— istic manner, and thus retain his original simplicity and innocence, next to God-given nature. Like the Unfallen Adam in Genesis, Quick's farmer hero would dress and keep the Garden. After identifying the ideal American as the agri— cultural Adam, Quick turned from twentieth-century America (the setting of all his fiction up to 1921, except the Russian novelette he co—authored, fig Egg; Changed All Thgt) to write his most distinguished work, a trilogy recon— structing his American past, in order to interpret the origins and also the development of the American experi— ence, as it was reflected in the history of his own life and region. Quick's Iowa Trilogy tells the three—part story of Adam as given in the Scriptures. First, there is the account of the Unfallen Adam, Cow Vandemark; second, the Falling Adam, Fremont McConkey; and third, the New .Adam, Christina Thorkelson. It is a challenge to recall any other single work in American fiction which presents such a full and coherent account of the American identity derived from the Adamic myth. Carl L. Keen The present dissertation concludes that although Quick must remain a minor writer he is nevertheless a significant and useful one. Quick is precisely that kind of writer—-in the tradition of Emerson's party of Hope, an Adamic writer—-who, as R. W. B. Lewis said, "has been frowned quite out of existence“ during the middle of the skeptical or pessimistic twentieth century but who still offers, to those critics who seem to be transfixed by the wasteland, “opposite possibilities on which to feed and fatten."1 Thus, if for no other reason than Quick's presentation of the Adamic American story in the Midland Trilogy-—a work which can be a standard to understand and appreciate other writers of fiction (major or minor, pessimistic or optimistic) who have drawn upon the Adamic materials in a less complete, less coherent, or less parallel manner--the fictional writings of Herbert Quick deserve a reconsideration. _ 1The American Adam (Chicago: The University of Chacago Press, 1955), pp. 195-196- THE FICTIONAL WRITINGS OF HERBERT QUICK By ,& Carl L? Keen A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1967 CLtSQWT 3-3-93 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any research project is indebted to a community of persons, and the present dissertation is no exception to the rule. I have tried to indicate this indebtedness in the bibliography. In addition, I wish to extend special thanks to my guidance committee, Professors Sam S. Baskett (Chairman), Elwood Lawrence, and C. David Mead. I feel especially grateful also for having had the good fortune and privilege of interviewing Mrs. Raymond N. (Margaret Q.) Ball, the daughter of Herbert Quick. ii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter I. SQUIRREL TRACKS IN LITERATURE, 1901—1906 la the Fairyland 2: America Aladdin g Co. Double Trouble II. NOVEL AND ROMANCE, 1907—1909 . . . . . . The Broken Lance Virginia 2: the Air Lanes III. IN QUEST OF FORM AND PLACE, 1909—1921 . Yellowstone Nights Thg Brown Mouse Thg Fairview lgga [Vegas—LChanedAiLw IV. RETURN TO THE PAST: THE MIDLAND TRILOGY, 1922—1924- I I I I I I I I I I I Vandemark's Folly The Hawkeye The Invisible Woman C ONCLUS ION I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I B IBLIOGRAPHY I I I I I I I I I I I I I a I I O I Page ii 10 .44 . 78 128 INTRODUCTION Once recognized for his writings (and even celebrated for some of them) as well as for his work in the Federal Farm Bureau, Herbert Quick is all but forgotten today. All of his writings, nonfiction as well as fiction, have been out of print since his death in 1925.1 While few could deny the im— portance of his work in the Farm Bureau, which many of his nonfictional writings did so much to found and establish,2 1Momentary reprints were (1) the nonfictional Ameri- can Inland Waterways (1909), which is named in the Cumulative Book Index, World List of Books in English for January- September, 1937, and (27—the fictional The Hawkeye (1923), which was reprinted during World War II in a paperback, minus illustrations but in full text, by the Armed Services Edi- tions, Council of Books in Wartime, Inc., a nonprofit orga— nization in New York. A copy of this paperback edition of The Hawkeye is in possession of Herbert Quick's daughter, Mrs. Raymond N. (Margaret Q.) Ball, 45 Elm Lane, Rochester, New York 14610, among various other papers there which will hereafter be cited as the Quick Papers. 2On the semicentennial anniversary of the passage of the Federal Farm Loan Act which created the Bureau, Quick's name was not recalled but the work which he more than anyone else started received proper recognition; in "Land Banks Credited for US Farm Growth," The Milwaukee Journal, Sunday, July 17, 1966, Part II, p. 10, cols. 4-5, it was observed that the Federal Farm Loan Act made it "possible for a man in agriculture today to increase his productivity nearly 400% in half a century," that the twelve banks (which Quick organized) have in fifty years "extended loans of more than 12.5 billion dollars to more than two million farmers," that "these banks, perhaps more than anything else, gave respect— ability to farm lending," and that the "original intent of the law" (farmers being able in time to pay back the Federal money used to start the banks and to own the banks them— selves on a cooperative basis) has been successfully ful- filled. 1 2 the significance of his fictional writings has been left in doubt. In fact, no comprehensive survey has ever been given of these writings. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to conduct such a survey of his twelve fictional books, in an attempt to assess his importance as a writer of fic— tion. Because Quick is not widely known and because his biography plays an obvious role in his fictional writings, it is necessary to begin with a review of the main facts of his life. A product of pioneer stock,3 John Herbert Quick was born October 23, 1861, on a small farm in Grundy County, near Steamboat Rock, Iowa, the son of the second marriage of both his parents, Martin and Margaret (Coleman) Quick.4 Herbert spent his boyhood on the farm, where he did his share of the family's work despite having been stricken with poliomyelitis,5 but he was not destined to stay there. 3"I come of a race of humble pioneers," Herbert Quick wrote, "We are of the Rondout Valley Dutch, who re— fused to go on up the Hudson into the domains of the Patroons, but filed off by the left flank and went up to Rondout Valley, and over the divide into New Jersey, and across the Delaware into Pennsylvania. I suppose that cele— brated or notorious Indian fighter Tom Quick was one of us. We plunged into the forest away back before the Revolution, and kept ahead of civilization until it overtook us in Iowa, where I was born." Letter of H. Quick to F. F. Van de “Eater, April 28, 1924, in the Herbert Quick—Bobbs—Merrill jPapers (Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana); hereafter ci:ted as the Bobbs Papers. 4The marriage of Martin and Margaret produced three dauighters and one son: Stella, John Herbert, Margaret, and Hialen. Counting the children from Martin's first marriage, IIeIfloert had a total of four brothers and four sisters. 5Herbert Quick was not quite two years old when he corrtracted infantile paralysis, a disease that crippled 3 While still a farm boy, he became a certified county school— teacher, and he taught fourteen years (1876—1890) near the area of his birth, ending this career as principal in Mason City. Then he became an attorney—at-law in Sioux City (1890—1909), his most noteworthy case being his successful prosecution in 1896 of the Woodbury County "boodlers" (grafters). The high mark of his Iowa days was his term as reform mayor of Sioux City in 1898-1900.6 As the century turned, Quick, failing to become a supreme court judge, gradually turned away from state poli— tics and also from his law practice, which he continued on a diminishing part—time basis until 1909, and more and more toward a career in writing. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Quick published several works, both fic- tion and nonfiction, but it was not until he became the editorial writer and director of Egrm and Fireside (1909- 1916) that he achieved national importance. It was a di— rect result of his active and influential interest in both his feet; for the rest of his life he had to have his shoes especially made, but the disease did not prevent him from walking, normally except for a pigeon—toed effect. Personal interview with Mrs. Raymond N. (Margaret Q.) Ball, in Rochester, New York, April 6, 1966. 6The details of the nineteenth—century part of Quick's life are given in Qng Man's Life, an autobiography published posthumously in 1925. This book does not, how— ever, treat in detail Quick's careers as attorney and mayor; the best sources for these careers are some of his coruespondence and an article written by one of his news— paper friends, Jay Darling, "Herbert Quick: The Man and This Work," Des Moines Register and Leader, August 30, 1908, p. 1. Instead, Qng Man's Life concentrates on the details of Quick's boyhood and youth in Iowa. 4 American agriculture that President Woodrow Wilson appointed him in 1916 to an eight—year term on the first Federal Farm Loan Bureau, a position from which Quick resigned in 1919 (when the Bureau's function was well established) in order to devote more of his time to writing, particularly fiction. Thus, like other Americans who lived during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Herbert Quick tried various occupations. This fact immediately suggests a search for identity——a search that did not take place so much during the early nineteenth century and before, when, for example, a farmer's son was more than likely to carry on the family occupation and even to stay on the same farm land. In Quick's case, the search took him to various parts of the nation, from Iowa to the Alabama coast (where he built some cabins to support a land claim) to the editorial office of Fagm and Fireside in Ohio, to Indiana (where he frequently met with his publisher, Bobbs-Merrill), to West Virginia (where he conducted horticultural experiments on the farm he purchased and named "Coolfont"), to his office in Washing- ton, D. C., and, in a sense, back to Iowa. During the last several years of his life he was in considerable demand as a public speaker in the United States in places as far apart as New York and Texas.7 Quick's search, typical enough, gains significance through its typicalness as it sheds light 7It was during a speaking tour that Quick suffered his final heart attacks, at the University of Missouri, May 10, 1925. Thg Columbia Missourian, Monday, May 11, 1925, p. 1, col. 2. 5 on the problem of the American identity during the time in which he lived, particularly since the fictionalized version of this quest for his identity as an American is the staple of Quick's fiction. A year before he died, Herbert Quick was recognized by Syracuse University in a way that in summing up his varied significance offered a contrast to the near oblivion into which he fell so soon thereafter. In 1924, the cita— tion read: We welcome you, Herbert Quick, as a successful teacher, lawyer, civic leader and editor; a success— ful administrator also in both national and inter— national spheres of service during the World War; we welcome you as one of our own, already asso— ciated with our University by marriage to one of its alumnae; we welcome you as the nearest of kin to Jacob Vandemark; and in recognition of your significant and permanent contributions to American literature; I admit you to the degree of Doctor 2: Letters and invest you with all the rights and privileges appertaining to that degree.8 Quick's significance could then, in 1924, be broadly cate— gorized as cultural and literary. The present investigation focuses on the possibility of the suggested "permanent" significance of Quick's fictional writings, but it bears in mind the inescapable relationship between literature and culture. Writing about his contemporary American culture was more than a passing concern for Herbert Quick. In addition to hundreds of articles-~for the 8Letter of January 11, 1966, from James K. Owens, Archivist, Library, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13210. 6 Newspaper Enterprise Association and the Scripps—Howard Newspaper Alliance and for such periodicals as World's prh, Reader, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, Saturday Evening EQEE’ and EEEE ghg Fireside——Quick wrote, during the last twenty—five years of his life (1900-1925), a total of eighteen books. Four of these books are nonfictional: American Inland Waterways (1909), Oh hphpg phg Eppd §Ql£ Ehpph (1913), Fppp (1924). Twelve of them are fictional: Ih phg Fairyland pf America (1901), Aladdin h 92; (1904), Double Trouble (1906), The Broken Lance (1907), Virginia pf the Air Lanes (1909), Yellowstone Nights (1911), Th3 hpphh Mphsp (1915), Thg Eggh— yggh ngg (1919), WE Hgyg Changed All Thgp (co—authored with Mrs. Elena Stepanoff MacMahon in 1921, published in 1928), Vandemark's Fplly (1922), Thg Hawkeye (1923), and Thg gh- visible mehh (1924). One is dramatic, Thgpg Camp Twp megh (1924), and one, ghg MERLE high, is subtitled "An Autobio— graphy."9 All these works have been considered during the 9Herbert Quick has also been accepted as one of the two co—authors of Mississippi Steamboatin': A History pf Steamboating 2h phg Mississippi ghd Ips Tributaries (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1926). However, Quick's daughter, Mrs. Raymond N. (Margaret Q.)Ball, stated unequiv— ocally that his son, Edward Connell Quick, wrote all of this 'book by himself; letter from Mrs. Ball, March 15, 1966. lWoreover, in a letter of May 24, 1966, Edward stated, "in re IMississippi Steamboatin'": This book was originally suggested by the publisher. My father agreed that he would go over a book written by me and make corrections if necessary. My father died while I was in New Orleans looking for local color. Later I asked the publisher if I should write the book. The reply was affirmative. I wrote the book complete. 7 preparation of the present paper, but the central question with which the present paper deals is, should Quick's fic— tional writings be neglected? All of this is not to say that Quick has been abso- lutely forgotten since 1925. From time to time his name has cropped up, but, as a glance at the bibliography of this dissertation will show, this posthumous recognition has been practically limited to the state of his birth, Iowa. On July 4, 1933, for instance, a "Program for the Dedication of the Herbert Quick Memorial Schoolhouse"1O appeared in Grundy Center, the schoolhouse being dedicated in memory of Quick's identity as a rural teacher. A few brief articles on Quick have appeared in the magazine of the State Historical Society of Iowa, Thg Palimpses . Only two studies of any considerable length have ever been written on Quick, and both of these are master's theses at the State University of Iowa, done The contention that Edward was the sole author of the book is also supported by what Mrs. Lucille Cobb (Head, Special . Materials Department, The University Library, University of Missouri), in a letter of January 14, 1966, called "the only local newspaper account of . . . the death of Mr. Quick," an account which included the following: "A son . . . is trav- eling on business somewhere between St. Louis and New Orleans, and has not yet been reached"; Th3 Columbia Missourian (pub- lished by the School of Journalism, University of Missouri), .Monday, May 11, 1925, p. 1, col. 2. The testimony of Mar— garet and Edward, the whereabouts and activity of Edward at the very time of his father's death in 1925, the publication date of the book (1926), and, equally important, the lack of any evidence in Herbert Quick's correspondence to indicate that he was even contemplating such a book—-all this should 'be taken to credit Edward C. Quick as the sole author of Atississippi Steamboatin'. 10This "Program" is in the Quick Papers. 8 forty—one and twenty—seven years ago, respectively. The first of these M. A. theses is Clara Ellen Speake's "A List of Dialect Terms from the Works of Hamlin Garland and Herbert Quick" (1926). Although Miss Speake's paper can hardly be called a comprehensive study of the sub— ject, for she only listed about 200 terms from seven of Quick's books,11 this eighty-one page document is neverthe— less a suggestive contribution about one aspect of Quick's importance. The other M. A. thesis is Geneva Waters' "Herbert Quick: Social Historian of the Middle West" (1940). As its title indicates, this 117-page report recommends that Quick, in his late fiction (the "Midland Trilogy") and in his th MERLE high, be remembered as a witness—recorder of what actually happened in the Middle West of the 1860's through 1890's as far as social affairs are concerned. With her special interest in discovering historical facts, Miss Waters saw fit to dismiss Quick's early fictional books, usually by spending only a sentence or two on each of these books and once by merely citing a title in her bibliography, as if these early works did not shed any light on Quick's later efforts in fiction. Like Miss Speake, Miss Waters has made a helpful but partial and preliminary contribution to an evaluation of Herbert Quick.12 11The seven books from which Miss Speake sampled 'Hiialect terms" are Aladdin h Co., Yellowstone Nights, The Binawn Mouse, Vandemark's Folly, The Hawkeye, The Invisible Wtunan, and One Man's Life. 12These M. A. papers have been especially useful on pp. 141—143 of the present paper. 9 The purpose of this paper is, then, to do what has not been done before. It proposes to undertake a system— atic chronological examination and evaluation of the fictional writings of Herbert Quick. CHAPTER I SQUIRREL TRACKS IN LITERATURE, 1901-1906 Late in life Herbert Quick wistfully remarked that his life had been characterized by "following squirrel tracks off into the woods,"1 by which he meant that various other interesting activities (in schools, the law, in prac- tical politics) had distracted him from his true vocation, writing. Although during his early years the other activ— ities had apparently allowed him time for little more than dabbling in verse, at the turn of the new century,when Quick was thirty-nine, he did manage to begin some notable excur- sions into literature by writing his first books of fiction. The characters, plots and scenes, and the fictional methods employed in the first three of these books--lh the Fairyland pi America (1901), Aladdin h Co. (1904), and Double Trouble (1906)--are the subject of the present chapter. Quick's first book, influenced by Longfellow's Hiawatha,2 was written for children, and it holds little or no interest for adults except insofar as it sheds light on 1"I Picked my Goal at Ten--Reached It at Sixty," American (October, 1922), p. 164. 2"Hiawatha, old Nokomis, the beautiful Minnehaha, and their life in the forest long ago" are mentioned in the lead paragraph of Ih_the Fairyland p£_America (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1901), p. 13. 1O 11 Quick's subsequent fiction. In Ih the Fairyland pf America Quick defined both the hero and the basic problem of that hero which would reappear in his later books. The hero is boyish and the problem is whether he should remain boyish. In Quick's first book the hero is called Edgar, an eight- year old boy3 who dreams he is in the "land of faery and fable." Somewhat like Adam before the creation of Eve, Edgar is a lone newcomer in a strange land, ignorant, naive, virtually a blank; his placement in fairyland is in— tended to expose him to some sort of education. One of the lessons offered to Edgar during his dream of being in fairyland is that of a theoretical condition of education itself. Professor Meda, one of the fairies, ex— plains this peculiar condition by saying that before he can teach his new pupils, they must all unlearn or forget what— ever their mothers or anyone else had previously taught them. Thus Meda's "Inversion" lesson, the first for all his new pupils, is to teach them to stand on their heads, since their mothers had taught them the opposite stance. His "Lamenta- tion" lesson, teaching the pupils to cry, is based on the same principle and also on the premise that crying develops the lungs and supplies the air with water for the rain. Meda does present a doctrine of fresh beginnings, but he 3Edgar's age is not specified, but in the revision of the manuscript of this book, Quick substituted the name Edgar for Edward, the name of his son, who was eight at the time. Herbert Quick Manuscript Collection, Vol. III, Des Moines, Iowa. Cited hereafter as Quick Manuscripts. 12 also values memory, as he himself keeps fairyland's oral historical records in what he calls "memory sticks." In one of these "memory sticks" is another lesson for Edgar's consideration, "The Legend of Pearl Hair," which tells how she became friend to all in the woods except the bear; how she became stranded one evening and heard the bear growling; and how the fireflies, though small creatures, formed a union of numbers to make the fire of which bears are afraid. The lesson of the legend is clear: socialistic cooperation saved the good Pearl Hair. This pro-collectivist legend seems to Edgar a satis— factory solution to the problem he had heard stated previ— ously in "The Ballad of the Wild—Cat," in the twenty-four stanzas of which Wild—Cat confessed the successful criminal individualism but consequent personal unhappiness of its robber—hero—narrator. Yet Professor Meda, the keeper of the "sticks," does not accept the happy wisdom of "The Legend of Pearl Hair," for when he delivers his "Lecture on Baldness" he explains to Edgar that bald people, such as Meda, are much more intelligent than such thick looks as Pearl Hair. Meda‘s scoffing at Pearl Hair is a chief example of the disagreement among the guides who would educate Edgar. As Edgar continues his adventures in fairyland, nar— rated by a third person in prose and verse, he is subjected more and more to an education in the principles of natural law. For example, Edgar hears the Thunder-bird's song: The Thunder-bird sits in his hole in the tree, That the world hangs upon like a nut, 13 And lays down the law Moving slowly his claw:—— 'It is well to be merciful——but A mouse should not squeak At the pinch of a Beak Which he knows must in reason be shut, Or the Owl's meat be let go uncut Uncut! Or the Owl's meat be swallowed uncut!’4 Edgar's unwillingness to accept such an interpretation of nature is illustrated in the sea scene of Chapter XII. At sea (to which he is transported magically), Edgar witnesses the "game" rivalry of the dolphin vs. the flying fish. The loser of this game gets eaten or (if dolphin) goes hungry. When Edgar suggests to Flying Fish that he should not play such a "dangerous game," Fish says that there is no choice in the sea, that they must play——for otherwise people would talk and bad feelings would result. Edgar further suggests that Flying Fish announce "King's excuse" to gain respite from the game—-fair play--but Fish says that he would be eaten just the same. With boyish be— wilderment Edgar leaves this scene, but the narrator's voice is quite clear in the concluding lines: And the dolphins and flying fish went on with their game of tag, just as they had done for ages, the dolphins always It, the flying fish always chased, and no King's excuse or any other excuse to stop it. In the last chapter Edgar returns to Professor IWeda's medicine lodge, where he hopes to learn a final solu— 'tiOn to the problem with which he has been presented. 4"What the Thunder-Bird Says," I_n the Fairyland SEE America, p. 162. 5Ih the Fairyland 9: America, p. 148. 14 There, Meda explains to Edgar such concepts as the germ theory of disease; germs, he says, come from Germany, and the human body is a battlefield for white corpuscles vs. germs. Meda himself takes sides, singing encouragement to the white corpuscles in a fight to the death that must in the natural law of things be. Meda also makes a comparison to the "Anglo-Boer War." Apparently converted to the sur- vival—of—the—fittest doctrine, Edgar spends the second of the three wishes previously granted him to acquire not a pleasure boat (as was the case with his first wish) but an armored cruiser, sailing on which he, together with his Pukwudjie Indian friends, meets a "war-party of great ships." A battle ensues. Meda is seen flying away clasp— ing a shell. Their ship begins to sink. Edgar could use his last wish to escape but what would become of his friends on board? He is more concerned to help his fellows than to save his own skin. The ship does sink, and everything gets mixed up. Edgar thinks himself a flying fish, playing tag, but wakes up from the entire dream, in his own bed, safe and sound, never able to find his fairy friends again who lived in the place he would call "Pukwudjie Ravine." What interested Quick in his first book, in addition to providing an amusing bedtime story for children, was the education of his boy hero. Although at the end of the "Tale of'the Pukwudjies," as the book is subtitled, Edgar has ZLearned little more than the names of the animals and flaixies, and some fabulous explanations for certain natural 15 phenomena such as rain, he has at least been confronted with the rival social beliefs of collectivism vs. individualism. in not allowing Edgar a firm commitment to either of these beliefs, however, the narrator leaves the theme of the tale unsatisfactorily suspended, the character of Edgar basi— cally unchanged. At the end of the tale as at the begin- ning, Edgar is a wishful—thinking, romantic boy. - Quick evidently could not quite decide whether his fictional hero should be a romantic collectivist or a romantic individualist. Quick was also interested, in I_n fl; Fairyland o_f_‘ America, in making a contribution to native American litera— ture. As the narrator expressed it at the end of this tale Which was influenced by Longfellow and also by the tales Quick had heard during his own boyhood, "There may be more elVes and gnomes and pixies in Europe than in America, but there isn't a Pukwudjie in Europe."6 Quick wished that the PukWudjie would become known as the Great American Fairy, an original creation.7 Yet this did not occur. The principal failure of Quick's first book derives from its lack of plot and character development. Its indi— Vidual episodes are but loosely linked by the mere presence of the boy hero and are without a total design. Edgar is Placed in a vague fairyland scene to learn, but he learns little beyond the existence of alternative social beliefs; \ 6Ih the Faihyland 9;; America, pp. 189—190. _ 7"I Picked My Goal at Ten——Reached It at Sixty," W (October, 1922), p. 163. 16 he takes no stand. Even children, for whom this book was primarily written, are confused about the point of the tale, particularly when it is compared to the well—defined quest in a story of similar genre, such as Thg Wizard pi 9&- If Quick had written nothing else besides Ih phg Fairyland 2: America, he would hardly be worth reconsidering as an author. A reading of his first attempt in fiction is, moreover, only important as a prelude to an understanding of his later fiction, mainly because the first book depicts in the simplest form the character Quick chose for his hero. Quick's second and third fictional works treat the progres— sively less simple aspects of this boy hero by presenting him in a species of fiction that was meant not for children only but for adults as well. Unlike IE phg Fairyland 2: America, which was dedi- cated to its author's mother because it was she who had first led his steps into the land of fable, Quick's second derived from his adult experience in Sioux City. As Quick Inoved from fable to what he called romance, he moved from a Inagical dream world of boyhood to a magical real world of Iristory. Since Aladdin g Co. was influenced by a segment 8Aladdin h g2; was copyrighted by Henry Holt and _ Ccnnpany in 1904 and by the Bobbs—Merrill Company (which be- ; ceune Quick's principal publisher) in 1907; it was reprinted : bjr Gapsset and Dunlap at an unspecified date but probably in.‘1909 or shortly thereafter since the title page of this edixtion names Virginia 9: phh hip Lanes, a recent publi— oadxiorlof Quick's which appeared in 1909. Subsequent page relfelrences in the present paper are to the Grosset and Druilerp edition of Aladdin g Co. 17 of Sioux City history which Quick knew, it will be helpful to review that history before analyzing what Quick did with it fictionally. Founded in 1854 and located where the Big Sioux and Floyd Rivers flow into the Missouri, Sioux City became a major point in river commerce and remained an important frontier town after the Civil War, as the railroads assumed a larger role in developing the West. In the 1880's Sioux City experienced its greatest boom, and enthusiasts believed that the town would become the greatest metropolis in the entire Midwest. But this boom reached its peak in 1890, when John Peirce, realtor and developer, built his stone mansion, at 29th and Jackson Streets, which was, and is (a museum since 1959), a monument to Victorian architecture as well as a magnificently gaudy ornament to the boom. Although Herbert Quick was not on hand in the Sioux City of the 1880's, he arrived there in time to see Peirce's new show—place in 1890 and to witness the subsequent fluc— tuations in real estate values during the 1890's. As a lawyer, Quick had opportunity enough to study the past and present activities of Sioux City realtors, bankers, rail- road men——the capitalistic "syndicate"-—even though he was deprived of the chance to participate therein on a scale as grand as Peirce's. Chapter III in Quick's book is aptly named "Reminiscently Autobiographical." In the book, Sioux City is called Lattimore, and it is most probably John Peirce who is called James Elkins, 18 the "man who made Lattimore" (p. vi). Albert Barslow, the "friend and partner" of Jim Elkins, is the narrator and also the character who most resembles Quick himself (with the major exception that Quick was not in Sioux City during the 1880's). The other characters are also briefly identified at the beginning in a list which helps make clear what the story is to be about: the creation, "not so very long ago," of the "Western town of Lattimore" by certain capitalists. The first capitalist to demand attention is Barslow, because he is the narrator of the entire story; or, as he says: "My mental and sentimental state is of importance in this history, I think, or I should not make so much of it" (p. 3). Barslow introduces himself, in Chapter I, as a young man of twenty—three, a delegate sent wide—eyed from Western farmlands to the National Convention in Chicago.9 He has a conflict of interests: the practical politics of the Convention and Alice's "newly—reciprocated love," which he associates with art. He shuns his political responsi— bility, drawn to art: "When one comes to consider the mat— ter, an art gallery is a wonderfully different thing from a national convention!" (p. 3). Further, the manner in which Barslow describes his experience in the art gallery (where he spends much of his Chicago time) suggests that he is not only "sentimental" but a romantic figure who, like Tom Sawyer and young Herbert Quick, has had a good deal of 9On the autobiographical parallel, of. One Man's Life. pp. 354—356- 19 practice in identifying himself with various formula heroes of the imagination: As I looked on them, the still paintings became instinct with life. Yonder shepherdess shielding from the thorns the little white lamb was Alice, and back behind the clump of elms was myself, responding to her silvery call. The cottage on the mountain-side was ours. The lady waving her handkerchief from the pro- montory was Alice, too; and I was the dim figure on the deck of the passing ship. I was the knight and she the wood-nymph; I the gladiator in the circus, she the Roman lady who agonized for me in the audi— ence; I the troubadour who twanged the guitar, she the princess whose fair shoulder shone through the lace at the balcony window. . . . Doves cooed for me from the clumps of thorn . . . (pp. 3-4). Barslow demonstrates his ability to fit his fantasies to actual situations when, in the art gallery, he overhears what he suspects are the overtures of the seduction of a young rural maiden called Josephine by a slightly older city-slicker called "Sir John." Barslow catches the hint of the theme of temptation from the first snatch of con— versation he overhears: 'I was brought up to think,‘ I remember to have heard the fair stranger say . . . 'that the surest way to make a child steal jam is to spy upon him. I should feel ashamed.’ 'Quite right,‘ said he, 'but in Europe and in the East, and even here in Chicago, in some circles, it is looked upon as indispensable, you know.‘ 'In art, at least,‘ she went on, 'there is no sex. Whoever can help me in my work is a companion that I don't need any chaperon to protect me from. If I wasn't perfectly sure of that, I should give up and go back home.‘ 'Now, don't draw the line so as to shut me out,’ he protested. 'How can I help you with your work?‘ (pp- 6-7). Quick's readers, in the first decade of the twentieth cen— tury, would not have missed the significance of this 20 passage, aware as they were of the dangers of the city which confronted the newly arrived girl from the country. Some— times, as in the case of Dreiser's Sister Carrie, the maiden became a mistress, though apparently not much against her will. At other times the girl was economically forced to frankly trade her charms in a brutish manner, as was the fate of Dulcie in O. Henry's "An Unfinished Story." But the worst case of all was that of the girl who, dreaming of be— coming a legitimate success in the city, was seduced by a seemingly helpful agent who lured her into the barred— window, locked—door houses of ill fame, in which prisons she had to supply for as long as she lasted the scarlet pleasures from which a diseased and lonely death was the only escape. The villainous agents often began their seductive operations in art galleries and on the backstages of theaters, as well as in the frightfully popular ice cream parlors.1O A battle cry of the righteous defenders of maiden— hood, in this decade before World War I, was General William Booth's "For God's sake do something!"11 This is quite pos- sibly what Albert Barslow, in Quick's book, had in mind when he overheard the talk, in the art gallery, about jam and sex 10A collection of essays on this problem, written by various persons, appeared in 1910 under the title, Fighting Trade: A Book Desighed _t_g Awakefi’ihj‘SfiEping gn_d 32 Egg— tect phg Innocentz With gh Astounding Report p: Chicago's Vice Commission, by Ernest A. Bell, "Secretary of the Illi~ nois Vigilance Association--Superintendent of Midnight Missions, etc." 11Quoted on the title page and the cover of Fighting the Traffic l2 Young Girls. 21 and offers to help; and Barslow decides, rather quickly, to do something about it: he actually follows the young couple to a "free-and—easy and distinctly Bohemian" restaurant (p. 10), despite a non-romantic voice within him which says: "' . . . such things happen every night in such a city. It's a part of the great tragedy. Don't be Quixotic!'“ (p. 11). Nonetheless, Barslow's dominant Quixotic feelings tell him that "Sir John" is very possibly a villain. After all, not only has "Sir John" had experience in various cities of the "East" but also he sports a black beard; this "smooth, dark, and passionate wooer with the vibrant voice" definitely needs a watchful eye; Josephine, the "good American girl [from the country who] may be in danger," obviously needs protection, Barslow feels (p. 11). At the restaurant Barslow's fears are confirmed as he reports such bits as the following: "'No,I I heard her say . . . ; 'not here! Not at all! Stop!'" (p. 14). The patience of Barslow, who casts himself in the role of a detective-chaperon-knight for a damsel in distress, lasts until all the other customers leave, and then the critical moral moment arrives: "Only we three were there. I won- dered if I ought to do anything" (p. 16). But he is here spared doing anything as Josephine, of her own free will, rushes away from the scene with the resolution, Barslow is glad to learn, of returning to her country home in the West. Since the first two chapters of Aladdin h 93; are set in Chicago, they are a contrast to nearly all the 22 following chapters, set in the rural West. Moreover, at the beginning, Chicago is associated with temptation and sin; the rural West, innocence and goodness. Since the rest of the story is about the development of a Western town practi— cally from scratch, Quick's intention is to investigate the origins of evil in American life. The plot develops slowly and with an intended sense of melodramatic mystery. The narrator, particularly in the first third of the book, repeatedly refers to the "air of mystery" (p. 77), or to the "future [which] loomed so myste— riously bizarre" (p. 73). Throughout he views and reports the unfolding events as though they were being performed on a stage; for examples: Captain Tolliver speaks "in a stage whisper" (p. 77), and it "was Mr. Cornish, who took the cen— ter of the stage now" (p. 108). The dialogue, too, often has a stiff, stagey quality, and it is only at the end of the story that the narrator seems to recognize his over— playing of this feature: 'Alice,‘ said Josie, under her breath, 'you go, please! Say to him that I cannot see him—~now! Oh, why did he follow me here?‘ 'Josie,’ said Alice dramatically, 'you don't mean to say that you are afraid of this man! Are you?‘ 'No, no!‘ said the girl doubtfully and distress- fully; 'but it's so hard to say "No" to him! If you only knew all, Alice, you wouldn't blame me——and you'd go!‘ 'If you're so far gone—~under his influence,‘ said Alice, 'that you can't trust yourself to say "No," Josephine Trescott, go, in Heaven's name, and say "Yes," and be the wife of a millionaire-—and a traitor and scoundrel!‘ As Alice said this she came perilously near the histrionic standard of the tragic stage . . . (pp. 334-335)- 22 following chapters, set in the rural West. Moreover, at the beginning, Chicago is associated with temptation and sin; the rural West, innocence and goodness. Since the rest of the story is about the development of a Western town practi- cally from scratch, Quick's intention is to investigate the origins of evil in American life. The plot develops slowly and with an intended sense of melodramatic mystery. The narrator, particularly in the first third of the book, repeatedly refers to the "air of mystery" (p. 77), or to the "future [which] loomed so myste- riously bizarre" (p. 73). Throughout he Views and reports the unfolding events as though they were being performed on a stage; for examples: Captain Tolliver speaks "in a stage whisper" (p. 77), and it "was Mr. Cornish, who took the cen— ter of the stage now" (p. 108). The dialogue, too, often has a stiff, stagey quality, and it is only at the end of the story that the narrator seems to recognize his over- playing of this feature: 'Alice,‘ said Josie, under her breath, 'you go, please! Say to him that I cannot see him—-now! 0h, why did he follow me here?‘ 'Josie,‘ said Alice dramatically, 'you don't mean to say that you are afraid of this man! Are you?’ 'No, no!‘ said the girl doubtfully and distress- fully; 'but it's so hard to say "No" to him! If you only knew all, Alice, you wouldn't blame me--and you'd go!‘ 'If you're so far gone——under his influence,‘ said Alice, 'that you can't trust yourself to say "No," Josephine Trescott, go, in Heaven's name, and say "Yes," and be the wife of a millionaire——and a traitor and scoundrel!‘ As Alice said this she came perilously near the histrionic standard of the tragic stage . . . (pp. 334-335). 23 The melodramatic tone is not much relieved by the realistic dialect of Captain Tolliver, a stereotyped Southern gentle— man. But a slight change of pace is offered by the style of some of the telegrams and epistles and the Herald newspaper items which convey, matter of factly, information otherwise inaccessible to Quick's first—person narrator. As the story unfolds, in this mixture of melodrama and literary realism, so are the motives revealed of the "Persons of the Story," who are either for or against, and sometimes both for and against, developing a town. Some m0— tives are rather briefly given, as in the case of Halliday, the "railway magnate," whose support of Elkin's company de— rives from his capitalistic and matter—of—fact desire to defeat the rival "Pendleton System" in a race to determine the survival of the fittest in the West. The motives of the major characters are of course treated in more detail and with a view toward their possible moral significances. The melodramatic romanticism of Al Barslow helps to explain his motive for participating in the scheme of Jim Elkins to develop Lattimore and other towns in the West. Al and Jim had been boyhood friends, and when they meet again, accidentally on a train, they are like two long—lost Tom Sawyers, recalling their days of playing pirates. Al's ‘Wife, Alice, explains his feelings for his boyhood days: "'He looks back upon his pirate days as a time of Arcadian SimPlicity, "Untouched by sorrow, and unspoiled by sin"'" (13- 49). Al accepts Jim's program with the rather 24 contradictory notion that developing the complexities of a town will enable him somehow to recapture the simplicity of his boyhood. Even when Jim talks about taking the money of what he calls the "suckers" out West-—talk which should of— fend Al's Quixotic sensibilities——Al is seemingly blinded by Jim's other talk about sheer mental power and piratical fantasies: All his skimble—skamble talk about psychology and hypnotism, and that other rambling discourse of pirate caves and buccaneering cruises, made me feel sometimes as if I were about to form a partnership with Aladdin, or the King of the Golden Mountain. If he had asked me, merely, to come to Lattimore and go into the real estate and insurance business with him, I am sure I should have had none of this mental vertigo . . . (p. 73). To Al, capitalism seems good because of its association with the romantic activities of boyhood, and worth pursuing. Al is so charmed by the call of the new adventure, the chance to relive his boyhood, that he is quite willing to surrender whatever he has established in the recent past of his supposed manhood, a surrender reminiscent of Thoreau's plea for simplicity by a sweeping away of the trivia of the past. Barslow puts it this way: That last quiet winter will always be set apart in my memory, as a time like no other. It was a sitting down on a milestone to rest. Back of us lay the busy past——busy with trivial things, it seemed to me, but full of varied activity nevertheless. A boy will desire mightily to finish a cobhouse; and when it is done he will smilingly knock it about the barn floor. So I was tearing down and leaving the fabric of relationship which I had once prized so highly (p. 72)- AJJthough Al and Alice take some of their old "stuff (as the Scxriptures term it)" with them to Lattimore, they go with 25 altogether "high hopes" in the appropriate season of spring— time, a time for new beginnings, to make a home out West, "for weal or woe" (p. 73). The happy aspects of the new adventure are indicated in several ways. As the town booms, so does Al's happy romanticism. He feels that his new—found fortune must be the result of magic, and he compares himself to one who found and traveled the mythical northwestern passage to the riches of the Far East: Again I seemed in a partnership with Aladdin; and fairy pavilions, sylvan paradises, bevies of dancing girls, and princes bearing gifts of gold and jewels, had all obeyed our conjuration. I could have walked down to the naphtha pleasure—boat and bidden the en- gineer put me down at Khorassan, or some dreamful port of far Cathay, with no sense of incongruity (p. 113). Nor does Al have a "sense of incongruity" when he compares that most important physical feature of the boom, the build- ing of the railway, which was the result of capitalistic paper-work, to the manifestations of magic: And so, in due time, it came to pass that, our Aladdin having rubbed the magic ring with which his Genius had endowed him, there came, out of some thunderous and smoky realm, peopled with swart ko— bolds, and lit by the white fire of gushing cupolas and dazzling billets, a train of carriages, drawn by a tamed volcanic demon, on a wonderful way of steel . . . (p. 152). The magician centrally instrumental in bringing about this development, Jim Elkins (alias Aladdin), is de— ijcted in various lights by the happy and admiring Barslow. JjJn is a master card-player "in the Game with the World and IDeErtiny" (Chapter XIII). Jim is also a "Titan," as Tolliver 26 calls him, and is likened to a cosmic creator: If the town be considered as a quiescent body pursuing its unluminous way in space, Mr. Elkins may stand for the impinging planet which shocked it into vibrant life . . . There was Jim's first impact, felt locally, and jarring things loose. Then came the atomic vivifi- cation, the heat and motion, which appeared in the developments which we have seen taking form. After the visit of the Barr—Smiths, and the immigration of Cornish, the new star Lattimore began to blaze in the commercial firmament . . . (pp. 120—121). As "president of a real railway," Jim has the "power to es— tablish town—sites and give them names" (p. 153); this he does in Chapter XIV, on "Railroads and Christenings," with the notion that names may "have an influence for good or evil" and that the "naming of the towns may be important as building the railroad" (p. 159). Jim bestows upon town- sites the names Josephine, Cornish, Antonia, Barslow, etc.—— after the names of his friends who accompany him on this tour through the rural West. Whatever the name Jim chooses for a site, that was henceforth its name. Jim as an Adamic name—giver and cosmic creator is not, however, without skeptical viewers. Collectively, these skeptics play the role of stating an anti-capitalistic and anti-town theme, but this theme is often mixed with its opposite (pro—capitalistic, pro—town) theme. Josie, for example, has doubts about capitalism which bring to mind Henry George's ideas about unearned increment, but the nar— rator tries to gloss over such doubts: . . . while we won and won, nobody seemed to lose [in the cosmic card game]. Josie spoke that night of fortunes which people had not earned; but surely 27 they were created somehow; and as the universe, when the divine fiat had formed the world, was richer, rather than poorer, so, we felt, must these values so magically growing into our fortunes be good, rather than evil, and honestly ours, so far as we might be able to secure them to ourselves (p. 138). Josie, moreover, expresses her doubts to her farmer—father and to the capitalist Jim Elkins: 'But, pa, we're not adapted to town life and towns,‘ urged Josie. 'I'm not, and you are not, and as for mamma, she'll never be contented. Oh, Mr. Elkins, why did you come out here, making us all fortunes which we haven't earned, and upsetting everything?‘ (p. 134). Jim's answer is that Josie and her family simply cannot stay in their "rural Amaryllis, sporting in Arcadian shades," cannot "parley with fate," and that their participation in the town's development will give them a mature experience, will push them "out of the nest" (pp. 134-135). Josie——who is depicted throughout this story as an ideal inexperienced female, courted by Jim (and by J. Bed- ford Cornish)——is not the only voice of skepticism. Alice is another, as when before the developments she looks upon the "pretty" and "lovely" natural scenery (the ravine, the clear stream called Brushy Creek, the prairie) and asks whether developing it would "spoil" it (pp. 47—48). But most important in this regard is General Lattimore. As "History incarnate" (p. 156), he offers the contrast of past experiences, a criticism of the present activities, and a warning for the future: 'You young men,‘ said he, 'are among the last of the city-builders and road-makers. My generation did these things differently. We went out with arms in ‘—¥— 28 our hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You don't seem to see it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift people from many places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your coils about an inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of organization at work, and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People come flying to it from the four quarters of the earth, and the first—comers levy tri- bute upon them, as the price of standing—room on the magnet! . . . 'Not only that,’ went on the General, 'but people begin forestalling the standing—room, so as to make it scarcer. They gamble on the power of the magnet, and the length of time it will draw. They buy to—day and sell to-morrow; or cast up what they imagine they might sell for, and call the increase profit. Then comes the time when the magnet ceases to draw, or the fore— stallers, having, in their greed, grasped more than they can keep, offer too much for the failing market, and all at once the thing stops, and the dervish—dance ends in coma, in cold forms and still hands, in misery and extinction! (pp. 160—161). The General's prophecy comes nearly true in Lattimore, be— ginning with the death of Josie Trescott's father, who, hav- ing traded his healthy farm life for life in the dubious town, had degenerated from a respectable family man into an alcoholic and customer at houses of ill repute. Although it is the probating of Mr. Trescott‘s es— tate which pricks the speculative bubble, it is his death scene which exposes the boom's less charming aspects. The romantic Barslow is particularly appalled by the exposure of the slums and dens of vice which had festered darkly while the sunny side of the town had boomed in merry mania. He describes his reaction to the dark side in the following manner: There was an indefinable horror about the place, which so repelled me that nothing but my obligation could have held me there. The lights were dim, and at first I could see nothing more than that the 29 sides of the room were divided into compartments by dull—colored draperies, in a manner suggesting the sections of a sleeping-car. There were sounds of dreadful breathings and inarticulate voices, and over all that sickening smell. I saw, flung aim— lessly from the crepuscular and curtained recesses, here the hairy brawn of a man's arm, there a woman's leg in scarlet silk stocking, the foot half with— drawn from a red slipper with a high French heel. The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows had opened for me, and I stood as if gazing, with eyes freshly un— sealed to its horrors, into some dim inferno, sibi— lant with hisses, and enwrapped in indeterminate dragon—folds——and I in quest of a lost soul (pp. 227—228). The lost soul is that of the farmer who turned capitalistic speculator, Bill Trescott. The origins of such evil (rarely described in such a daring style by Quick, what with the "high French heel" and all) are associated with temptation as introduced by for- eigners or outsiders to the simple rural folk. Bill Tres— cott's ruin is basically a consequence of his failure to reject Elkins‘ proposition, which lured him away from his life on the farm, despite Josie's doubts and warnings. Only a few characters, such as Biddy Collins, who are in the story for the purpose of contrast, are sufficiently strong to resist the temptation for capitalistic speculation as offered by Elkins & Co. and, indeed, flee "from the presence of the tempter" (p. 91). Elkins, moreover, is not above tempting Josie to break an oath to herself as he courts her and tries to enlist her support in what he considers a civi— lizing of the rural community: 'Well, I was just leading up to a statement of what we lack,‘ continued Jim. 'It's the artistic atmosphere. We need a dash of the culture of Paris AI.IIIIHB_____l 30 and Dresden. . . . Come out and supply our lack. You owe it to the great cause of the amelioration of local savagery . . . 'I've abandoned the brush ' [said Josie]. 'Take it up again.‘ 'I have made a vow.‘ 'Break it!’ She refused to yield, but was clearly yielding . . . (pp- 135-136). Yet, even though Elkins is the leader of the capital— istic forces of temptation, he is not the Villain of the piece. This was Quick's problem in his fictional investiga— tion of the origins of evil: on the one hand, Elkins is characterized as one who tempts others into self—betrayal and away from innocence; on the other, a creator of civili— zation, of art and culture, of maturation in the West. If Elkins is half bad, he is also half good. Highlighting this problem, Quick employed another character, one who is closely associated with Jim Elkins, J. Bedford Cornish, and both were apparently inspired by the historical person John Peirce. Quick evidently recognized that Peirce had done both good and bad deeds in Sioux City, and so split him, as if he were some kind of amoeba, into the fictional charac— ters Jim Elkins, who is both good and bad throughout much of the story but who is finally just good, and J. Bedford Cornish, who clearly represents what Quick considered bad. Cornish, whose first name is John (the "Sir John" of‘the introductory chapters, where he was viewed as the WOLudrbe seducer of a rural maiden), attracts inordinate ruatice when he arrives in Lattimore: . . . the last person to alight from the train——a tall, sinewy, soldierly-built youngish man, who wore an 31 over-coat of black, falling away in front, so as to reveal a black frock coat tightly buttoned up and a snowy shirt-front with a glittering gem sparkling from the center of it. On his head was a shining silk hat--a thing so rare in that community as to be noticeable, and to stamp the wearer as an out- sider. His beard was clipped close, and at the chin ran out into a pronounced Vandyke point. His mustaches were black, heavy, and waxed. His whole external appearance betokened wealth, and he ex— uded mystery (p. 74). Although, incredibly, Barslow here and for a while hereafter fails to recognize the "Sir John" he had studied so closely in Chicago, Captain Tolliver gives a stage direction about the importance of Cornish: 'Did you-all notice that distinguished and opulent— looking gentleman who got off the train this evening?’ said he in a stage whisper. 'Mahk my words, the coming of such men, his coming, is fraught with the deepest significance to us all . . . ’ (p. 77). Like Elkins, Cornish is a tempter, only more evilly so, as defined by the innocent Western community. For ex- ample, whereas Elkins tempts Josie to take up art again, as already indicated, Cornish in his courting tempts her, un— successfully, to imbibe an alcoholic beverage (p. 166). Unlike Elkins, however, Cornish makes a fetish of clothes, and in this respect the latter is nearly the same character as Barr—Smith, the foreign capitalist from England who also intrudes upon the innocent Westerners (whose suspicions are aroused by even the hyphenated name). Elkins knows them both, since both are in his company, but between Barr—Smith "and Cornish there was the stronger sympathy of a common understanding of the occult intricacies of clothes" (p. 100). In this same passage the tricky or careless use of a u 32 pronoun, at the beginning of a paragraph, creates the im— pression that, although the pronoun ("He") probably refers to Barr—Smith, it might stand for Cornish as well: 'He'll expect something in the way of birds and bottles,’ observed Elkins; 'but they won't mix with the general society of this town, where the worm of the still is popularly supposed to be the original Edenic tempter' (p. 100) This passage occurs in the Chapter X, "We Dedicate Lynhurst ZPark" where Jim Elkins, the Adamic name—giver as well as (dedicator, attempts a compromise between the accepted moral :Laws of the rural folk and the wishes of the newly arrived 'EEdenic tempter"——"'I guess we'll have to make it a temper— axte sort of orgy [continues Elkins], making up in the spec— 'taicular what it lacks in spirituousness'" (p. 100) The "spectacular" has a lot to do with clothes. Bazzfir~Smith, like Cornish, makes a "religion" of what began 1n371311ically as a fig leaf, as indicated in the following paissssage (which was also influenced by Quick's reading of Carlyle): As for the men of Lattimore, any one of them would as soon have been seen in the war-dress of a Sioux chief as in this entirely correct costume of our LBIitish visitor. We walked about in the every-day ‘vestments of the shops, banks, and offices, illus- ‘trating the difference between a state of society in vuhich apparel is regarded as an incident in life, Emad one rising to the height of realizing its true ssignificance as a religion. Mr. Barr-Smith bowed Ilot the knee to the Baal of western clothes-monotone, 'blit daily sent out his sartorial orisons, keeping his vViindows open toward the Jerusalem of his London ‘tailor, in a manner which would have delighted a CDeufelsdrdckh (p. 104). BarP—Smith and Cornish are equally devils, or dis01ples of the devil, who disturb the rural bliss of the American 32 pronoun, at the beginning of a paragraph, creates the im- pression that, although the pronoun ("He") probably refers to Barr—Smith, it might stand for Cornish as well: 'He'll expect something in the way of birds and bottles,‘ observed Elkins; 'but they won't mix with the general society of this town, where the worm of the still is popularly supposed to be the original Edenic tempter' (p. 100). This passage occurs in the Chapter X, "We Dedicate Lynhurst :Park" where Jim Elkins, the Adamic name—giver as well as dedicator, attempts a compromise between the accepted moral Llaws of the rural folk and the wishes of the newly arrived 'CEdenic tempter"--"'I guess we'll have to make it a temper- 2113e sort of orgy [continues Elkins], making up in the spec— ‘teacular what it lacks in spirituousness'" (p. 100). The "spectacular" has a lot to do with clothes. LBEizhr-Smith, like Cornish, makes a "religion" of what began nxy“11hically as a fig leaf, as indicated in the following ipélssssage (which was also influenced by Quick's reading of Cainrilyle): As for the men of Lattimore, any one of them would as soon have been seen in the war—dress of a Sioux chief as in this entirely correct costume of our British visitor. We walked about in the every-day vestments of the shops, banks, and offices, illus- trating the difference between a state of society in ‘which apparel is regarded as an incident in life, ‘and one rising to the height of realizing its true ssignificance as a religion. Mr. Barr-Smith bowed Ilot the knee to the Baal of western clothes-monotone, IJut daily sent out his sartorial orisons, keeping his VVindows Open toward the Jerusalem of his London “tailor, in a manner which would have delighted a TPeufelsdrdckh (p. 104). Barr'-Smith and Cornish are equally devils, or disciples of the devil, who disturb the rural bliss of the American 33 Westerners by introducing the ways of the world. But although both "Cornish and Barr-Smith [are] the visible representatives of the 'world'" (p. 106), it is Cornish who carries the symbolic, rather mythical, load of villainy at the end of the story and is indispensable in revealing what Quick finally wanted to say about morality. For, when the speculative bubble begins to burst, Cornish indicates his desire to betray the confidence of the inves— tors in the town's developments by escaping with their money. So determined is Cornish to commit this betrayal that he "Iaroudly" refuses even to discuss the matter with his part— riear, Jim Elkins, and will betray him, too, if necessary. Jfiiln, who is presented with his greatest temptation in the s‘t<3ry (to follow or not to follow Cornish's course of action), dea<2ides to reject treason, to remain true to the townsfolk mdi<> trusted him and his grand scheme of development, and to fEngint Cornish: "'There isn't treason enough in all the S‘t<>:rehouses of hell to balk or defeat us'" (p. 287). Jim tklj_11ks that the "tropics" would be an appropriate consign— Inerl't for such a "poisonous devil" as Cornish (pp. 293, 303). So Elkins and Cornish part company, Elkins emerging as Tflae hero of the story because of his loyalty, Cornish as thfi? \rillain because of his treason. Cornish leaves the scerle with his immorally acquired millions; Elkins stays to face the consequences of financial depression. And though Elkills manages to salvage his mansion in Lynhurst Park, he is much happier in looking forward to marrying Josie-~as 34 Quick resolves the love plot melodramatically. In the last chapter, "The End—-and a Beginning" (XXVI), Quick allows his narrator, Barslow, to moralize: The disposition to moralize comes on with advancing middle age. . . . The financial cycle was complete. The world had passed from hope to intoxication, from intoxication to panic, from panic to the depths, from this depression, ascending the long slope of gradual recovery, to the uplands of hope once more . . . (pp- 329-330). Barslow says that the capitalistic way of development, particularly in the "newer and more progressive lands" of the world (p. 330), is like an inescapable law of nature. (}iven such a law, the book says in effect, one can obey it 111 all its cyclical phases, as did the loyal and therefore Inc>ral Elkins, who endured the financial storms as well as erijoyed the sunny boom, or one can behave as did the immoral Cornish. Aladdin h Co. presents several outstanding problems. Nka‘t only does this "Romance of Yankee Magic" have a curious 81161 often awkward mixture of melodramatic, realistic, and In3’1311ical elements and techniques, but also it has some contra- Stated in a brief syllogistical form, dj—Ct130ry premises. if boyhood, these premises are: if capitalism, then boyhood; tflierl innocence; and if capitalism, then the experienced (non— inaioczent) way of the world. The problem becomes: if capi— talidsnn then what—-innocence or experience? Also, the subjfact of art is injected into the innocence-experience coanJict, and art in Aladdin g Co. is associated with ex— Perience and, strange as this may sound, with innocence .4 35 as well. Quick's entanglement with these problems, though not particularly admirable, is somewhat understandable in the light of his sources. On the one hand, he drew upon the historical experience of the typical capitalistic develop— ment of a Western town. 0n the other, he depended, too much, on literary techniques, such as the Aladdin metaphor, which he got from story—books associated in his mind with boyhood innocence and from other books, such as Sartor Resartus, associated with experience. The attempted combination of suich elements and values resulted in the stiff, flat, melo— dnramatic characters of this romance. Aladdin h g2; does make clear that Quick was con- c:earned with these problems and that, especially, he wished tc> investigate in fiction the subject of capitalism. What 1163 discovered in this second "squirrel tracking" is that nuaIondramatic capitalists have both good and evil potential— i t:L¢es, that an inherent duality existed in the subject and N£3€3cied pursuing in his next work of fiction. Quick's next work was entitled "The Occultation of iFl-C>Irian Amidon," which, after its serialization in Cosmo- Efillgghgah in 1905, was published in book form under Quick's 'HOIBGE appropriate title, Double Trouble; or, Every Hero His 9W3; Villain (Bobbs-Merrill, 1906). Dualities galore Char‘acterize this work from start to finish. There is the use fo verse and prose, melodramatic speech and realistic dialect, external appearance and reality, internal 36 consciousness and unconsciousness, capitalist as hero and capitalist as villain. Told in the third person, Double Trouble is a Dr. Jekyll—and-Mr. Hyde story about Florian Amidon, whose other self, Eugene Brassfield, becomes dominant not by drinking a potent concoction of wondrous chemicals but by submitting to the hypnotic charms of Madame le Claire, a "professional occultist." At the beginning of the story, Amidon is de— picted as a young, respected bachelor and banker in Hazel— lnirst, Wisconsin. The practical townspeople see only his "outer husk," for, as the narrator confides, Amidon likes Ip<3etry, which is somehow impractical. Moreover, It was good business to allow Hazelhurst to harbor its illusions; it was excellent pastime and good spiritual nourishment for Amidon to harbor his; and one can see how it may have been with some quixotic sense of seek— ing adventure that he boarded the train (p. 5) I‘t is on this vacation train ride that Amidon receives a I)J.<>\N on the head and mysteriously finds himself addressed as Mr - Brassfield . Thus begins the search, which constitutes a major pCDJT‘tion of the story, to find out just who Brassfield is. B37 Ciegrees, and with the help of Madame le Claire and her GerThan—scientist father (Professor Blatherwick), Amidon 1eElIHis doctrines and vocabulary that suggest Freudianism, and_ discovers that Brassfield is an unscrupulous but highly sueCessful capitalist in Bellevale, Pennsylvania. When Amidini discovers that he and Brassfield are one person, his Problem as hero is to master the villain within. 37 The gayety of tone running throughout the story sug— gests that Quick enjoyed exploring the problems of dual— personality, and of dualities as such. One of the most obvious pairings is that of prose and verse. Each chapter is in prose and is headed by a short verse supposedly quoted from some authentic source but actually composed by Quick.12 Each verse, moreover, deals with some sort of duality; a few examples follow. From Chapter I: Deep in the Well where blushing hides the shrinking and Naked Truth, I have dived, and dared to fetch ensnared this Fragment of tested Sooth; And one of the purblind Race of Men peered with a curious Eye Over the Curb as I fetched it forth, and besought me to drOp that Lie: But all ye who long for Certitude, and who yearn for the Ultimate Fact, Who know the Truth and in spite of Ruth tear piecemeal the Inexact, Come list to my Lay that I sing to—day, and choose betwixt him and me, And choosing show that ye always know the Lie from the Veritee! —-Thg Rime p: the Sheeted Spoorn (p. 1). Fro In Chapter V: Now, Red—Neck Johnson's right hand never knew his left hand ' s game ; And most diverse were the meanings of the gestures of the same. For, benedictions to send forth, his left hand seemed to strive, ‘While his right hand rested lightly on his ready forty-five. 'Mr. Chairman and Committee,‘ Mr. Johnson said, said he, 'It is true, I'm tangled up some with this person's prOperty; IEt is true that growin' out therefrom and therewith to arrive, _ 12Helen Quick Dillon's note in "Poems by Herbert Quick," typed by Helen Quick Dillon (Herbert's sister) December'25, 1933, found in the Quick Papers. 38 Was some most egregious shootin' with this harmless forty-five: But list to my defense, and weep for my disease,‘ said he; 'I am double,’ half—sobbed Red—Neck, 'in my personal— ity!‘ ——The Affliction p: Red—Neck Johnson (p. 33). From Chapter X: When Adam strayed In Eden's bow'rs, One little maid Amused his hours. He fell! But, friend, I leave to you Where he'd have dropped Had there been two! -—Paradise Rehypothecated (p. 78). Flippancy is what the verse has in common with the Iazrose, which is almost always melodramatic. Thus the meeting cxf‘ Amidon with Elizabeth Waldron (the girlfriend of Brass— :fj.eeld) in Chapter IX, "In Darkest Pennsylvania": Amidon waved a contemptuous rejection of the notes, and, casting a despairing glance at Madame le Claire, walked over toward his fate. He could have envied the lot of the bull—fighter advancing into the fearful radius of action of a pair of gory horns. He would gladly have changed places with the gladiator who hears the gnashing of bared teeth behind the slowly— opening cage doors. To walk up to the mouth of a battery of hostile Gatlings would have seemed easy, as compared with this present act of of [sic] his, which was nothing more than stepping to the side of a carriage in which sat a girl, for a place near whom any unattached young man in Bellevale would willin ly llave placed his eternal welfare in jeopardy (p. 73 . Thus too Amidon's meeting with Daisy Scarlett, "a Youulé; woman of fervid complexion and a character to match,“ 31 tile chapter entitled "The Strawberry Blonde": "Fate seemedto have in store for him an extraordinary introduc- tion, for instantly he was aware of the descent upon him of 39 a fiery comet of femininity“ (p. 240). Realistic dialect sometimes interrupts the melodrama, as in the passage on the corrupt labor leaders in Chapter XVII: Mr. Zalinsky, his eyes gleaming with gratification, thought the sum named might possibly suffice. 'Good!‘ said Alvord. 'And now come up and see the next mayor [Brassfield].' 'What's de use?‘ asked Zalinsky. 'Don't we know him all right? Ain't it all fixed? I want to git busy wit me end of deliverin' de goods.‘ 'Mr. Brassfield's views on labor——' began Alvord, but Sheehan interrupted him. 'Your word goes wid us!‘ said he. 'Ye've convinced us Brassfield's the laborin' man's frind. What say, Zalinsky?‘ 'So!‘ said Zalinsky. 'Ve better git to work over in de fourt' ward' (p. 195). ESCDmetimes the use of realistic speech helps create the im- p)z“ession of a stereotyped if not melodramatic character, as 111 Chapter V, "Subliminal Engineering," where the German 131‘c>fessor analyzes Amidon's condition: 'It iss a case . . . of dual pairsonality . . 'Oh, dere are many such! Te supchectife mind, te operations of vich are normally below te theshold of gonsciousness, suddenly dakes gontrol. Pouf! you are anodder man! You haf been Smidt; you are now Chones. As Chones you remember notting of Smidt. You go on, guided by instinct, ant te preacquired semi-intellichence of auto-hypnotismus——' (pp. 36-37). The main theme of the story is the necessary re- Pr“efission of capitalistic villainy. There is no doubt that Amidonconsiders his alter ego a villain: 'Friends!‘ sneered Amidon. 'I tell you, the VWhole thing [Brassfield's running for mayor] is lxypocrisy and graft. That villain Brassfield has a scheme for stealing the streets . . . ' (p. 223). “The only doubt" that Amidon allows himself is to what 4O extent he is "morally responsible for Brassfield's wrong doings" (p. 288). But whatever Brassfield's villainy in the past, Amidon as hero resolves to make reforms in the future. Under no circumstances, he says, should a Brassfield be let loose in any man. However, the narrator offers a rather surprising de- fense for Brassfield by indicating that he is a practical man, who adapts to his environment and whose behavior is determined by it: Mr. Brassfield is psychologically incapable of deviating much from the course marked out by the average ethics of his surroundings. This subcon— scious mind which——as Professor Blatherwick so clearly explained to us—-normally operates below the plane of consciousness, happens, in his case, to be abnormally acting consciously; but it is still controlled by suggestion. The money—making mania being in all minds, he becomes a money—maker. The usual attitude of society toward all things—— including, let us say, women, poetry, politics, and public duty——is one into which the Brassfield mind inevitably fell. The men on whom any age bestows the accolade of greatness, are those who embody the qualities——virtues and vices——of that age. Your popular statesman and hero is merely the in- carnate Now . . . (p. 207). III this preachy and serious tone (the narrator often stops tO preach and have brief talks with himself), the narrator tlfiies to make Brassfield understandable and even to suggest a. laittle sympathy for him. Because of this sympathy, the character of Brass- fi43]_d as presented in the story should be examined again. Unlaike the Sawyerish capitalists in Aladdin g Co., Brass- fie31d is down to earth, realistic. His talk, for example, is 'to the point: 41 'I'm glad you know of that little whim of Edgington's. But about this contract. Now, I usu— ally look after these things myself, and do them by days' work. But if I am forced to take this office of mayor, I sha'n't be able to do this—~won't have the time: and I'll want you to do it. Perhaps I'd better give you a check on account now—~say on the terms of the Rogers' job? All right, there's five hundred. That settles the contract. Now with that off our minds, let's talk of the political situa— tion . . . ' (pp. 179—180). Brassfield lives neither in a dreamy past nor in some utopian future. He lives in the down—to—earth, practical present. He is an example of Quick's realistic capitalist. He is a contrast to Amidon, who is an example of Quick's romantic or melodramatic capitalist. The story says that the romantic capitalist is a hero and that the realistic capitalist is a Villain. Yet there is double trouble, and this was Quick's problem. Quick was caught between recognizing the emerging literary realism (with its use of dialect, interest in the here and 110w, and practical behavior——in which style Quick's real- isstic capitalist emerged) and a reluctance to give up the jpélst. Quick seemed to want to preserve the good old roman— tfi.c capitalist as much as William Dean Howells wanted to dispense with romanticism altogether. Yet, at the same t1.Jne, Quick could not but treat his romantic character hulnorpusly, in "flippant prose." Although Double Trouble is not a book that one would Willingly reread, and it is doubtful that it will ever be reprinted, it nevertheless provides an insight into the relationship between Quick's use of fiction and the 42 development of his social ideas. Just as hypnosis was a method for the "wretchedly inexperienced" Amidon to discover the potentialities of his own character, so writing fiction was a way for Quick to explore his evaluations of the heroes and villains in American culture. In summary, all three of the books discussed in this chapter——;h phg Faipyland pi America, Aladdin h 99; and Double Trouble——were for Quick explorations, experimental "squirrel tracks" in fiction. It is noteworthy that all three deal with capitalism and express mixed emotions on this subject. On the one hand, Quick seemed to accept capi— talism as the natural and inescapable way of the world; on the other hand, he seemed dissatisfied with capitalism and all that which he associated with it--the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, the profit motive, urbanization, sexual seduction, unconscious urges, experience. Such a mixture of attitude toward his subject, in addition to an awkward mixture of literary methods, did not make a viable fiction. The literary methods of romance, melodrama, and realism were all available to Quick and he used them in a way often exactly backwards to that which might have made a better fiction. In the case of Aladdin h g2; he began with knowledge based on his actual experience in and study of Sioux City, yet he did not write a realistic story, pre— ferring instead the use of melodramatic and romantic tech- niques derived from the stereotyped stuff he had read. In 43 the case of Double Trouble he began with a formula derived from his reading of Robert L. Stevenson, yet tossed into this framework some realistic elements which, in isolation, may be judged credible. In both cases, the grafting, if it may be called that, is, unfortunately, a botched job. The character Quick chose for his hero in his first three books was a romantic one, a boyish, Adamic figure, an innocent subjected to some aspect of capitalistic experience, yet Quick did not make convincing how this hero changed as a result of his experience. It is even questionable whether this hero did truly change, Quick being overwhelmed, appar- ently, by his problem of how to keep his hero pure and moral during the challenge of experience. Moreover, Quick's atti— tude toward this romantic hero is often expressed in such a way as to make it difficult to take the hero of these first three books seriously. After writing Double Trouble, with its romantic but humorous hero, what Quick needed was to investigate a pos- sibly serious hero. Quick attempted to employ a serious hero in his very next book of fiction, which will be ana— lyzed in the first part of the following chapter, even though he had yet to find a fictional method which would carry the weight of his need. CHAPTER II NOVEL AND ROMANCE, 1907-1909 In these years, 1907-1909, his last years as a resi— dent of Sioux City, Herbert Quick published two books of fiction, The Broken Lance (Bobbs-Merrill, 1907) and Virginia 9: the Air Lanes (Bobbs—Merrill, 1909). The first of these books, which are to be analyzed in the present chapter, is what Quick called a novel, and the second is what he consid— ered some kind of romance. Of The Broken Lance, Quick said (in 1922): it is "the best and most searching sociological novel I ever wrote, or, I think, I ever shall."1 However that may be, Quick framed his "searching" in a plot that cannot be con— sidered unique, for at the end of the Grosset and Dunlap edition of Quick's own Aladdin h g2; there is an advertise— ment about Harold Morton Cramer's Hearts and the Cross, which runs as follows: The hero is an unconventional preacher who follows the line of the Man of Galilee, associating with the lowly, and working for them in ways that may best serve them. He is not recognized at his real value except by the one woman who saw clearly. Their love story is one of the refreshing things in recent fiction. . 1"I Picked My Goal at Ten—~Reached It at Sixty," ikflézigaa (October, 1922), p. 163. 44 45 This blurb well suggests the plot-line of The Broken Lance, which is 546 pages of single-tax propaganda, the "Economics of Jesus," and a plot about a knightly preacher who re— nounces the House of Have in favor of the House of Want and who dies trying to settle a strike peacefully. Its hero is romantic; his name is Emerson Courtright. Before an analysis of the book's romanticism and its other features is given, a more detailed summary of the plot should prove helpful. Emerson Courtright begins his career as a schoolteacher out West and then as a preacher, at Lat- timore. His former pupil, Morgan Yeager, becomes a social reformer and stimulates Emerson to practice what he preaches. Emerson's other unforgettable pupil, Olive Dearwester, goes forth to become a famous and wealthy theatrical singer and, finally, Emerson's second wife. Emerson's first wife, Amy Bloodgood, is of the plutocracy in Chicago and divorces Emerson because of his radical "Economics of Jesus" doctrine and practice thereof, and refuses to let him visit their little daughter, Mildred. At the end of the book, Emerson is killed while trying to stop a strike in Chicago, by John Bloodgood, who is Amy's brother and the rejected lover of Olive Dearwester, and who heads the militia to put down the strike that Emerson had actually solved peacefully. In addition to the preponderance of romantic- sounding names for the main characters (Courtright, 45 This blurb well suggests the plot-line of The Broken Lance, which is 546 pages of single—tax propaganda, the "Economics of Jesus," and a plot about a knightly preacher who re— nounces the House of Have in favor of the House of Want and who dies trying to settle a strike peacefully. Its hero is romantic; his name is Emerson Courtright. Before an analysis of the book's romanticism and its other features is given, a more detailed summary of the plot should prove helpful. Emerson Courtright begins his career as a schoolteacher out West and then as a preacher, at Lat— timore. His former pupil, Morgan Yeager, becomes a social reformer and stimulates Emerson to practice what he preaches. Emerson's other unforgettable pupil, Olive Dearwester, goes forth to become a famous and wealthy theatrical singer and, finally, Emerson's second wife. Emerson's first wife, Amy Bloodgood, is of the plutocracy in Chicago and divorces Emerson because of his radical "Economics of Jesus" doctrine and practice thereof, and refuses to let him visit their little daughter, Mildred. At the end of the book, Emerson is killed while trying to stop a strike in Chicago, by John Bloodgood, who is Amy's brother and the rejected lover Of Olive Dearwester, and who heads the militia to put down the strike that Emerson had actually solved peacefully. In addition to the preponderance of romantic— SOunding names for the main characters (Courtright, 45 This blurb well suggests the plot—line of The Broken Lance, which is 546 pages of single—tax propaganda, the "Economics of Jesus," and a plot about a knightly preacher who re— nounces the House of Have in favor of the House of Want and who dies trying to settle a strike peacefully. Its hero is romantic; his name is Emerson Courtright. Before an analysis of the book's romanticism and its other features is given, a more detailed summary of the plot should prove helpful. Emerson Courtright begins his career as a schoolteacher out West and then as a preacher, at Lat— timore. His former pupil, Morgan Yeager, becomes a social reformer and stimulates Emerson to practice what he preaches. Emerson's other unforgettable pupil, Olive Dearwester, goes forth to become a famous and wealthy theatrical singer and, finally, Emerson's second wife. Emerson's first wife, Amy Bloodgood, is of the plutocracy in Chicago and divorces Emerson because of his radical "Economics of Jesus" doctrine and practice thereof, and refuses to let him visit their little daughter, Mildred. At the end of the book, Emerson is killed while trying to stop a strike in Chicago, by John Bloodgood, who is Amy's brother and the rejected lover of Olive Dearwester, and who heads the militia to put down the strike that Emerson had actually solved peacefully. In addition to the preponderance of romantic— sounding names for the main characters (Courtright, 45 This blurb well suggests the plot—line of The Broken Lance, which is 546 pages of single-tax propaganda, the "Economics of Jesus," and a plot about a knightly preacher who re— nounces the House of Have in favor of the House of Want and who dies trying to settle a strike peacefully. Its hero is romantic; his name is Emerson Courtright. Before an analysis of the book's romanticism and its other features is given, a more detailed summary of the plot should prove helpful. Emerson Courtright begins his career as a schoolteacher out West and then as a preacher, at Lat— timore. His former pupil, Morgan Yeager, becomes a social reformer and stimulates Emerson to practice what he preaches. Emerson's other unforgettable pupil, Olive Dearwester, goes forth to become a famous and wealthy theatrical singer and, finally, Emerson's second wife. Emerson's first wife, Amy Bloodgood, is of the plutocracy in Chicago and divorces Emerson because of his radical "Economics of Jesus" doctrine and practice thereof, and refuses to let him visit their little daughter, Mildred. At the end of the book, Emerson is killed while trying to stop a strike in Chicago, by John Bloodgood, who is Amy's brother and the rejected lover of Olive Dearwester, and who heads the militia to put down the strike that Emerson had actually solved peacefully. In addition to the preponderance of romantic- SOunding names for the main characters (Courtright, 46 Dearwester, Bloodgood)2 over the less romantic (Yeager), certain chapter titles smack of the romantic: "The Fleshing of a Maiden Sword" (XII), "The Fledgling Takes Wing" (XV), "Behind the Hollow Mask" (XVI), "A Quest in the Catacombs" (XXVI), "The Strangle—Hold" (XXVII), "The Man in Crimson" (XXVIII), as well as the book's title. Yet Th2 Broken hhhpg is different from Quick's pre— vious romances, Aladdin h g2; and Double Trouble. Th3 Broken £2222 has, instead of a gayety of tone, a grave, searching social purpose. In the hhhpp Quick intended to make a really serious statement about contemporary social problems. Compared to his previous books, the THESE has certain features which contribute to this difference. For example, whereas in Double Trouble Quick made references to such invented sources as Th; Affliction p: Red-Neck Johnson and Paradise Rehypothecated, in Thg Broken REESE he cites only the titles of existing works or names actual authors. In fact, Thp Broken £2222 contains so many such re— ferences that they must be counted as one of the book's principal features. There is reference to Herbert Spencer's 2These names have an obvious symbolic function in the story. Emerson Courtright, in addition to standing for Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy, is one who courts females in a right manner, which is to say in a Victorian manner, With strict observance of the "proprieties" which Quick treated in some detail in Vandemark's Folly; Courtright is also one who would, through peaceful means, make the es- tablished powers of the church and plutocracy—-the "court" -—do right. Dearwester is one of the dear West, more Specifically one from Quick's treasured American Midwest. IBloOdgood stands for the military, violence, bloodshed. 47 Education (p. 2); the Educationpi Review, a Life pi Garri- son, Wendell Phillips's Writings and Addresses, Mill's Logic, Lowell's Poems, Whittier and Whitman (all on p. 14); McGuffey's Second Reader (p. 15); Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (pp. 45, 191); Alice Through the Looking Glass (p. 48); Longfellow's "My Lost Youth" (p. 102); Tennyson's "Lady of Shallot" (p. 103); Shelley's Masgue pi Anarchy (p. 110); Jefferson and Emerson (p. 112); Adam Smith and Malthus (p. 118); Shakespeare and Aeschylus (p. 480); Saint Francis of Assisi, John Ball, Wyclif, Savonarola, Henry George, and Jesus Christ (p. 141)——there are nearly a hundred such re— ferences. In addition to showing that he is seriously discuss— ing a contemporary problem, these references suggest Quick's need to establish his companionship or even identity with well-known persons. He also uses the references to illus— trate or explain various points as the story develops--as though he were a schoolteacher (which Quick once was) remind- ing his pupils of past lessons learned. Sometimes, however, the references in ihp Broken hphpp serve no discoverable purpose, as far as the overall plot is concerned. But this cannot be said of the two most important references: Henry George and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Quick had studied Emerson and even done a paper on him.3 He believed that Emerson's philosophical romanticism 3This paper has not been found, but Edwin Markham refers to it in his letter to Quick of October 22, 1900; iii the Quick Papers. 48 was right but that this transcendentalism was too abstract for the practical, economic world of the early twentieth century.4 Quick needed a translation of general principles into concrete facts of living, and it was Henry George who came to the rescue. George brought Emerson down to earth for Quick, explaining that it "ip not necessary pp confis~ cate land; ii ip only necessary pp confiscate rent" and proposing that: the simple yet sovereign remedy, which will raise wages, increase the earnings of capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative employ— ment to whoever wishes it, afford free scope to human powers, lessen crime, elevate morals, and taste, and intelligence, purify government and carry civiliza— tion to yet nobler heights, is—-ip appropriate rent hy taxation. . . ip abolish all taxation save that upon land Lathes-5 — Quick's interest in both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry George explains much of the plot development in The Broken Lance, the first half of which is devoted to transforming its hero, Emerson Courtright, from a lofty idealist to a practical Georgeite. In Chapter IV, "The First Fine Careless Rapture," the narrator emphasizes Emerson Courtright's Emersonian features by describing him as one who dwells beyond the realm of sensory experience: Above all, he was what the congregations are wont to call a 'spiritual preacher'-—that is, he regarded 4One Man's Life, p. 399. 5Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879), Book VIII , Chapter II . 49 that exaltation of the inner consciousness which marks the intense manifestations of all religions-—in Chris— tian experience being called the indwelling of the Holy Spirit——as the supreme blessing; and he strove mightily to bring to all his people the psychic know— ledge of the Spirit witnessing with their spirits that they were children of God . . . (p. 36). In Chapter VII, "Between Ormuzd and Ahriman," Courtright is depicted in a state of day—dreaming, his next day's sermon "half done" on his desk and a copy of Progress and Poverty in his hand. Into this scene steps his newly acquired wife, Amy Bloodgood of the plutocracy, "rosy from sleep, her flow— ing robe gathered by dainty ribbons about the snowy throat and virginal form": A painter might use the scene for an allegorical can- vas: The book, the Call to the Apostolate of Humanity; the woman, the Noose cast by Self in the Guise of Love; the pale Student, the Devotee Choosing. Lest the moral should be lost or reversed, the picture should, of course, carefully conceal the fact that she in the door— way was the bride of a month or so, and that he, gazing at vacancy, was most blameworthy thus to desert the One specially committed to him-~because of his yearning toward All (p. 85). The difficulty of transforming Courtright is especially no— ticeable in this passage, since the purpose of the allusion to R. W. Emerson's philosophy of the Many and the One is no clearer than the "moral" that should somehow not be "lost or reversed." About all that can be said is that the narrator gives evidence of his difficulty in trying to transform his spiritualistic hero. In Chapter XII, "The Fleshing of a Maiden Sword,“ Courtright preaches: The effort of the church to save society through the individual has failed. It must always fail. Let us 50 now address ourselves to the task of saving the individual through society (p. 148). Here the narrator allows Courtright to preach a doctrine ex- actly backwards to R. W. Emerson's self—reliance. The point seems to be that as Courtright is transformed into a prac- tical man he must adjust his Emersonian doctrines (assuming he understood them in the first place) to meet the demands of the early twentieth century. In any case, by Chapter XVIII, "Chief Men and Honor- able Women," Courtright has become more practical and quite specific in his pro-collectivism and on how the heavenly city will be achieved for each and all on earth: 'Well,‘ said Emerson, looking straight forward, 'I thought I would handle it like this: I'll first assume that all the highways have been taken over by the people——the government——whether wires, or rails, or pipes, and that justice in the use of the earth shall have come by freeing from tax everything pro— duced by man, and taking all ground-rent in a tax—— would you call it by its controversy—name, single tax?’ (p. 214). Thus Courtright becomes a relatively practical man, a Georgeite, but he always retains a dreamy quality and his manners, even when he is working in the Chicago slaughter house or demonstrating in the streets, faintly suggest William Graham Sumner's image of the little boy who sat down with slate and pencil and tried to remake society. When Emerson Courtright is working in the Chicago slaughter house, the narrator, like little Edgar of ih the Faipyland pi America (but unlike social Darwinists of the day), reveals that he cannot accept the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The narrator reveals this through 51 his sentimental attitude, as in the following paragraph from Chapter XXVIII, "The Man in Crimson": The floor was dark with clotted and diluted blood, and blood spread in a coagulating mass of viscous red mottled with splotches of pink foam about the feet of the man who stood in front of the line of victims, which filed before him in inverted helplessness. As each one passed him, he seized it by the forefeet, spread the legs apart so as to expose the broad black throat, and then, with a single thrust, as skilful as the finest pass of a swordsman, his long keen knife went straight to the artery, and the spurt of crimson as it was with— drawn went unheeded over the man's clothes from waist to feet, as he mechanically pushed the slain brute by, and automatically reached for another—~and all the time the great wheel rotated, and out from below and behind came the volume of tortured screams, each moment bring— ing more and more throats before him for the knife. Hour after hour, day after day he stood there, the reek of gore in his nostrils, the screech of death in his ears——the king of slaughter, surrounded by his san— guinary helpers, who, with machine and cleaver and knife, urged on by shouted command and competing en— ginery, tore heads from bodies, ripped out bowels, dismembered frames, and sent off to some room where they hung cooling in long rows, the clean—scraped and eviscerated creatures brought here in thousands from green fields and pastures. But the central figure, the monarch of horrors to Olive's eyes, was a man with the knife, who, with the machine—like thrust, second by second smote from its rock of flesh the fountain of blood, and stood like an embodied emblem of carnage, in steam and reek and expiring clamor, a red angel of death, dripping gore from every finger, and bathed from head to foot in the tide of butchery (pp. 363—364). The "monarch of horrors“ is the "man in crimson," the hero Emerson. The animals slaughtered, the hogs, are "victims" who emit "tortured screams," are "poor beasts" who are killed with "diabolical deliberation," and whose deaths are "pitiless tragedies." The narrator creates the impression, otherwise not bad,6 that the hogs ought to have been left 6The narrator is at least successful in suggesting the sense of speed and chaos of working on such a production 52 in peace in their "green fields and pastures." In fact, although Quick correctly recognized the "embruting influence" (p. 387) of slaughter on the man who does it day in and day out, the total impression of his slaughter—house scenes is a contrast to Upton Sinclair's. ihp Jungle (1906) recognizes the survival-of—the—fittest code and is mainly concerned that man, and not other ani— mals, be master. Sinclair wanted to reform or do away with the "speed—up" system in the shops and to make sure that the meat was germ free (giving man a victory over the germs be— fore they even had a chance in the struggle for survival). Quick-—a corresponding acquaintance of Sinclair's——was expressly against the presentation of such frank views in fiction.7 Yet Quick did not restrain himself from answer— ing, in an editorial letter of Epip phi Fireside (January 20, 1912), the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals by saying that the S. P. C. A. was "simply silly" in its criticism of "hanging up of turkeys by the feet for picking." So Quick may have agreed with Sinclair concerning the idea of the survival of the fittest, but he could not write fiction which endorsed or promoted such a doctrine. This is a significant point because it helps to ex— plain why Quick's fiction was often unsuccessful, at least line. Note that in the second sentence it sounds as though one would need three arms to perform the task, and that the performer is chaotically imagined as one who is bathed in blood "from waist to feet" and "from head to foot." 7Letter of Herbert Quick to Upton Sinclair, May 8, 1911, in the Quick Papers. 53 during the period of his career before World War I. On the one hand, he ardently believed in writing a moral fiction, which in his view did not include the encouragement of any sort of brutishness. On the other, he surely could not but recognize, in life, the code of the survival of the fittest, a code which he associated with brutishness, or human in~ dignity, and also with practicality. Once this dilemma is understood, Quick's problem in writing good fiction should also be understood. He tried to solve this problem, again, in The Broken Lance, a story about the transformation of the boyish hero into a practical man-—the rub being that prac— ticality carries with it, inherently and woefully, the burden of brutishness, the loss of idealism, dignity, romanticism, innocence. As Quick's hero in The Broken Lance undergoes the transition from an innocent and lofty idealist to a practical Georgeite and manual laborer, the experience is not a happy one for Emerson. This feature of the book is made clear by the two contrasting scenes in which Quick the narrator places his hero Emerson. One scene is a romantically rustic village in Wisconsin, where Emerson is very happy. The other is Chicago, which is "emblematic of the inferno into which he [Emerson] had replunged" (p. 446). Emerson goes back and forth between these two places. He feels that it is his practical duty to plunge, and replunge, into Chicago, and all that it stands for, but he is definitely not happy there because of its contrast to the pleasant romantic realm: 54 Chicago! It was a name of dread and command and call to Emerson, breaking with fierce dissonance upon the glamorous air of the realm of Arthur, Guinevere, Count Gismond, Childe Roland, Lorna Doone, Annabel Lee, Sir Launfal, The Lady of Shalott, The Italian in England—~and the Queen of Atlantis . . . (p. 422). In order to define a happy romanticism, Quick here overdoes the references to the point of satire. In this connection, the literary style of one long scene in Wisconsin is particularly noteworthy. This scene occurs toward the end of the book, in Chapter XXXIII, where the narrator pauses to insert a short story (a story within a story) and at the same time to comment, as it were, upon his problem of language, diction, style. The situation is this: Morgan Yeager, Olive Dearwester, and Emerson Court- right (now sometimes called Strangler Courtright because of his slaughter-house work in Chicago) are away from non- romantic Chicago, preparing to return there the next day. But since not much packing had to be done, Olive and Emerson decide to take a stroll through the nearby woods. While they are gone, Morgan wonders "what was going on out there among the trees and meadows" (p. 432). Quick tells what was going on by referring to "the beautiful story of Emma and Eginhard——which goes back, it will be remembered, to the time of Charlemagne,“ saying that there is, however, a better way to tell that story, and then he inserts the following: Now Queen Olivia, being young and full of the sap of youth, and moreover, being of such wondrous beauty that no man of all her court dared look forthrightly into her countenance, lest he run straightway mad of 55 love, was without a consort, for that none of her nobles and princes was pleasing in her sight. Yet she, being young, as aforesaid, yearned strongly after the king that was to be, and dreamed many dreams of him, as being of mighty strength and of most fair favor, and so pure in heart that to none other woman would he ever give even so much as a glance of the eyes or a thought. SO, being of such warm heart toward Love, she was nathless cold to all lovers until there came to the court, borne prone and white upon branches of cedar spread on two lances, a knight cravenly smitten from behind upon the crown by caitiffs in a gruesome battle in the wilder— ness, and bleeding much and nigh unto death . . . (p. 432 - The story goes on in this manner to tell that Queen Olivia nursed the knight back to health, that the knight however was more concerned about battles and wanted to continue his quest, "mayhap, of San Graal," and that the knight perhaps surrendered to the Queen's charms after all, "in the demo— cracy of the wood." Then Quick narrates, "let us go on with the adventures of this modern prince and princess [Emerson and Olive] in speech more suited to modern ears" (pp. 433- 434). That is, more suited than the simulated style of a romantic medievalist. But what is this "modern speech"? It is different, but only slightly so. Both modes are coy, even feminine, in relating mating matters. The "modern" style has more of a titillating sort of Victorian sexiness in it. Quick's very next paragraph is as follows, illus- trative of his "modern speech": She tripped along before Emerson through the path, stooping so that her straw hat might escape the boughs, and gathering her skirts about the ankles clad in open— work of silk. Emerson followed, telling his beads. That is, he was arranging his words for the statement he meant to make with reference to his return to 56 Chicago. At the margin of the meadow, she turned on him, her cheeks rosy with the swift walk under the trees, her bosom heaving with her deep breathing—- heaving in rounded billows glimpsing creamily through a lace yoke, topped with its half—seen line of pink ribbon. The knight forgot the count of his beads, and began all over again (p. 434). Olive and her "knight" Emerson then have a rather long con— versation about King Arthur and Queen Guinevere and also Lancelot (pp. 436-437), and the wood scene draws to a close with Emerson carrying Olive across a stream (a situation which Quick used again in Vandemark's Folly), narrated in this fashion: He took her up, oh, so tenderly and deliberately, and walked straight across to the opposite side. She said nothing either as to his slowness or speed; and this time, perhaps, it was her clasp that tightened ever so slightly, as they neared to the end of their crossing. And then, when he had put her on her feet, he stOOped and kissed her on the mouth in a strange way that seemed to her like a kiss from a devotee to an image. She stood quite still, and then—~she put up her lips for another kiss; which he bestowed as the Greek boy might have given the second to Artemis, in the delicious fear arising from the first (p. 440). The title of this chapter, "The Magnet and the Arma- ture," in which Quick found it so difficult if not impos- sible to surrender his romantic style in depicting his hero, is significant. The magnet was in Quick's day a synonym for city. It was common for the newspapers then, particularly in articles about the back—to-the—land movement, to refer to the city as a magnet. The magnet as an image reflected the pervasive deterministic and mechanistic thinking, and it was used by Theodore Dreiser, who entitled a chapter in Sister Carrie (1900) "The Magnet Attracting" in reference to 57 Chicago. A brief comparison of Dreiser and Quick suggests one reason why the relatively unknown writer is important. The significant difference between the well—known writer's use of the magnet image and Quick's use of it is that Dreiser makes no explicit judgment about it; Dreiser merely puts his heroine in the city and describes how she survives by accommodating herself to the deterministic forces. But Dreiser's effectiveness——shocking in its own day—~derives from his public's assumption that the city-magnet was evil. Quick was one who contributed to that standard assumption by explicitly depicting the city-magnet as evil. It has al— ready been noted that General Lattimore, in Quick's Aladdin @ pp; spoke at length about the city—magnet in highly un— favorable terms, and in The Broken Lance the city draws Emerson to his fateful destruction. Another significant difference is that the boy-like Emerson plunges and replunges into Chicago not, as is the case of Dreiser's Carrie, to seek glitter and fame and comfortable satisfactions, but to reform the corruption he found there. Emerson Courtright remains throughout Quick's story a romantic and idealistic boy. The narrator's attempted transformation of him into a practical hero who somehow must grapple with the city on its own realistic terms is awkward. This important aspect of The Broken Lance might be made clear if it is compared to another work which was published in.the same year, Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907). Lon- donfs hero, Ernest Everhard, is, like Quick's Emerson 58 Courtright, a socialistic reformer. But Everhard is not a socialist in the same sense as Courtright is; even their respective names suggest this. Everhard appears in a dif- ferent and a consistent literary style. Everhard is a matter—of—fact, outspoken, hardened fighter who relishes the logical demolition of opponents by his fact—filled debate and who (apparently) has no more compunctions about tossing a bomb into a nest of plutocrats than having a sexual affair without the benefit of traditional courting and marriage. Courtright, on the other hand, is appalled by the use of physical force (as in the strike scene at the end of the story) to accomplish reform; and Courtright maintains a tra- ditional, proper, Victorian stance with respect to his as- sociations with Amy Bloodgood and Olive Dearwester. In a word, Everhard is a realistic socialist and Courtright, a romantic socialist.8 Apart from such comparisons, ihp Broken hphpp has a serious, searching social purpose. Its intended theme is a protest against private ownership and capitalism, and against the hypocrisy of American churches. It suggests the remedy of socialism, or communism. Often the book takes on 8This paragraph and the preceding one are not in- tended to imply that Quick was familiar with the work of either Dreiser or London; the only discoverable link be— tween Quick and London is that they both knew the work of Upton Sinclair; Quick may have read the advertisement about Sister Carrie which appeared at the end of the Grosset and Dunlap edition of Aladdin h pp; But there is no question of influence here: the significance of Quick is that he offers a standard by which the better-known writers may be read. 58 Courtright, a socialistic reformer. But Everhard is not a socialist in the same sense as Courtright is; even their respective names suggest this. Everhard appears in a dif— ferent and a consistent literary style. Everhard is a matter-of—fact, outspoken, hardened fighter who relishes the logical demolition of opponents by his fact-filled debate and who (apparently) has no more compunctions about tossing a bomb into a nest of plutocrats than having a sexual affair without the benefit of traditional courting and marriage. Courtright, on the other hand, is appalled by the use of physical force (as in the strike scene at the end of the story) to accomplish reform; and Courtright maintains a tra- ditional, proper, Victorian stance with respect to his as— sociations with Amy Bloodgood and Olive Dearwester. In a word, Everhard is a realistic socialist and Courtright, a romantic socialist.8 Apart from such comparisons, The Broken Lance has a serious, searching social purpose. Its intended theme is a protest against private ownership and capitalism, and against the hypocrisy of American churches. It suggests the remedy of socialism, or communism. Often the book takes on 8This paragraph and the preceding one are not in- tended to imply that Quick was familiar with the work of either Dreiser or London; the only discoverable link be— tween Quick and London is that they both knew the work of Upton Sinclair; Quick may have read the advertisement about Sister Carrie which appeared at the end of the Grosset and Dunlap edition of Aladdin h pp; But there is no question of influence here: the significance of Quick is that he offers a standard by which the better-known writers may be read. i. I“, ._ h 59 the quality of the tract: the sermons are explicit. Morgan Yeager, for example, delivers a summary sermon in Chapter XLI, "The Last Word," which characterizes the many preceding it. A brief excerpt of Morgan's preaching follows: '80 it was that he [Emerson] became my leader and teacher, as he has been the leader and teacher of so many others; and as I had once been his. He took the hard learning which I had given him, and harmonized it with the truths of all true religion; and he preached it from a great American pulpit. He told his people of the communism of Jesus; but he also told them that only things necessary to be made common were so treated. He showed that if we in this age were only to keep out of the hands of the individual those things which are of common creation, and therefore of common right, we should thereby bring an era in which the things which feed and shelter and clothe mankind would be so plenti— ful and cheap——as matches and newspapers now are—~that no one would care to assert private ownership in them, as against another person's desire——and that we should thus have arrived at practical communism by common con— sent, through universal plenty, by rendering unto all the things that belong to all, and sacredly unto each the things which are his alone' (p. 544). As if the explicit sermons of Yeager or of Court— right were not enough, Quick employs throughout the story certain references to enhance his purpose of protest and "propaganda" in 1907. For example, the . . 'Blackhall Stamps,’ a queer appliance for propa— ganda work [were] devised by an ardent soul named Blackhall, who applied the methods of the exploiters of root pills and live—stock fairs to force land re— form upon the notice of the wayfaring man. The 'Blackhall Stamp' had an adhesive back, and a face on which some Georgeite text was printed. Some simply mentioned the fact that 'The Single Tax Will do It,‘ or asked the seemingly unsociological ques- tion, 'Have You Seen the Cat?‘ Others bore bits of argument like: 'Tax dogs to make dogs scarce. Why tax houses or factories or stocks of goods or money? To make them scarce? It does.‘ The Emersonism, 'While another hath no land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is vitiated;' the Jeffersonism, 'The earth belongs in usufruct to the living: the dead 60 have no right or power over it,’ were much used; as were also Red Jacket's exclamation: 'Sell land! Why not then sell the sky, the waters and the air? The land is for all men!’ and the Mosaic text: 'The land shall not be sold for ever, saith the Lord; for the ladismhm'(p H2L Another example of propagandizing righteousness is the Voorhuit, a group of socialists in Ghent who were "learning the lesson of the bees and ants and prairie—dogs——how to live together on terms of righteousness" (p. 481). Quick's additional comment on the Voorhuit is that they had more solidarity, even owned their own theaters, had more true "co—living" than the George movement in the United States; the George movement, according to Quick, lacked the passion of the Voorhuit, should be more cooperative, and was too often and unfortunately a mere "intellectual cult" (p. 481). This is probably why Quick depicts his hero Emerson Courtright as a romantic who must somehow be made practical, a man of action: 'Thought is free,’ said she [Olive], '——and amounts to mighty little. It is action that counts.’ 'Ah, yes!‘ he [Emerson] cried. 'It is action that counts. Action!’ (p. 437). Emerson's actions on behalf of an American socialistic move— ment gain the admiration of the working people, such as the O'Malleys and Burnses, but his actions do not accomplish practical reform. His active battle against the plutocracy ends not with a socialistic victory but with his own death. Concerning the book's title, Emerson explains to Amy Bloodgood that education ought to be freely supported by the State, that the greatest philanthropists are nevertheless 61 still "robber—barons" and the most hypocritical church mem— bers (who have a double standard--cold business through the week, warm brotherhood on Sunday), that the church itself has fallen in modern times, and then he quotes for her a verse: 'Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it' (p. 156). In other words, Emerson thinks of himself as the "strong lance of justice" who, if the plutocracy's gold is not taken away, will be broken. Later, Emerson explains the same idea to Morgan Yeager: "'If evil be entrenched behind a stone wall, you must become a projectile, to be dashed to pieces against it. You cannot serve both God and Mammon'" (PP. 427—428). Emerson as knightly lance or "projectile" hurling himself against the wall of Mammon, or the plutocracy, is aware that he might not be a complete practical success, for he adds, " . . . 'if I have not battered a breach in the wall, I have at least laid no stones in it'" (p. 428). Indeed, Emerson has a martyr complex. "'You can not live as Jesus did?'" he asks of Morgan, "'Well, then, die as He died'" (p. 428). And a bit later Emerson explains him— self: ‘We are under a money despotism, as insolent and ruth- less as the despotism of the czar. I chose to light a bomb and die in its explosion that I might call men to resistance by the sight of what I did' (p. 462). Emerson's willing surrender of his comfortable position as preacher in plutocracy-controlled churches and his forfeiture 62 of his own life--his martyrdom--raise the question of the genre of The Broken Lance. Morgan Yeager suggests, "'To find Emerson fallen from his high estate would be a greater tragedy than never to find him at all . . . '" (p. 386); and Olive speaks of "'a book that will horrify and shame the world'" (p. 327). In view of these clues, is it possible that Herbert Quick had in mind Aristotelian tragedy when he wrote ihp Broken Lance? Yes; but it must be confessed that the book's intended stimulation of pity and fear (or shame and horror, which are similar enough emotions) simply does not result in catharsis for the reader. The book has too many distrac— tions for a serious purpose of magnitude, too_much explicit moralizing and propaganda, too much awkward mixing of liter— ary styles, too much melodrama, too much romantic sentimen— tality. It is possible, of course, that Quick intended a passionately romantic sentimentality as Emerson's tragic flaw; but this creates another awkward situation, for why would Quick consider a flaw the very quality which he be- lieved the George movement lacked? floreover, although it is possible for a romantic hero to be a tragic one also (wit ness Shakespeare's Othello), Quick's romantic Emerson is actually more melodramatic than tragic. One of the numerous recent critics to discuss the nature of tragedy, Robert B. Hellman, makes the following theoretical distinction between tragedy and melodrama: In melodrama, he [man] is victorious or he is de- feated; in tragedy, he experiences defeat in victory, 53 or victory in defeat. In melodrama, man is simply guilty or simply innocent; in tragedy, his guilt and his inno— cence coexist. . . . Melodrama has affinities with politics; tragedy, with religion. Pragmatic politics appears as a competition for power between good and evil; our side is 'good,' and the other side, 'evil.’ In the religious view of man is a sense of his dividedness, of the co—presence of coun- terimpulses always striving for dominance, of the fact that throughout his life he is a dual creature with equal possibilities of coming to salvation or damnation. Melo— drama leans toward the timely, tragedy toward the time- less; on the one hand we have the world of protest and problpm plays; on the other, the world of meditation and myth. In Heilman's terms, it can be seen that Quick's Emerson Courtright is melodramatically "simply innocent." He has no struggling good and evil within him (as in the case, say, of Shakespeare's Macbeth). The conflict is external: Emerson is the pure hero against the villainous plutocracy. The fact that at the end of The Broken Lance it is this Villain- ous plutocracy which destroys Emerson (though it does not conquer his spirit) underscores the book's pragmatic purpose of shocking social protest and, hopefully, reform in the real society Of 1907. The Broken Lance "leans toward the timely," in Heilman's phrase. This is to say, too, that it leans ippp toward the world of myth. But the myth is there, underneath the melo— drama and propaganda, and, in the context of Quick's devel- opment as a writer, it is the most important element in the entire book. Emerson's story is of the Myth of the Fall, 9"Tragedy and Melodrama," The Texas Quarterly (Summer, 1960) in Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1965), p. 257. 64 not of the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall, but just the Fall. Emerson's is a shocking, regrettable, unfortunate fall. The Fall is from Innocence. Again, Emerson's romantic innocence—~his boylike, Adamic purity—-is destroyed not by any fault within his own character but by external forces, by the villains of an ex— perienced, realistic, pragmatic and corrupt society. The magnet of this urbanized and plutocracy—controlled society draws him—~because of his dutiful wish to reform contempo— rary society—-and he plunges and replunges into the "inferno" of Chicago, confronted by the realities of the slaughter house and performing the butcherous chores which naturally repel him, until his benevolent attempt to stop an armed clash of human beings ends with his death. Quick seems to bemoan the very necessity of pragmatic political action, and his mythic message, in his only long—story where the hero dies, is that innocence, unfortunately, cannot survive in an environment of experience. Although ihp Broken hphpp offers the specific solu— tion of George's single tax, its broader question is not completely answered: where is innocence? To survive the conditions of the modern American city, innocence must some— how adapt, or be transformed; but to be transformed is to lose innocence: this was a dilemma for Herbert Quick. In choosing a romantic socialist for his hero Quick was on the side of the rising social thought (collectivism instead of individualism), but he expressed an ambivalent 65 attitude both toward his romantic style (which derived from his readings and was perhaps appropriate to depict a roman— tic hero) and toward the rising realistic literary method (which put a premium on fidelity to experience). It is thus possible that Quick meant it when he called ihp Broken iphpp his "most searching" novel; it is noteworthy in passing that one chapter therein is actually entitled "A Quest in the Catacombs" (XXVI) and describes Olive and Morgan's "search" for the lost innocent, Emerson. Quick's search was not only in idea (innocence vs. experi— ence, socialism vs. plutocracy) but also in literary form (a romantic style vs. a realistic one, melodrama and tragedy). A viable work of fiction may well have such vari— ous elements, may well stimulate multipartite critical in— terpretations, but in ihp Broken hphpp these features are not blended into an artistic whole. Perhaps because ihp Broken hphpp was not a popular success in its own day, Quick tried to convey the same social message——or, rather, half of it (i.e., that capital- istic speculators, plutocrats, or monopolists are villains) --in a fictional method that was more in vogue at the time; for the method of his next work of fiction, Virginia pi ihp hip iphpp (1909), is neither serious nor searching. Its method is, rather, quite dominantly and humorously melo— dramatic, or satirically romantic. A looking—backward story, Virginia pi ihp hip hphpp has a futuristic setting-—"America, well along toward the 66 middle of the twentieth century" (p. 80). Virginia deals with what might happen in America when air planes, flimsy enough contraptions or toys in 1909, are developed into a major means of transportation in the future. Quick makes his prognostications in a plot which may be summarized as follows. Theodore Carson, the hero, is the inventor of a mar— velous aircraft which others in the story want to capitalize on. Carson refuses to side with Finley Shayne ("the Prince of the Powers of the Air," i.e., the capitalistic exploit— ers) and his villainous companion, Silberberg. Craighead, a humorous opportunist whom Carson meets by accident, con— vinces Carson that they, together, should fight the Shayne forces. The battle between these two monopolistically minded powers takes place on land, sea, and air, and in the courtroom. The "good" monopolists (the Carson—Craighead Aeronef Company) win. Meanwhile, a love story develops: Virginia Suarez (Shayne's niece) flies, literally, from the villainous (i.e., sexually seductive) advances of Silberberg into the chivalrous arms of Theodore Carson, whom she mis— takenly identifies as another uncle for a while. Carson names his new aeronef the Virginia in her honor, and after she learns that he is not her uncle she encourages his love even more and in the last chapter they are married with the prospect of living happily ever after. The melodramatic alignment of heroes and villains is established in the opening scenes. First there is the scene ‘ _. : -.-:.:-_:_'_‘—.._."—‘_.¢_.."'——‘ .40' ...~'. ' ' KAI—‘9" 3.5"” "I‘ ’ 67 where Virginia is in the helicopter attached to the Roc (her uncle Shayne's airship), fiddling with the controls, and the villainous Silberberg makes his unwanted advance: 'I could move this lever a little,’ said she, 'and fly away. I feel as if I should fly!‘ 'I shall not let you,‘ said he. 'I shall hold you!‘ 'Mr. Silberberg!‘ The rebuke was evoked by his putting his arm about her. One white, jeweled hand was slipped be— hind her, the other laid on her arm, the oily per- fumed curls stooping until the red lips approached hers. . . . Virginia pushed the lever . . . and the wings started. The pull of the vivified mechanism, drawing him out to death, made Silberberg's very fingers tingle with terror, and he let go girl and car, and leaped backward (p. 15). Virginia then flies the heliOOpter, awkwardly and luckily, until she thinks she is utterly "lost" (p. 19). But just then Theodore comes to the rescue by grabbing the rope dan— gling from the helicopter and wrestling the odd contraption nearly to the ground, onto which soft sandy beach Virginia falls—-"a mass of red hat, crimson scarf, pigué and silken fallals" (p. 19). Theodore then takes the unconscious Virginia to his "mysterious shed in the dunes" and properly treats the bumps and bruises she had suffered during her perilous escape. A damsel in distress, rescued, Virginia thanks Theodore--"flightily," for she has been in flight-- with words suggesting that Quick did not wish his popular audience to mistake the fact that he was writing a melo— dramatic romance: "'I came out to thank you, sir,‘ said Virginia flightily, 'for your heroic behavior-~heroic, ro- mantic, mediaeval behavior! Don't my eyes look funny?'" (p. 25). Although Theodore fails to see the humor in this 68 (and it is perhaps a question whether Quick's audience did), his behavior is a direct contrast to Silberberg's, for Theodore replies to Virginia, "with infinite solicitude": "'I beg of you not to mention it, madam. . . . But may I not insist upon your allowing me to escort you back to your room?'" (p. 25). Henceforth Virginia is on the side of the courteous Theodore, the hero, and against Silberberg and the other villains. Throughout the story Theodore is characterized as a melodramatic, naive, inexperienced youth. The narrator re— peatedly refers to him as "the boy" (p. 139), the "boy— uncle" to Virginia (p. 174), or as one "so young and inex— perienced" (p. 179). Theodore is like Adam, boyishly puz— zled by the arrival of Eve (Virginia) in his Eden, which is called Carson's Landing: . . this was Carson's Landing. The gourds hanging from tall poles; the martins chattering from them; the china tree full of blossoms like lilac blooms, humming with bees and visited incessantly by crimson bee—birds —-all these he knew. But this, this corset; with its lacings unrove it lay there like a mold awaiting the casting of a Phidian Psyche. The name entering his mind made him tremble. He picked up the fragrant gar— ment with the pink ribbons edging it, and looked at it with something of the terror of Charmides in the shrine of Artemis. He had forgotten the marvel of their pre— sence in that of the things themselves; for he was paradisiacally innocent . . . (p. When Virginia enters this scene, unaware at first of Theo— dore's presence, he reacts like a boy who has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar: A light step sounded without, and he froze with the corset in his hand to a statue of panic and trance and paralysis. Some one entered, his heart bounded, 69 and then stood still; for it was Psyche of the dunes, Shayne's niece, Virginia, entering jauntily, madden- ingly, like a real woman taking possession of his bedroom as her own! She had a little subjectively derived smile on her lips, held in her hands a spray of huckleberry blooms, which she put to her nostrils, and then stuck in a vase by the old mirror. She took off the memorable red hat, and pulled up her skirt with affrighting recklessness, examined her dainty stockings for dust or burs, and dropped the skirt with a little flirt, like a wren shaking a raindrop from her tail. She did a dozen things to make one fear the fate of Tom of Coventry. Every time she looked his way, Theodore quaked . . . (pp. 159—160). When Theodore (whose name means "gift of God," suggesting an innocent, Edenic gift) announces his presence, Virginia too is alarmed, for she too is a virgin (as her name suggests); yet " . . . she was the least excited of the twain. Her alarm ceased with her recognition of him; for this boy had shown himself one to be trusted" (p. 161). A trustworthy but clumsy boy, Theodore is clearly a direct contrast to the smooth and experienced Silberberg. The melodramatic clumsiness of Theodore is depicted again and again in this story. For example, when he dis- covers that the Shayne forces have stolen his virgin flying machine, the Virginia, he rants and raves, with an unfeigned antic disposition, at Wisner, one of Shayne's "devils": 'You're all linked in together!‘ he [Theodore] wailed, sitting on a bench, and feebly pounding his head against the column. 'You're the head devil! . . You stole her! Give me my million or give her back--' Carson took him by the throat, choked him purple, and banged his head against the post until the whin— ing became an outcry of real pain. . . Wizner moved away slowly, but turned at a safe distance, his eyes blazing. 'I'll fix you, you young fool!‘ he snarled. 'You think you're an engineer! I'll show you!’ 70 'Go!' said Carson. 'Before I fix you so you can't --you snake!‘ (pp. 192-193). The melodramatic conflict between an Adamic hero and a Satanic villain is illustrated not only in such scenes of confrontation between characters but also in scenes high— lighting their respective machines. Pitted against the heroic Virginia (which Carson re— covers, of course) is the villainous submarine, the Stickle- ppph, which has a "black slimy nose" (p. 248), lurks in the waters "like a shark awaiting the dropping overboard of man or other morsel" (p. 250), is a "go-devil" (p. 259), and is operated by Wizner, who (like the developing villain on the international scene in Quick's day, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II) "had a withered arm" (p. 307). The battle takes place in the chapter entitled "Devil—Fish vs. Bird" (XIII). The situation is this: Theodore and Virginia are flying in their marvelous craft in the serene heavens when they see someone in apparent distress in the bay and go to the rescue, only to find themselves deceived and their Virginia caught by a chain attached to the Stickleback: "They were chained to their fate——a dark fiend of a machine that was taking them out to sea, to deeps profound enough to drown them" (p. 264), and echoing in their ears is the "harsh, raucous laugh of Wizner" which "rose with horrid significance from the Stickleback's manhole" (p. 262). Theodore's response is to climb out and under the Virginia, file in hand, and the race against time is like the melodramatic situation of the tied—up damsel watching the train or the buzz—saw coming 71 nearer and nearer: The air—ship sank, sank, nearer and nearer to the water. . . . Carson again attacked the chain, and the shrill 'screek' of the file greeted Virginia's ears again . . . but with remorseless suction—like force the submarine drew her down closer, closer to the water, and she seemed lost. . . . Virginia looked and despaired. The waves were so terrifyingly near; death in their cold depths seemed so unthinkably horrible. . . 'I think,’ said she, 'that we are doomed. Is there anything I can do?‘ 'You might advance the spark,‘ said he (p. 269). This goes on for four pages, Virginia at the spark-levers of the aéronef and Theodore filing away, and they finally es- cape from their "deadly peril" (p. 270). A similar situa- tion occurs in the next—to-the—last chapter, where Theodore rescues Virginia from the mountain fortress of "Shayne's Hold," which is almost as fantastic as something out Of Ian Fleming. The main issue of Virginia pi the Air Lanes is the old one of monopoly, but instead of land monopoly ppi pp, the legalistic issue of air—space rights. Quick's intention is to show that air should not become the private property of anyone and, by analogy, that the common gift of land should not be (in 1909) the Object of monopolistic specu— lators either. Yet the hero, as well as the villains of this melodramatic romance, appears as a monopolist. This state of affairs can be appreciated only in the light of the relationship between Theodore Carson and his partner in crime, Craighead. Theodore meets Craighead in Chapter IV, "The Fall that Followed Pride." The "Fall" refers to Theodore's _.,.‘;.' ig-vnw __-.-3fi——.-_-u._v—._.v_égfib.pw -‘- 72 departure from his paradisiacal Carson's Landing on the Alabama coast, where he first met and rescued Virginia, and then his parachute fall from the high—flying hpp, after proudly refusing Shayne's offer to buy out his interests in both Virginia and the newly invented acronef named in her honor. Theodore falls through the night-filled space, "like a soul hurled forth into a purgatory of limitless descent" (p. 76); and he finally lands in a strange, cold, walled—in "garden" which has a "Cerberus guarding it" (p. 79). A "Cerberus," in classical mythology, was supposed to be a dog guarding the entrance and exit to Hades, and it is in this hell—like garden that Theodore meets Craighead. The garden is not Edenic but hell-like because it is associated with capitalism and the city. Craighead becomes a devilish "guide" (p. 83), a hu— morous one, for Theodore. When they meet, Craighead too is trying to find a way over the wall, his abortive attempt to climb it nearly resulting in "'a doom that . . . would have topped the agonies of deepest hell'" (pp. 81-82). Later, the innocent Theodore comes to feel "helpless in the toils of [Craighead's] serpentine logic" (p. 127) and to accept his "hissed" replies to naive questions (p. 128). Quick doubtless had in mind a serpent-like companion for his Adamic hero. When they first meet, in the mysterious garden, Craighead puzzles Theodore by using an archaic language (which has the same humorous intent that Mark Twain had in 72 departure from his paradisiacal Carson's Landing on the Alabama coast, where he first met and rescued Virginia, and then his parachute fall from the high—flying hpp, after proudly refusing Shayne's offer to buy out his interests in both Virginia and the newly invented acronef named in her honor. Theodore falls through the night-filled space, "like a soul hurled forth into a purgatory of limitless descent" (p. 76); and he finally lands in a strange, cold, walled-in "garden" which has a "Cerberus guarding it" (p. 79). A "Cerberus," in classical mythology, was supposed to be a dog guarding the entrance and exit to Hades, and it is in this hell-like garden that Theodore meets Craighead. The garden is not Edenic but hell—like because it is associated with capitalism and the city. Craighead becomes a devilish "guide" (p. 83), a hu- morous one, for Theodore. When they meet, Craighead too is trying to find a way over the wall, his abortive attempt to climb it nearly resulting in "'a doom that . . . would have topped the agonies of deepest hell'" (pp. 81-82). Later, the innocent Theodore comes to feel "helpless in the toils of [Craighead's] serpentine logic" (p. 127) and to accept his "hissed" replies to naive questions (p. 128). Quick doubtless had in mind a serpent—like companion for his Adamic hero. When they first meet, in the mysterious garden, Craighead puzzles Theodore by using an archaic language (which has the same humorous intent that Mark Twain had in -_ ..— ~——-.- 73 allowing the Duke, one of Huck Finn's guides, to speak in a mock-Shakespearean style): "'I wot we are kindred spir- its, rectified, one hundred proof, aged in the wood and bottled in bond--bottled tight! Wottest thou not so, w'at?'" (p. 82). Craighead then leads Theodore to the "fragrant and warm" greenhouse of the emporium, a "flowery jail" (p. 84) where the boy and the much older Craighead exchange informa— tion about their respective conditions. Theodore learns that the mysterious place, the empo— rium, into which he has accidentally fallen is a "drink cure" establishment, privately owned and inefficiently oper— ated, that Craighead is an alcoholic confined there against his will, and that Craighead has various useful assets, in— cluding a knowledge of the law. Craighead learns that Theodore is the inventor of a marvelous new aircraft and that this would be an excellent opportunity for monopolistic exploitation if they could only escape from the emporium. (They soon do escape and form the "great Carson-Craighead Aeronef Corporation," p. 127.) Although Craighead refers to himself, in Theodore's presence, as one of the "parasitic capitalists" (p. 98) and as one eager to "go forth and rob folks like any other good citizen" (p. 121), Theodore accepts the new partnership: not only because in his innocence he is mystified by Craig- head's "serpentine logic" but also because he would like fame and fortune to offer Virginia, his new-found girlfriend who apparently needs plenty of new and expensive clothes, 74 such as corsets. The partnership of Theodore Carson and Craighead helps illustrate Quick's satiric purpose; for Carson, in being less ambitious and less experienced in the matter of monopolistic exploitation, provides a norm for Craighead's exaggerated schemes and melodramatic delusions of grandeur: 'I'm glad,‘ said Carson, 'to get above profits. Thank Heaven, clouds can't be commercialized.‘ 'Can't, eh?‘ sneered Craighead. 'You have made good with this machine, I'll have to admit; but you lack financial resourcefulness. I've got to dig out the by-products of the company myself. One of them has just occurred to me. We'll lease sites for cap— tive balloons all along our lanes of licensed air navigation, and sell the right to throw ads for Johnson's Gum Drops and Mother Hubbard's Obesity Regulator on the shining levels of the cloud floor. It can be done by a simple mechanism-—if it isn't invented, I'll invent it in an odd moment. And we'll sell exclusive rights to throw colored pic- tures of Killarney and Senator Clark's house, and moving pictures of the great Sage—Brush Hen-House Robbery on the thunder clouds in alternation with praises of Peterson's Planetry Paint and Bugworth's Insecticide. Why, hang you, witless youth, let me outS while I work these things up, right now!‘ (p. 319 . With his extreme pro—monopoly View, Craighead becomes Quick's principal satiric mouthpiece for the opposite View (namely, that air monopoly would really be as immoral as land monopoly is). This is shown again in the courtroom scene. There Craighead begins by telling the court that airownership is "as moral as landownership": 'Cujus pp solum, ejus est usque pp coelum,’ went on Craighead, 'is the maxim on which we stand, the meaning of which has been decided in hundreds Of cases-~and, strange to say, is still clear-~"He who owns land, owns to the sky." He has as much moral right to the sky as to the surface' (pp. 372-373). 75 The satiric note begins here, of course, in the "strange . . . still clear," and in the very next sentence absurdity makes the satire clear: 'The man with a deed to a square mile of the surface of this planet, under this law, owns a great pyramid, apexing at the earth's center, and extending out into space, in diverging lines, infinitely; so that if he can show that these lines of boundary take in Mars and her canals, he would have a perfect case against the Martians for rent of fields and tolls over water- ways, if he could get service and bring the defen— dants into court' (p. 373). The whole story becomes a 424-page joke on American monopolists, who are depicted in a negative and ridiculous and melodramatic light, but the story does make a positive point, too: newness, or virginity, per pp is good. Called by Quick's most favorite name, Virginia, this is what Car— son's new machine symbolized when it was newly invented. As Virginia--the good "solid American girl" (p. 225), who did not really want the riches Theodore thought she did—- expressed it, Carson's invention of the machine was "doing, creating" but his subsequent use of it "was the old story of finding out how to exploit the world by monopoly" (p. 385). In the opening sentences of the last chapter of Virginia pi the Air Lanes, "Finale" (XIX), the narrator gives a final example of his attitude toward the melodramatic-romance technique which he has employed throughout the story: The unities doubtless require that Theodore Carson be given the credit of diving under the wreck of the ROO and rescuing his lady—love. The facts are that 75 The satiric note begins here, of course, in the "strange . . . still clear," and in the very next sentence absurdity makes the satire clear: 'The man with a deed to a square mile of the surface of this planet, under this law, owns a great pyramid, apexing at the earth's center, and extending out into space, in diverging lines, infinitely; so that if he can show that these lines of boundary take in Mars and her canals, he would have a perfect case against the Martians for rent of fields and tolls over water— ways, if he could get service and bring the defen— dants into court' (p. 373). The whole story becomes a 424-page joke on American monopolists, who are depicted in a negative and ridiculous and melodramatic light, but the story does make a positive point, too: newness, or virginity, per pp is good. Called by Quick's most favorite name, Virginia, this is what Car— son's new machine symbolized when it was newly invented. As Virginia-~the good "solid American girl" (p. 225), who did not really want the riches Theodore thought she did—- expressed it, Carson's invention of the machine was "doing, creating" but his subsequent use of it "was the old story of finding out how to exploit the world by monopoly" (p. 385). In the opening sentences of the last chapter of Virginia pi the Air Lanes, "Finale" (XIX), the narrator gives a final example of his attitude toward the melodramatic-romance technique which he has employed throughout the story: The unities doubtless require that Theodore Carson be given the credit of diving under the wreck of the R00 and rescuing his lady-love. The facts are that 76 he met at the water's edge a huge Swede in overalls carrying Virginia and towing Mr. Shayne by a line (p. 406). It is as though Quick were yawning at the formulas of ro- mance and desirous of writing in a matter-of-fact, realistic manner. In the real mid—twentieth century of America, melo— drama--with its hair—breadth escapes and rescues, mysterious places, heroes and villains—-was read, or viewed, more for the laughs it provided than for its thrills. Quick's Virginia pi the Air Lanes is an illustration of this changed attitude toward melodrama, a change very possibly beginning around 1909. However that may be, Quick's mixed or uneasy attitude toward melodrama distracts from the effectiveness of Virginia pi the Air Lanes. A good melodramatic romance should be written straight, so to speak, like a Ian Fleming story. By 1921, even Quick, looking back upon Virginia pi the Air Lanes, could refer to the banality and ineffective— ness of at least its title (he said it was "Charley Nor- cross's invention . . . a Hearst headline put to a book").10 In order to understand the development of Quick's fiction, it is profitable to compare, by way of brief sum- mary, the two works analyzed in the present chapter, ihp Egpken Lance and Virginia pi the Air Lanes. The first book fias a serious intent; the second, a humorous intent. The first emphasizes the cure for societal ills; the second, ‘ 10Letter of Herbert Quick to Hewitt Hanson Howland, April 26, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. +— 77 the disease. In both books, the heroes are essentially the same and the villains are essentially the same. The vil- lains are plutocrats, capitalistic speculators, monopolists, experienced, city men; the heroes are romantic, innocent, Adamic youths. In fact, a broader overview suggests that the one constant and recurring element in all of Quick's fiction up to 1909 was this Adamic hero. All of Quick's fictional heroes up to 1909——Edgar of ih ihp Fairyland pi America, Albert Barslow of Aladdin h Qpp, Florian Amidon of Double Trouble, Emerson Courtright of ihp Broken iphpp, Theodore Carson (and Virginia) of Virginia pi ihp iii iphpp——are essentially romantic innocents. But it may be asked at this point: what, in addi— tion to romantic innocence, did Quick's hero stand for? Certainly not capitalism (for that is either a serious evil or a ridiculous joke), and only Emerson Courtright stood for socialism, but this positive program of Emerson's was unsuccessful——was unsuccessful, it should be emphasized, in the city, which was for Emerson such an unnatural or awkward environment that it resulted in an unfortunate fall from innocence. In 1909, one could only speculate on where Quick would place—-or, perhaps, more favorably find—— his fictional hero next. CHAPTER III IN QUEST OF FORM AND PLACE, 1909—1921 As the previous chapters have shown, Quick's fic— tional writings up to 1909 had the major common denominator of a youthful, innocent hero, but this Adamic hero did not have an appropriate and consistent place, occupation, or social belief. Moreover, the literary forms-—fairytale, romance, melodrama, novel, satiric romance——suggest that Quick was searching for a proper form in which to present his hero, as well as for an appropriate place, occupation, or social belief. Quick's quest for literary form and proper setting continued from 1909 to 1921, and the fictional works he wrote during these years suggest that while he still had problems in writing fiction he clarified his hero's place, occupation, and social belief. And in clarifying these, Quick completed the conditions of what he considered the true American identity. The purpose of the present chapter is to analyze the works--Yellowstone Nights (1911), ihp hpphh Mphpp (1915), ihp Fairview iipp (1919), and Wp prp Changed iii ihpi (co-authored with Mrs. Elena Stepanoff MacMahon in 1921, published in 1928)——in which Quick con— tinued his search and made his clarification. 78 —_’—" 79 The form of Yellowstone Nights is a collection of stories, framed in a manner suggestive of Chaucer's Canter-— bury Laps: Quick's frame situation is that of eight Sight—seers taking a pleasant trip in a surrey, drawn by four horses, through Yellowstone National Park; at the end of each day's tour, one of the characters takes a turn in telling a "Yellowstone Nights' Entertainment" story to his companions gathered around a campfire of fellowship. Fol— lowing Chaucer, Quick calls each tale—teller by a general— ized or occupational name most of the time; they are the Poet, the Bride and the Groom, the Driver, the Professor, the Hired Man, the Colonel, and the Artist.1 It is the dove—like Bride (instead of some hearty Harry Bailly) who proposes the plan of story-telling and of drawing the "loser's" name from a hat each evening. That Quick had Chaucer in mind is also suggested by certain passages in the text Of Yellowstone Nights. There is reference to "Thomas a Becket" (p. 41), "'the tale of the Patient Griselda'" (p. 55), "Zephyrus" (p. 156), one Who é§ives "Pardon" (p. 171), a "'Mr. Clerk'" (p. 173), "lawyers" who are "too busy" (p. 207), a story character named "Absalom" (pp. 211, 215), a "plowman" and "Poet's \ 1Individual names are given for all but the Poet and the Artist. The Bride is "Dolly" Aurelia (Amelia) Blunt Helmerston (pp. 6, 42, 47); the Groom is "Billy" HelmeI‘ston (pp. 6, 39); the Driver is Aconite Driscoll p. 7 pi passim); the Professor is Oscar Boggs (PP. 153, 206); the Hired Man is Bill Snoke (pp. 183, 195, 207); the Colonel is Baggs (p. 207). 80 (hoiflaer" (p. 345). And there is the technique of describing a (ghaiacter through the use of small details (like Chaucer's 'bliie-hooded, brawny Robin Miller, who had a wide nose, a vwazrt thereon and a tuft of red hairs sprouting out of the vwazvt); thus Quick's Groom's description of "Goliath," a 'Wartawny western farmer": His hat was broad as a prairie. . . . A few dried alfalfa leaves had lodged in the angle between the crown and the brim, and clung there. . . . His face was enormous but not puffy; and the red veinlets on the cheek and nose had acquired their varicosity by weathering rather than by indulgence. His hair was clipped short. . . . He had a high beak of a nose, with rugged promontories of bone at the bridge, like the shoulders of a hill; and his mouth ‘was . . . huge . . . like the mouth of a cave. His shirt was of blue flannel. . . . great mus— cular neck. . . His trousers were spotted with the stains of sstables; and his huge boots, like barges . . . (pp. 91—93). Even. some of the phraseology in this technique of multi- Plicj_ty of detail suggests Chaucer. Quick's "His hat was broarl as a prairie“ brings to mind the Wife of Bath, on whose: head was a "hat/ As brood as is a bokeler or a targe." In Yert another passage Quick employs the Chaucerian phrase "for"the nonce" (p. 146). Quick even gives a parallel, echoing version of the love1~'s malady described in Chaucer's Knight's Tale; Quick's :PTOffxssor's version of this "disease" is as follows: . Whipple Cavanaugh had been idle and 'lawless' Slance attending school. Refused nourishment. Pil- JJJW wet with tears. Kissed Cavanaugh's mare, 'Old 1ELora,‘ on nose after Miss Frayn had patted her on Said.spot. Had written a poem to Roberta, and rather than.have it read publicly by the hired girl, who had Ifound it under his pillow, had eaten it, paper, ink, 81 and all. Doctor Dilworthy called in; pronounced him in danger of gastritis and love—sickness with grave prognosis (pp. 166—167). In. additional satire, Quick's Professor comments on modern, ruat; medieval-renaissance, scientific jargon: There was a certificate of Doctor Dilworthy of Teal Lake as to the existence of many cases of 'ex- treme mental exaltation accompanied by explosive and fulminant cerebral disturbances traceable to mediate or immediate association with one Roberta Lee Frayn, an individual seemingly possessed of an abnormal power in the way of causing obsessions, fixed ideas, aberrant cranio-spinal functionings, and cranial tempests, in those of her associates resembling her in the matter of age, and differing from her in social habits, hereditary, constitution, and sex' (pp. 167—168). The IProfessor, whose story is one of the best, also makes hunmxr of "medieval notions of honor and personal dignity" and 'the "Iowa Code" (pp. 171—172). There are twelve or thirteen stories in Yellowstone Nighissu depending on how one counts,2 and not counting the brief‘ anecdotal legends about the Park which are woven into the l;inks between the stories prOper. These stories are giverl in the following order: "A Telepathic Tragedy, Being the Ertory Told by the Minor Poet," "The Triumph of Billy Hell, {Phe Story Told by the Bride," "The Triumph of Billy Hell, (Phe Second Part of the Bride's Story" (which has the same Cflqaracters but a different thematic statement, and it aPIK%trs in.a separate chapter, just like any of the other stoxfixes), ”The Heart of Goliath, The Story Told by the \ . 2If the "Second Part" of the Bride's story is con- Sldelkfld as a continuation of the one story allotted her, 115311 the book contains twelve stories; if not, then a baker” s dozen. ¥_ 82 Groom," "The Tale of the Ten Thousand Dogies, The Tale Told by the Driver," "A Belated Rebel Invasion, The Professor's story," "From Alpha to Omega, The Hired Man's Story," "The Law and Amelia Whinnery, The Tale of Colonel Baggs of Omaha," "Henry Peters's Signature, The Hired Man's Second Tale," "The Return of John Smith, The Story Narrated by the Artist," "The Federal Imp Company, The Professor's Second Tale," "The Jilting of Mr. Driscoll, Aconite's Second Tale," and "The Stalking of Pauguk, The Poet's Second Story." Of these stories, at least three were previously and separately published (with very slight differences): "Be- tween Alpha and Omega," Putnam's (November, 1908), "Old Hen and the Experts," Century (February, 1909), and "Tele- pathic Tragedy," CosmOpolitan (March, 1909). The "Old Hen" story was retitled "Henry Peters's Signature" in the book's collection. The same question that George Lyman Kittredge asked Of Chaucer's Tpipp may with profit be asked of Quick's m: do the stories stand by themselves or are they illustrations of the characters who tell them? There can be little doubt that Quick intended the latter alternative. The Outstanding possible exceptions are the three tales PreViously published, which are relatively weak stories and Which have signs of being rather expediently injected into the framework plan that Quick conceived sometime between 1909 and 1911. For example, Quick as omniscient narrator refers to "Henry Peters's Signature" as an "unimportant 83 teale" (p. 221)-—unimportant because it does not contribute pgiénaificantly to the real drama developing as the little (goinpany of tourists make their half—month journey through tile: wonders of the Park. As in Chaucer's ipipp, Quick's company splits into ftacrtions. Friendships are made for the nonce. Quarrels fleaire and come dangerously close to getting out of hand. Tefllees are even interrupted in the midst of their telling. IDehnates are conducted on the subjects of law and business etlrics, and love and marriage. The central and most sus- taiiied quarrel motif is that involving the Bride vs. the ColAJnel. This key motif should be examined in detail in ordexr to discover the overall theme of the book. At the beginning of the journey, "all looked at the Brides [the only female present] as commander—in-chief" (p. 8), tout it is only moments later that the Colonel begins to chal].enge the wisdom Of that evaluation, for when the Bride 'beconies excited over the first sight, ”the huge stream of hot waiter where Boiling River bursts from its Opening in the becks, and falls steaming into the Gardiner": Colonel Baggs asserted that hot water is hot Waiter, no matter where found or in whatever quan- tj.ties, and couldn't be considered much of a Wonder (p. 9). .And Wfllen the "Bride and Groom announced their intention to take Ipot luck with the rest, though the great hotel was Ireadpr for their reception," the Colonel sarcastically remarks: .i____________.___----IIIII-llllllllllllllllEFTT 84 'We are honored, I am sure. Would that we had a troupe of performing nightingales to clothe the night with charm fit for so lovely a member of i the party' (p. 10). The Bride rejoins, "Oh, thank you ever so much, but"~—and then proposes hp; plan for story—telling. These are the small beginnings of the antagonism between the Bride, who tries to appear as a sweet young thing of innocence, and the Colonel, who makes no bones about his age and experience—— the Colonel is the only one to have visited the Park before, thirty—three years earlier (p. 21). The Bride, abiding by the rules she herself made, has her name drawn for the telling of the second story, and she delivers the "only one story a bride can tell" (p. 27), the story of courtship. In the middle of her story about Billy, who was a sort of "hobo" with no worldly goods but who successfully courted in the American way the boss's daughter, the Bride is interrupted by another sarcastic re— mark of the Colonel's: "'Blessed be the hobo, for he shall reach paradise!'" (p. 35). Apparently unruffled, the Bride continues to tell how she, in the story, playfully deceived her Billy concerning her identity, calling herself Amelia when her real name was Aurelia. Then she concludes by PromiSing another part of her story for the following evening around the campfire——which would, in a sense, give her a chance to tell two stories even though her name was drawn but once. The Colonel—-noting the Bride's penchant for decep— tion as given in her story, her mild flirtation with the h: 7,, ‘1‘ 85 Poet in the group (pp. 11, 28, 54), and her demonstration of toying with the rules of the company's game——has some justification for interrupting the Bride's "second" story before she even gets started in telling it. The Colonel does this by starting an uncalled—for tale of his own, based upon his previous experience in the Park, a tall—tale about the Nez Perce Creek (pp. 54-59)--thereby flinging down and all but dancing on the Bride's rule for law and order. The Hired Man and the Poet side with the Bride and try to stop the Colonel: 'Here,’ said the Hired Man [to the Colonel]. 'You tell the rest of this to marines.‘ I I 'Thank God!‘ breathed the Poet. 'Even a Mon- tana hotel was a sweet boon as bringing the end of these troubles' (p. 58). But the Colonel is not easily stopped: "'Who said it was the end?‘ inquired the Colonel. 'It wasn't'" (p. 58). And he goes merrily on with his tall-tale. The Bride employs her naivete for criticism, and the Colonel finally stops talking, though he has Aconite the Driver on his Side: 'And all that took place right here?‘ asked the Bride. 'Here and hereabouts,‘ answered the Colonel. 'I was here about the time, and I know.’ . . . said Aconite. . . . 'The Colonel's correct. The tale is true!l 'So you don't want the rest of [my] story?‘ she queried. 'Ma'am,‘ said the Hired Man. 'We should all be darned sorry to lose you . . . ' p. 59 . Although the Bride's second story concludes with her approaching marriage to Billy, thereby linking this to 86 her first story, this second story is largely devoted to explaining a business transaction and makes the thematic statement that the staging of a deception is ethical busi- ness. Her first story says that all is fair in love; her second, in business. The Colonel has time enough to ponder these doctrines while four intervening tales are told, and then he delivers his story—reply. There are too many aspects of the Colonel's story for it not to have been aimed at the Bride. First, the title is "The Law and Amelia Whinnery," using a name, Amelia, the Bride had used in reference to herself. Second, Amelia Whinnery's lover's name is Bill Williams, a name doubly suggestive of the name of the Bride's lover and sub— sequent husband, Billy, who by the Bride's own admission had learned or exhibited crooked or deceptive ways during his association with her. In the Colonel's story, Miss Whinnery's husband's name is Bob Fink, who during his court— ship of her exhibited deception also. The other major character in the Colonel's story is named Absolom Scales, the defending attorney for the C. & S. W. Railroad, whose name suggests not only an instrument of justice but also a character in Chaucer's rather racy Miiippip Tpip. The Colonel relates that Amelia was an opportunistic schoolteacher who was involved one fine night in a bus-train accident and apparently shocked speechless thereby, and who sued the c. & s. w. Company and in the process married her attorney, Bob Fink, whose victorious reward, the Colonel 87 sgqys, was a questionable maidenly virtue. The Colonel says tILis by means of suggestive diction (italics added below); a11C1 Quick displays an excellent comic touch when he allows tliea Bride of Yellowstone Nights demonstrate that she, at least, is not speechless: 'We [the Colonel and Absolom] proved that she [Miss Whinnery] was doing right well financially when the railroad put her out of business by fail— ing to ring a bell or toot a whistle at the cross- ing coming into Tovala, and catching Bill Williams' bus asleep at the switch. Miss Whinnery was in the bus. When it was all over, she was in pretty fair shape-—' _ 'Naturally,’ interpolated the Artist. 'Excepting that her nerves had got some kind of shock and she was robbed permanently of the power of speech.’ 'How terrible!‘ exclaimed the Bride (p. 209). Miss; Whinnery shows her physically alluring “shape" at the trienl, where she wears a "close—fitting dress" (p. 209); and altkuough she was probably not pregnant, the Colonel leaves littfile doubt about her posturings on the night in question; for zafter the trial, which Bob Fink wins by playing on the "P001? girl" sympathies and anti—railroad prejudices of the jury' (and despite his knowledge of Amelia's merely acting dumb) , Bill Williams appears to confront the new bride and groonl with a claim of his own: VVell, Bill comes in with his claim against Amelia 811d Bob for two or three hundred dollars for his blls. They disdainfully gave him the ha—ha. 'Then,‘ says Bill Williams, 'I will tell all, “Roman!' Amelia flushed, and looked inquiringly at Bob. Bob walked up to Bill and hissed: 'What do you Inean, you hound, by insulting my wife in this way!‘ 'She knows what I mean,‘ yelled Bill, turning On.Amelia. 'Ask your wife what she an' I was talkin' about when we was a—crossing the track that time. Ask her if she didn't say to me that 88 I was the perfec'ly perportioned physical man, an' whether I didn't think that men an' women of each perportions should mate; an' if she didn't make goo—goo eyes at me, ontil I stuck back my head to kiss her, an' whether she wasn't a-kissin' me when that freight come a pirootin' down an' run over her talkin' apparatus! Ask her if she didn't say she could die a—kissin' me, an' if she didn't come danged near doin' it!‘ 'How perfectly horrid!’ gasped the Bride (p. 213). Hearing this bit about what may be called the untimely kiss, the gasping Bride nearly loses the power of her own "talkin' apparatus"; but when "Amelia Whinnery Fink, defendant in error, and permanently dumb, turned loose" with a torrent of words hotly protesting and defending her honor, the Bride loudly interjects: "'I don't blame her!'" (p. 214). The Colonel ends his story by saying that the court did not reverse its previous decision about the dumb Amelia, that the court was very wise, never to be criticized, and that the whole case was "locally regarded as a good joke on the railroad“ (p. 216), and of course on Absolom, who was left out in the cold, as it were, along with the true jus- tice and good faith he represented. This story has its effect on the Bride and makes her think; she is the first to respond to the Colonel: 'But was it honest?’ queried the Bride. 'Honest, me lady!‘ repeated the Colonel, p ip Othello (p. 216). Subsequent examples of the quarrel motif of the E32r‘ide vs. the Colonel may be briefly noted. In the very rlext chapter-link, after the Colonel's story, the Bride, vVho had previously been rather enthusiastic about the vYonders of the Park, says, dejectedly, of a Park wonder, 89 "‘I don't care much for this'"-—and the Colonel, with an ex— hilaration born of his successful tale, says, "'What's the next marvel?'" (p. 218). When the Bride comments on "'how peaceful and sort of comforting the river is . . as placid as a lake--or some deep river—~like the Thames——made for ,'" the Colonel, with his shout "'See To- pleasure boats the trout leapI'", suggests an opposite view (p. 245). ward the end of the book, the Bride sees "another monument placed . . . by the gods with manifest intention," and another flare—up between her and the Colonel occurs: 'Reminds me of the providential way that rivers always run past cities, just where they are needed,‘ carped the Colonel. 'It isn't the same thing,‘ said the Bride hotly. 'You're getting mean, Colonel!l 'Honing for the wrangle of the courts, Bride,’ said he. 'I apologize' (Pp. 294-295). In the book's last paragraph the Bride bids all good-by, but she names the Colonel last and her tone is less favor— able toward him; she also knits up the unity of the book—- "'We have made a continued story of our trip . . .'" (p. 345). The respective characters of the quarreling Bride arm.Colonel represent a continuation of a major problem that (Quick had dealt with in his previous fiction: the vexed Ilroblem of innocence vs. experience. The young Bride is Eipparently a romantic innocent but, in View of the Colonel's Qiuarrel with her, it is suggested that she might well be a héfipocrite too. The old Colonel, for his part, is apparently Idle voice of realistic and pragmatic experience, but in the . .. . a . 1. I It . I n — . I. l . I 1. I1 I I n r | L 1 v 1 n . ~ . I . . J I . ... I I i . \ t \ 90 last analysis he has not lost his idealistic or innocent values (which do not include deceptions, nor illicit flir— tations and affairs). It is thus entirely understandable and fitting that Quick's Bride and Colonel were impelled to quarrel. Quick's theme in Yellowstone Nights is a question—— where or in whom can true innocence be found?—-and it is illustrated by several tales in the book's collection. There is the Bride's second story of the by-hook—or—by—crook rise of Billy from rags to riches, thereby raising the question of the moral rightness of an American myth formula. There is the Professor's story of "A Belated Rebel Inva— sion," which is a spoof on American courts as an instrument for righteous progress. There is the Colonel's story, which not only attacks the Bride but also has the thesis that, like the Professor's story, the courts are legally con— stituted for wrong—doing. There is the Artist's serious tale, "The Return of John Smith," with its thesis that one should leave the courts and look elsewhere for justice, truth, and unspoiled conditions, such as back on the farm and next to nature. There is the Professor's second tale, "The Federal Imp Company," which likens business trusts to ESatan incarnated. And there is the final tale in the 53eries, the Poet's second, "The Stalking of Pauguk," which Irelates how an American businessman, burdened with the éfllilt of his business success, stalks Death in the Minnesota woods. .0 ":5.’.M~4A .-.—4-'~ - ‘ 91 It is important to emphasize here that in allowing different characters to tell the tales and to give the vari- ous and quarreling viewpoints, Quick escaped a principal failure of his previous fictional works, each of which, it will be recalled, had a single narrator plagued by mixed or inconsistent views and literary styles. In Yellowstone Nights each character—narrator says what he has to say in his own way. For example, the Driver, in his "The Tale of Ten Thousand Dogies," speaks in a Western dialect which is consistent and appropriate; the Bride, on the other hand, imitates the literary style of the "romances" which she has read and which, appropriately enough, she insists her com- panions in the Park also tell (though, of course, they do not carry out her wishes in this regard). Yet, for all the quarreling and the suitable diversity of styles, the book has an overall unity; the journey through the Park is, as the Bride says, "a continued story." For behind all the tales in Yellowstone Nights is the land where they are told; and, in addition to the quarrel motifs that are woven throughout the entire text, the unity of the book is made clear by these landscape (descriptions which are found in the links between the tales Ixroper and which constitute one—fifth of the book. These Ciescriptions of the Park show it in a highly favorable lflight, and the wondrous land often has a pacifying effect Orl those tourists whose quarrels might otherwise get out of :heuad. Quick the overall—narrator is rapturous in describing 92 this land, as for example when the tourists make a turn and "suddenly": . there burst upon their sight that most marvelous of inland seas, Yellowstone Lake. Straight away ex- tended its waters, for twenty miles, to the dim shores of Elk Point, where the pines carried the wonderful landscape upward, their gloom cutting straight across the view, between the mirror—like sheen of the lake, to timber-line on the azure Absarokas, standing serenely across the eastern sky, their serrated sum- mits picked out with snow against the blue (p. 150). In the paragraph immediately following, Quick suggests that this wondrous and breath—takingly beautiful land is symbolic of a religion and has the soothing effects of a religion: A huge chalice lay the lake, reared to a height of a mile and a half above the dusty and furrowed earth where folk plow and dig and make their livings, the crown jewel of the continent's diadem, unutter- ably, indescribably lovely, filled with crystalline dew. The tourists caught their breaths. Aconite said nothing. For a long time they stood, until the horses began to move backward and forward, uneasy at the unwonted stay. The Bride was holding the Groom's hand, her eyes glistening with tears (pp. 150—151). In such an unspoiled, Edenic setting, quarrels cannot be- come seriously sour. Just as Chaucer's pilgrims journey to the shrine at Canterbury, so also do Quick's tourists make a pilgrimage to the virgin land, or, as it is frequently called, the "heavenly" land. One reason why it is "heavenly" is that "the tourists (and indeed all other citizens) own it in COmmon: The sense of ownership grew upon them. Here was their own pleasure-ground. It was theirs by virtue of their citizenship. They might not visit it often—- though all declared their intention of coming back every summer—-but, anyhow, it would be fine to know 93 that here on the summit of the continent was this wonderland, owned by them and each of them (pp. 185—186). The government—owned Park is an Edenic sanctuary of natural healing powers, set apart from such troubles down below as those which bedeviled Emerson Courtright in The Broken Lance. Set on the summit of the continent, Yellowstone National Park is thankfully out of the reach of capitalistic land speculators.3 What Quick clearly located in Yellowstone Nights was the object of his fictional search, namely, the lost Adamic place. This Adamic landscape was the proper object of won— drous worship and pilgrimage. Yet how——caught up in contem— porary problems associated chiefly with the rapid urbaniza- tion (hence degeneration) of America—~how could one preserve or recapture Adamic innocence down below? Or, what should the pilgrims do after they left the Park? Quick gave a key answer to this question in his next two works of fiction, or rather semifiction, The Brown Mouse (1915) and The Fairview Idea (1919). The Brown Mouse contains the fictional elements of story and character, but its propagandistic purpose so (dominates these elements that they are often lost sight of. _‘ 3Quick was preaching against land speculators in his Iionfictional writings, too. For example, in his Farm and lEireside editorial of October 11, 1911, he said that the 13ests (in Florida) are not the "fleas, snakes, 'red bugs' Enid mosquitoes," since there "are remedies for them all," tmt rather "the greatest pests . . . [are] the land- Eflaark and real—estate pirates." 94 The social propaganda is so explicit that many passages in this book are scarcely distinguishable from the nonfiction Quick wrote from 1909 to 1921, such as his semimonthly edi- torials in Farm and Fireside and the speeches he prepared in connection with his position in the Federal Farm Loan Bureau. As a matter of fact, The Brown Mouse is an ex— panded--and fictionalized--version of a speech which Quick delivered in 1911 at Madison, Wisconsin, entitled "The Rural Awakening in Its Relation to Civic and Social Center Development."4 In any case, the purpose of The Brown Mouse is unmistakably clear: to promote a "new kind of rural school" (p. 32). But before discussing that purpose in detail, the story and characterization should be reviewed. The main character is Jim Irwin, the twenty-eight— year—old son of a poor family in rural Iowa of the twentieth century. He is depicted (by a third—person narrator) as a "clodhopper" who has educated himself by reading dime novels, various farm papers, and the works of such writers as Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Carlyle, Shakespeare, and Byron (pp. 10-11, 13), of whom his favorite is Emerson. In fact, Jim's way of thinking is basically Emersonian, as is shown, for example, by his response to Colonel Woodruff's "dictum, 'Any job's as big as the man who holds it down‘": this "was an.Emersonian truism to Jim" (p. 47). ‘ 4Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin (Madison, 1912), Ser. No. 474, Gen. Ser. No. 310. Quick gave a £3horter version of this "Address delivered before the First 1National Conference on Civic and Social Center Development" Iln.his Farm and Fireside editorial of January 6, 1912. 95 Tall and slim, and ignorant in the matter of stylish clothes, Jim is often likened to Abraham Lincoln: Jim "had fine, lambent, gentle eyes which lighted up his face when he smiled, as Lincoln's illuminated his" (p. 10). The "Lincolnian smile" (pp. 39, 53) is the most prominent physi- cal feature of "the gangling, Lincolnian, ill—dressed, poverty-stricken Jim Irwin" (p. 210). As the story develops, Jim's mission becomes the freeing of the slaves to confor— mity, the slaves to an educational tradition in the contem— porary rural Iowa community. At the beginning of the story, Jim, despite having been a star pupil in school and despite having earned a teacher's certificate, is still just a hired farm—hand. He does not teach because the salary is so low that it would not support him and any wife he might select; he also does not like the methods of the school. Instead, he works on Colonel Woodruff's farm, where he can at least be near the girl of his dreams, the Colonel's daughter, Jennie. It is Jennie Woodruff who rekindles Jim's ambition to make something of himself; but, contrary to Jennie's suggestion (that he seek fame and fortune in the big city), Jim is determined to stay in the country——because, as he puts it, "I love the soil!" (p. 5). Also, to improve him— self and his station in life, Jim thinks that he must Zreform the society in which he lives--much like Emerson (Iourtright (except that Courtright sought to reform a city Esociety, not a rural one). Jim's key to rural reform is 96 his theory of educational method. Jim is prompted to make his new educational theory a reality when he finally proposes marriage and receives Jennie's prompt reply of "Humph!" (in Chapter I, "A Maiden's 'Humph!'"). Determined to make a name for himself and to become worthy of Jennie, Jim runs for the position of schoolteacher, is elected (unintentionally by the typi- cally——and, in this case, ironically——incompetent school board), and proceeds to institute his own program in the school. Throughout the story, Jim has the backing of Colo— nel Woodruff but the questionable support of Jennie, who becomes the county superintendent and supposed guardian of the traditional educational methods. These traditional methods are simply based on text- books which were written for city children, not rural chil— dren. Also, some of the subjects taught, such as Latin, have a dubious value anywhere in twentieth—century America, as far as the majority of the pupils are concerned. Again and again Jim argues for the new methods, as for example in the following conversation with Jennie: 'Jim,‘ said she, 'you're going to have a hard enough time to succeed in the Woodruff school, if you confine yourself to methods that have been tested and found good.‘ 'But the old methods,’ urged Jim, 'have been tested and found bad. Shall I keep to them?‘ 'They have made the American people what they are,’ said Jennie. 'Don't be unpatriotic, Jim.‘ 'They have educated our farm children for the cities,‘ said Jim. 'This Country is losing popula- tion—~and it's the best country in the world.’ 'Pessimism never wins,‘ said Jennie. 'Neither does blindness,’ answered Jim. 'It is 97 losing the farms their dwellers, and swelling the cities with a proletariat' (pp. 60-61). This propagandistic dialogue is wordily dominant in the book; another example follows: 'Jim,‘ she said pleadingly, 'I want you to give up this sort of teaching. Can't you see it's all wrong?‘ 'No,‘ answered Jim, in much the manner of a man who has been stabbed by his sweetheart. 'I can't see that it's wrong. It's the only sort I can do. What do you see wrong in it?‘ 'Oh, I can see some very wonderful things in it,' said Jennie, 'but it can't be done in the Woodruff District. It may be correct in theory, but it won't work in practise.‘ 'Jennie,‘ said he, 'when a thing won't work, it isn't correct in theory. 'Well, then, Jim,’ said she, 'why do you keep on with it?‘ 'It works,‘ said Jim. 'Anything that's correct in theory will work. If the theory seems correct, and yet won't work, it's because something is wrong in an unsuspected way with the theory. But my theory is correct, and it works' (pp. 138—139). Jim's educational theory and program is pragmatic; as he says: 'Froebel, Pestalozzi, Colonel Parker——they all had the idea which is at the bottom of my work; "learn to do by doing,“ and connecting up the school with life' (p. 242). Jim believes that the farm children should learn lessons and practice skills which will fit them for life on the :farm, not in the city. And it is in this regard that the taook's propagandistic purpose overshadows the rather frail Estory framework. Indeed, The Brown Mouse contains so many specific :Lessons or teaching tips that it is a sort of manual for Irragmatic rural schoolteachers. A typical schoolroom where ____ .. __ .-. .—-v-'—'z."r‘;'.. - _q_d.~ a -,,,._...-,_.‘fi 98 such teachers would guide their pupils is described as follows: To be sure, there were on the blackboards exercises and outlines, of lessons in language, history, mathe- matics, geography and the like. But these were not the usual things taken from text—books. The problems in arithmetic were calculations as to the feeding value of various rations for live stock, records of laying hens and computation as to the excess of value in eggs pro- duced over the cost of feed. Pinned to the wall were market reports on all sorts of farm products, and es- pecially numerous were the statistics on the prices of cream and butter. There were files of farm papers piled about, and racks of agricultural bulletins. In one cor- ner of the room was a typewriting machine, and in another a sewing machine. Parts of an old telephone were scattered about on the teacher's desk. A model of piggery stood on a shelf, done in cardboard. In— stead of the usual collection of text—books in the desk, there were hectography COpieS of exercises, reading lessons, arithmetical tables and essays on various mat- ters relating to agriculture . . . (pp. 70—71). A typical morning in Jim's school for life-adjustment is narrated as follows: This morning, Jim had arranged in various sorts of dishes specimens of grain and grass seeds. By each was a card bearing the name of the farm from which one of the Older boys or girls had brought it. 'Wheat, Scotch Fife, from the farm of Columbus Smith.‘ 'Timothy, or Herd's Grass, from the farm of A. B. Talcott.‘ 'Alsike Clover, from the farm of B. B. Hamm.‘ Each lot was in a small cloth bag which had been made by one of the little girls as a sewing exercise; and each card had been written as a lesson in penmanship by one of the younger pupils, and contained, in addition to the data mentioned above, heads under which to enter the number of grains of the seed examined, the number which grew, the percentage of viability, the number of alien seeds of weeds and other sorts, the names of these adulter- ants, the weight of true and vitalized, and of foul and alien and dead seeds, the value per bushel in the local market of the seeds under test, and the real market values of the samples, after dead seeds and alien matter had been subtracted (pp. 83—84). Iqor‘aie such matters as lessons on traditional literature 99 neglected, for on this particular morning: "The reading lesson was an article on corn condensed from a farm paper, and a selection from Hiawatha—~the Indian—corn myth" (p. 85). The pupils find that attending this school is "a frolic, rather than a task" (p. 84), and Jim becomes their idol. But the adults in the community, particularly those on the school board, need further convincing. And the nar- rator exploits scenes outside of the classroom, as well as inside, for his propagandistic purpose. For example, there is the scene of the dinner at the Woodruffs: 'I'd like to see the school class that could pre- pare this dinner,’ said Mrs. Woodruff. 'Why,‘ said Jim, 'you'd be there showing them now! They'd get credits in their domestic—economy course for getting the school dinner——and they'd bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their classes. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve. The setting of the table would come in as a study-~flowers, linen and all that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!‘ (pp. 118—119). Ill his very next outburst, Jim blends his Emersonian way of 'tllinking (of seeing the relationship among various things) VVi.th his enthusiasm for pragmatic, utilitarian education: 'And when the food came on the table,‘ Jim went on . . 'just think of the things we could study while eating it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it——well, the discussion of a meal under pro- per guidance is much more educative than a lecture. This breast—bone, now,‘ said he, referring to the re— mains on his plate. 'That's physiology. The cranberry— sauce-—that's botany, and commerce, and soil manage- ment--do you know, Colonel, that cranberry must have an acid soil-—which would kill alfalfa or clover? . 'And the difference between the types of fowl on the table-—that' s breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut-—that's geography. And everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked 100 to our lives by dollars and cents--and they're mathematics' (pp. 119-120). The voice of the school board, Superintendent Jennie, ob- jects to this pragmatic doctrine: 'We must have something more than dollars and cents in life. . . . We must have culture.’ 'Culture,‘ cried Jim, 'is the ability to think in terms of life-~isn't it?‘ (p. 120).. Because of Jim's nonconformity (to the traditional definition of culture and methods of education), Colonel Woodruff calls him a "Brown Mouse." Quick probably got the idea of a "Brown Mouse" from his reading of farm papers dur— ing his youth in Iowa; in any case, the Colonel explains this quaint term as follows: 'A fellow in Edinburgh . . . crossed the Japanese waltzing mouse with the common white mouse. Jim's peddling father was a waltzing mouse, no good except to jump from one spot to another for no good reason. Jim's mother is an albino of a woman, with all the color washed out in one way or another. Jim ought to be a mongrel, and I've always considered him one. But the Edinburgh fellow every once in a while got out of his variously-colored, waltzing and albino hybrids, a brown mouse. It wasn't a common house mouse, either, but a wild mouse unlike any he had ever seen. It ran away, and bit and gnawed, and raised hob. It was what we breeders call a Mendelian segregation of genetic factors that had been in the waltzers and albinos all the time-—their original wild ancestor of the woods and fields. If Jim turns out to be a Brown Mouse, he may be a bigger man than any of us. Anyhow, I'm for him' (pp. 45-46). MCDIreover, such a mouse stimulates change: 'Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse,‘ said the colonel. 'So was George Washington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears he changes things in a little way or a big way.‘ 'For the better, always?‘ asked Jennie. 'No,' said the colonel. 'The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant—headed savagery. But Jim . . . 101 sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort' (p. 105). It need hardly be elaborated that since 1915 the public schools and colleges of America have become filled with pragmatic Brown Mice. In ihp hiphh Mphpp, one of the main changes effected by Jim Irwin is the attitude of the pupils, of whom Newton Bronson is the chief example. Newton had disliked school, skipping it often and spending too much of his time roaming the woods with other "Boy Trappers" and imitating in games such dime-novel heroes as Dead—Shot Dick (p. 75). Without meaningful guidance in his boyhood, Newton would later leave the country to seek more spectacular frivolities in the city. But he is spared that fate because of the "savior" .Iim Irwin, who has remembered only too well his own ragged sand aimless "Boyville." Newton, of course, becomes a regu— liir attender at the "truly rural rural—school" and bent on k>ecoming a successful farmer in that district. Jim understands the parents as well as the children (>1? the community. He makes a "survey" of all the farms in ‘tlle district; he . . . had note—books full of facts about people and their farms. He knew how many acres each family pos— 'sessed, and what sort of farming each husband was doing ——live stock, grain or mixed. He knew about the mort- gages, and the debts . . . the horses, the automobiles, the silo~filling machinery and the profits of farming (pp. 51—52). With all his gathered information, Jim is in a key position tO recommend improvements for all the farmers, and he argues 102 for a "cooperative" way of life; for example, he says to the farmers: 'Let's get together and pool our cream. By that, I mean that we'll all sell to the same creamery, and get the best we can out of the centralizers by the OOOperative method. We can save two cents a pound in that way, and we'll learn to COOperate. When we have found just how well we can hang together, we'll be able to take up the cooperative creamery, with less danger of falling apart and failing. 'Who'll handle the pool?‘ inquired Mr. Hansen. 'We'll handle it in the school, answered Jim (p. 214). In fact, everything is to be handled in the new rural school, which is to be not only the "educational center" and the "business center" but also the "social center" of the country—side-—a center into which all would be drawn "like a swarm of bees into a hive" (pp. 271, 299). This school— .house is to be a "twentieth—century temple" for parents and <3hildren alike, with Jim as its "chief priest" (p. 309) This, then, is what the pilgrims of Yellowstone DIights should do after they leave the Park: they should re- ‘tllrn to their rural homes and stay put. They should not EllLlow themselves to be drawn by the city—magnet, which in Ellllikelihood will produce a profound moral criSls, as the $3I‘own Mouse's narrator, in total abandonment of a fictional ‘t<>11e (evidenced by the "1"), A moral crisis accompanies the passing of a man from the struggle with the soil to any occupation, the productiveness of which is not quite so clear. . I think there is a real moral principle involved. I believe that this deep instinct for labor in and about the soil is a valid one, and that the gathering together of people in cities has been at the cost of an obscure but actual moral shock. I doubt if the people of the cities can ever he explains: 103 at rest in a future full of moral searchings of con— science until every man has traced definitely the connection of the work he is doing with the mainte— nance of his country's population. Sometimes those vocations whose connection can not be so traced will be recognized as wicked ones . . . (pp. 204—205). In a larger sense, Quick‘s purpose in ihp hiphh Mouse was to pump new life into a Jeffersonian agrarianism, or what Henry Nash Smith has called "the Myth of the Gar- den."5 America would be made strong only if it had enough farmers, and these farmers would stay in the God—given country only if they received, as boys, the pragmatic educa— tion which would keep them there. To Quick, saving the Adamic boy depended on keeping him in Eden, where he would, under proper educational guidance, naturally learn to love the soil and to derive joy from tending it. Moreover, those who were lured east of Eden were to be more pitied than con- ciemned; they could well be reminded of their paradise lost—— j_f, for instance, the farm folk sent them surplus flowers, ffiruits, jellies, "little shipments of rural life, little églnimpses of heaven"6—-and perhaps be persuaded to return to ‘tlie meaningful life next to nature. Quick's purpose in The Brown Mouse was essentially I‘EEIJeated in The Fairview Idea: A Story pi the New Rural la2;ip_(1919). Both books are propagandistic, semifictional VVC>Iks in behalf of American rural life. Both deal with 5Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol (C3ahmridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 124 EIE,passim. 6"With the Editor," Farm and Fireside, June 8, 1912, p. 2. 104 what Quick considered the most important contemporary dan— ger, the drift to the cities, and both give specific solu— tions designed, hopefully, to keep people in the country. If anything, The Fairview Idea is even more explicit in propagandizing this good life on the farm; as Quick stated in his preface to this work: "This book is a plea for a better morale in rural life" (p. xi). Yet, although he had settled on a clear purpose, Quick experimented once again with the fictional, or semi— fictional, form. For the boosting of rural morale in The Fairview Idea is not given in just one story, as might be suggested by the book's subtitle and as was the case in The Brown Mouse, but rather in a series of stories. In form, the book is thus like Yellowstone Nights, except that in gflgg Fairview Idga the chapters are not so much stories as 'they are each a combination of story and essay, and the riarrator finally and correctly calls them "sketches" (p. 2358). If The Fairview Idea has any overall unity of form, i.t; is provided by the theme of promoting a new rural life, 135’ the setting of agrarian Iowa (though as a landscape Se‘tting it is scarcely described), and by the fact that all ‘tlfixs sketches are told by the same first—person narrator, an C33-d.farmer named Abner Dunham. In the light of his later achievement, in Vande— Efiadrk's Folly (1922), it is significant that Quick chose a Quick had fj~I‘st—person narrator in The Fairview Idea. a-Voided using this viewpoint in fiction since writing 105 Aladdin g Co. (1904). Now, in 1919, he was returning to it, along with the autobiographical mode it suggests. A sig— nificant development in the use of this "I" persona is that Albert Barslow, in Aladdin Q ggy, was a relatively young narrator who was more than willing to take his chances in helping to build a city, whereas Abner Dunham is old and will not dream of leaving his farm. More significantly, Abner is Quick's first recognizable character who precedes and resembles the old farmer who narrates Vandemark's Folly, the chief difference between these two narrators being, it may be noted here, that Abner is concerned almost wholly with problems and solutions of his contemporary American society (just after World War I). The character of Abner is spelled out in the first chapter of The Fairview Idea. Considered "the most eminent Inossback in the countryside," he disagrees with his rieighbors' opinion of him. Actually, the key to his char- Elcter is derived from a couplet of Alexander Pope's, which 1162 quotes as his "motto": Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside (p. 1). lies an instance of this motto, he cites that he "was not the i?jirst, by any means, to try that new mode of locomotion, the a-L1tomobile; neither the last to cast eside the horse and IDIAggy" (p. 2). Abner's attaching of his old buggy whip to ‘tlie dashboard of his new car helps to symbolize that he is El transitional character in American society, a society that “was changing too rapidly and becoming overurbanized. Abner, 106 for one, "still refuseEs] to retire from the farm and the Fairview neighborhood" and in the rest of the book he gives his "good reasons for that eccentric course too" (p. 3). As Abner gives his reasons, in ten sketches, it be— comes clear that Quick had in mind the Adamic myth. Only the names have been changed, and the brief Biblical version is, in Quick's book, expanded, made specific and meaning- ful, in effect translated for the contemporary American audience. Fairview is Abner—Quick's name here for the Gar— den of Eden, "God's garden" (p. 249). Certain chapter titles also suggest the myth: "The Boys' Revolt in Fair— view" (III), "Sex Rebellion in Fairview" (VII), "Tackling the Midgard Snake" (IX). Each sketch states (rather me- chanically as far as the structure is concerned) a specific problem and then specific solutions designed to keep the farmers in the Garden. In Chapter I, "Retiring from Fairview," Abner Dunham explains why some of his neighbors left the farm for the city. For example, Herman Lutz's two sons left because their father was too miserly, in that he did not allow them to have their own bank account; and after his boys left, Herman also retired. The problem-~of the breaking up of the family-—is further explained by the fact that Herman simply did not get along with hired men, "hobo help" (p. 12), who 'by definition were too unsettled to care for the Garden as it was meant to be cared for. Herman also failed to pro— ‘vide his wife with the comfortable modern home which she 107 desired, and so she did not even try to persuade him to stay on the farm. The solution to these related problems is that the family must stay together at almost any cost. Another example of a retired farmer is John Ackerman, who, like Lutz, moved to the city because his sons would not carry on his good work in the country. Ackerman's principal mistake was that he did not encourage his boys to become full- fledged farmers; he did not talk with them about farming; although he himself was a success at farming, he "let the children's imaginations get away from it": The trouble with the Ackerman boys was that they saw only the details, and a good many of the details and daily jobs are not very thrilling, and some of them are dirty. Working day by day without a big idea behind you gets monotonous, and that was the trouble with those boys (pp. 17-18). The solution to this problem is the encouragement of the farmer's children to see the "glamour," or the "romance," of farming (p. 18). Also in Chapter I, Abner—Quick gives an explanation of what happens to the farmer who moves to the city. First the old farmer tries, unsuccessfully and pathetically, to "countrify" (p. 20) his small and cramped lot and house (by bringing farm implements and even animals to the unnatural environment), and then, all too soon thereafter, he suffers a greater and more significant penalty: Old farmers seldom do well physically in town. When the Livermore family left their farm and went to town they had an old cattle dog named Shep which they couldn't bear to leave behind. He had been a dog worth fifty dollars of any man's money on a stock farm, and was as active and industrious a dog 108 as I ever saw. He lived about eight months in town -—died of changed environment. I have observed that the old farmers who 'retired' first when the retiring fever struck the country are mostly dead or in bad health. They have gone the way of Liver— more's Shep. I wish we had statistics on this; but Uncle Henry Wallace once said that in his opinion retired farmers live on the average about four years after they strike the pavements (pp. 21—22). In other words, the twentieth—century American farmer who retires may well expect the same death penalty that has been associated with the removal of the archetypal farmer, Adam, from the Garden of Eden. In Chapter II, "A Corn—Belt Pioneer——1918 Model," Abner-Quick treats the problem of the decay of the rural church. The reasons for this decay were that the contem— porary ministers did not have the "pioneer spirit of getting acquainted" with their neighbors, did not care to travel the hazardous country roads to visit an individual farm family (on a "retail" basis) when they "could serve the Lord by wholesale in towns" (p. 35), and that it was practically impossible to provide a separate church building for each of the various denominations in the country. One solution to this problem is illustrated by the arrival in Fairview of Frank Wiggins, the ministerial pioneer of 1918, who, to— gether with his wife (Daisy), goes about the countryside spreading a general good cheer and warmth, and boosting the morale of his neighbors by showing them that somebody cares. Like Jim Irwin of The Brown Mouse, Frank Wiggins learns all he can about his neighbors, their problems and dreams, so that he can talk with them on a common ground of interest 109 and ultimately help them. For the farm boys, Wiggins prom— ises to make his church "'as interesting as baseball'" (p. 43), which they appreciate even more after Wiggins teaches them some pointers of the game. Because Wiggins' church is open to all denominations and no specific creed is in- sisted upon or even mentioned, it gains the financial support of the farmers. But an even better answer to the lack of a general spirit of togetherness in rural life is the school, because the school is automatically supported by taxation and does not have to depend upon the personal diplomacy of a Frank Wiggins. The rural school problem is the subject of Chapter III, "The Boys' Revolt in Fairview," where Quick repeats the thesis of Th3 ngwn Mggsg. The boys run away (psychically and then physically) from their Edenic homes because they simply do not realize how enjoyable the occupation of farm— ing can be, because they grow bored with the traditional school lessons, and because they desire "adventure and money of their own" (p. 79). The key solution is the "new kind of rural school," which is as romantic as it is pragmatic. In Chapter IV Abner—Quick states his position con— cerning the man who learns to farm by first reading books on the subject and then putting the theories into practice. Jeff Sharpe is the illustration of this sort of farmer. At first, everybody in Fairview . . laughed at his farming. We saw his blunders, which were obvious and expensive. We saw fields knobby with clods because he had plowed when it was 110 too wet. We saw great corn—fields made hard to cultivate because of the failure of some new tool which was tried on a big scale instead of a small one. We saw stacks built to carry the rains in instead of out. We saw corn—fields half tended because he tried to do too much with the force of men he had . . . (p. 104). Then, as Jeff's farming gradually improves and starts paying dividends, the laughing stops and the learning begins. For example, Jeff "got this theory of the keeping up of soil fertility out of his books. It was a new thing in the Corn Belt-~but we've all learned it since" (p. 105). Jeff is credited for being . . . the first man to inoculate soil for alfalfa in our part of the country--that was the soil shipment. I myself lived to pay him two dollars a load for soil from that same field when I saw the sort of crOp alfalfa is——and nobody laughed at me. He was the first man to act on the scientific fact that leguminous crops must have certain bacteria on their roots, and he shipped that earth to get the bacteria. . . . Jeff was the first man to treat his seed grains for smut-—and after about ten years, during which he had oats by the carload every year without a trace of smut in them, we gradually woke up to the fact that . . [he] knew something we didn't (pp. 105-106). In broader terms, theoretical agriculture can play an impor- tant role in accomplishing the ultimate goal of recapturing and maintaining America's Eden. Chapter V is about the positive contributions of "Fairview's New Hired Man," Tom Whelpley. Having been trained by the state college of agriculture, Tom, upon his arrival in Fairview, goes about doing "demonstration work" (p. 123) and giving the old farmers new ideas (much in the manner of Jeff Sharpe). Finally, Tom is deemed more useful as the district school master, in which elected capacity he 111 consolidates various surrounding rural schools and proceeds to put into effect the same program as Jim Irwin's in The Brown Mouse. (Quick evidently believed that it was better to be repetitious and clear rather than brief and possibly vague.) Near the beginning of Chapter VI, "An Adventure in Backtothelandia," the narrator says, We pride ourselves on having the answer to almost any rural—life problem. By two problems, however, we are frankly stumped. One of these is the increasing price of land which is making it harder and harder all the time for any one to start in farming. The other is the back—to—the-lander (p. 147). Unlike those who, with "bumptious optimism," were "sent out by Horace Greeley's 'Go west, young man,'" the contemporary "back—to—the—landers" . . . now come with false science. They are the boys who have read that when the sides of Mother Earth are tickled with a hoe she breaks out into a regular ha—ha of harvest . . . (p. 147). Admitting that "guessing the true route to Backtothelandia," "the sociological Northwest Passage," is the "Great American Riddle," Abner suggests that the "city people should stay in the cities, and the country people on the farms, where they both know what to do" (p. 158). However, for those city people who are truly determined to return to rural riches, there is a sensible way: 'Hire out as a farm hand at twenty-five dollars a month' [advises Abner]. If you want to be a dairy- man, hire out on a dairy farm. Leave the eight hun- dred dollars in the bank, and put twenty-five more with it every month. Learn the habits, tricks, and the language of cows. Learn to milk, keep a score sheet, and do individual feeding with a balanced 112 ration. . . . Learn on other people's cows, other people's feeds, other people's capital. Make the dairy business pay you for learning it. Play safe, young man, play safe. The only way to do this is to go to work at the farming business at the bottom as a hired man. Every back—to—the-lander ought to be obliged by law to do it. It would make intel— ligent and interested hired men more plentiful for us farmers, and it would save a lot of fools from making themselves ridiculous and going broke' (pp. 156—157). Another way is for the serious "back—to—the—lander" to set up an experimental "miniature farm" on any vacant lots he may find in town; then, if that proves successful, he may make the big move to the greater reality of the country— side (p. 164). Chapter VII, "Sex Rebellion in Fairview," deals with what women most desire in the would—be Eden of contemporary America. It should be said at once that this "sex rebel— lion" does not have anything to do with an initiatory biological experience, as it does in the Genesis version of the myth. Rather, the rebellion is that of the rural (and married) feminist, who desires a modern home and conve— niences to help her do her work, which is important to the total success of farm economy. Yet, even here, Quick uses the old myth, in a story which may be summarized as follows. A young Fairview farmer, Charlie Henderson, is successfully tempted by a city—slicker—swindler named Mr. De Haven ("and his beautiful wife"), not into biting an apple, but into buying some useless agricultural implements (e.g., a "Never-Work Horse Rake"). In consequence, Charlie suffers not a terrible bellyache but a "blushing" 113 embarrassment that is surpassed only by the fear of losing his farm. He does lose, temporarily, control of it; his only way of preventing a possibly irrevocable loss is through some legal technicalities which are not of concern here but which, in effect, give his wife, Emmie, sole legal ownership of the farm and reduce poor Charlie to the mere status of a hired hand. It is from her superior legal position that Emmie makes good her "rebellious" demands. Emmie is as specific as she is enthusiastic about these demands. Fulfilled, they define her paradise: "'Bathroom!‘ burst out Emmie Henderson. 'My idea of heaven is a place filled with pretty children, and bathtubs of soft water——hot and cold . . .'" (p. 189). She intends ' . . . to make the house and the woman's side of the farm as convenient as the barn, and the man's field of work. This means some central lighting system to relieve me of the disgusting and never- ending task of filling, cleaning and lighting kerosene lamps. It means a central heating system which will take off my hands the barbarous labor of shoveling soft coal into sooty stoves and keep— ing my mind on what fires we have when the men are out of the house in cold weather, and which will heat the house evenly all over, and thus rid us of the draughts and physically shocking changes of temperature in winter caused by the fact that only a portion of the house is heated at all. It means some arrangement for saving me the choice of hanging out my clothes on an outdoor line at the risk of my life in bad weather, or making the house unfit to live in by putting them up in the rooms. It means a modern kitchen, with a dish— washing contrivance of some kind, and water always hot to use in it, a good kitchen cabinet, a refrig— erator with ice always on hand, a gasoline or oil range, fireless cooker and a linoleum floor. It means a thoroughly sanitary modern bathroom. It means a mangle for the clothes, and a washing— machine—-both run by motors of some sort. It means the removal of the milk and cream from the $49; ”A “.... t...- 4......” ~~ . _ 114 house, and it means milking machinery—-the whole thing to be run by the men. It means a house fit to live in!‘ (pp. 191-192). Charlie listens with helpless "horror" to these demands of Emmie, who is the "new farm wife."7 Despite her husband's fall brought about by Satanic agents (the De Havens), and ironically because of it, Emmie will proceed to deal with Satan himself, if necessary, in order to gain her heaven: 'I'd like,‘ said Emmie, 'to have a definite propo- sition from Satan to give me for my soul running water, hot and cold, in my kitchen—-or to mortgage a few years of my life for it' (p. 189). Happily spared the high and incongruous Faustian price, Emmie soon celebrates the "fifth aniversary" of Charlie's paradoxical deal with the "seductive Mr. and Mrs. De Haven," which meant for her the "foundation" of the true Eden, by giving to Charlie, in their remodeled home, "the deeds and bills of sale which legally wiped out the whole De Haven episode" (p. 198). The Hendersons can then live happily ever after; and Quick's main point in this story is that, although some price must be paid, some sort of Satanic pests or problems dealt with, Eden can be created in America's Corn Belt. The problem in Chapter VIII, "The Fairview Girl Crop," is that the girls unfortunately leave the country to seek romance and excitement, mates, and art in the city. 7Quick made the same case in a strictly nonfictional form in his "The New Farm Wife: Who She Is and What She Will Demand Before She Will Stay Put," The Ladies' Home Journal (April, 1919), pp. 41, 82—83. 115 The solution is to have "socials in the schoolhouse," where "'nice dances, . . . a musical programme, or maybe a lecture or a picture show'" would assist the mating process (pp. 215, 214). Moreover, as Abner explains, . . it would be better for our rural life if we made more of their [the girls'] weddings, their preparations for mating, the greatest thing of their lives. . . . It has been a distinct loss to our American country life, this long abandonment of ceremony and observance. We must build it up again (pp. 223—224). Furthermore, there should be a "new art"-—not only for the girls' but the whole community's benefit--" an art growing out of life" (p. 218), an art of the farmers, by the farm- ers, and for the farmers. When Daisy (Abner's niece) mentions an example of this new and pragmatic art, "'a Minnesota play, called ngk‘yg thg Eagm,'" Kate (a girl who had been drawn by the city-magnet) asks, "'What's it about?'" 'About the life you ran away from, and how to make it better,‘ answered Daisy. 'Cecil Baker, a Hive--that' s the retired farmer play; and The New Liberator is another rural play of the North Dakota school, dealing with the marketing problem-~I don't know who wrote that. The rural credit question is presented in a North Dakota drama entitled, The Prairie Wolf. The peOple of the farming districts are crazy about them, because they know what they are about.‘ 'Gammer Gurton's Needle,‘ said Frank, 'and Ralph Roister Doister over again.‘ 'And Marlowe and Shakespeare over again, too, perhaps,‘ said Daisy. 'When thirty million people whose expression of their own life has been suppres- sed for centuries start expressing themselves nobody can tell what great things may come of it——if they can only escape the blight of New York!‘ (p. 219). At the end of this chapter, Abner names a play, supposedly 115 The solution is to have "socials in the schoolhouse," where "'nice dances, . . . a musical programme, or maybe a lecture or a picture show'" would assist the mating process (pp. 215, 214). Moreover, as Abner explains, it would be better for our rural life if we made more of their [the girls'] weddings, their preparations for mating, the greatest thing of their lives. . . . It has been a distinct loss to our American country life, this long abandonment of ceremony and observance. We must build it up again (pp. 223-224). Furthermore, there should be a "new art"-—not only for the girls' but the whole community's benefit-—" an art growing out of life" (p. 218), an art of the farmers, by the farm— ers, and for the farmers. When Daisy (Abner's niece) mentions an example of this new and pragmatic art, "'a Minnesota play, called Bagk £9 ihg Fagm,'" Kate (a girl who had been drawn by the city—magnet) asks, "'What's it about?'" 'About the life you ran away from, and how to make it better,‘ answered Daisy. 'Cecil Baker, a Hive-—that's the retired farmer play; and Thg Ngw Liberator is another rural play of the North Dakota school, dealing with the marketing problem——I don't know who wrote that. The rural credit question is presented in a North Dakota drama entitled, Th3 Prairie Wolf. The people of the farming districts are crazy about them, because they know what they are about.’ 'Gammer Gurton's Needle,‘ said Frank, 'and Ralph Roister Doister over again.’ 'And Marlowe and Shakespeare over again, too, Perhaps,' said Daisy. 'When thirty million people whose expression of their own life has been suppres- sed for centuries start expressing themselves nobody can tell what great things may come of it—-if they can only escape the blight of New York!‘ (p. 219). ‘At the end of this chapter, Abner names a play, supposedly 116 written by a farm girl, which sums up the solutions to vari- ous related problems in contemporary American life: "Th3 £2231.2£.IQ§ §Ell: which deals with the redemptive power of the love of nature" (p. 226). Chapter IX, "Tackling the Midgard Anake," deals with the problem of "the landlord, the tenant, the public, and the land itself" (p. 245). The problem is that the short— term (usually one—year) tenants and their landlords are in a "criminal conspiracy . . . to rob the land" of its fer— tility, hence posterity's use of it (p. 242). Although the problem may seem complex, the central solution is quite simple: the tenant should be encouraged to maintain and even improve the fertility of the soil; if the landlord wants him off the land, then the landlord should pay him for the yet-to-be—used fertility; since the payment for this fertility right would be expensive for the landlord, the tenant, in all likelihood, would stay put on the soil he has properly cultivated and calls his home. As Abner says, Furthermore, I don't like laboring to build up a socialized community in Fairview and have it all shot to rags every spring by the moving in and mov— ing out of tenant farmers. I want them to stay until we can build them solidly into the neighbor— hood like good concrete (p. 256)- To clarify the importance of the landlord-tenant as- pect of the ideal neighborhood, Quick used, in Chapter IX, a Norse myth, as well as the Hebrew mythology used in pre— Vious chapters. The "Midgard Snake" is explained by Adolph Tulp (a German immigrant in Fairview): 117 - 'Vunce the god Thor vass out fishing, and caught somedings on his hook dat made earthquakes and vol— canoes ven he tried to pull it out. He had hooked the Midgard Snake vich iss wrapped round and round the whole earth, and vich, ven id iss landed, lands the planet with it. Ven ve take hold of the land kvestion ve haf hooked the Midgard Snake. No vunder it makes a disturbance. It iss the kvestion of all kvestions. Ven it iss settled, all iss settled' (p. 252)- Yet the Hebrew parallels dominate; Fairview is "God's gar- den" (p. 249), and the landlord—tenant problem is the ser— pent that must be properly dealt with if the Garden of Eden is to be realized, or not lost. Abner allows another Fairview neighbor to quote not a Norse myth but Moses: 'All systems of religion recognize, as did the religion of Moses, that the land is not like other objects, a thing which can properly be held in un- limited ownership. "The land shall not be sold forever," said our religion in its earliest days, "for the land is mine, saith the Lord." The land— lord's interests must be first those of the com— munity, and second those of a taker of rent' (p. 254). Abner also refers to Moses: . . . if Moses found it necessary to give back the land every fifty years to the families that origi— nally owned it, I don't think a man can be called a wild-eyed fanatic if he looks our land system over and sees what can be done to prevent all the land from going into the hands of those who never work land, and all the work of farming to those who never own land (pp. 255—256). And in his finale, Abner-Quick waxes as lyrical as some Biblical prophet: It is a question for you, oh, ye millions of town-dwellers who own so many of the farms of America, to say what you will do to save the land in its richness, to save the nation in its integ- rity, to save our returning soldiers, to save the nation from you yourselves! (pp. 256-257)- 118 The last sketch, "Uncle Sam in Fairview," is about "Uncle Sam's farming missionary, the county agent" (p. 258). The only problem here is that many American farmers may not have heard about the good such missionaries can do. The solution is to propagandize his worth. The agent in Fair— view, Freeman Clay, maintains an office full of the latest bulletins on agricultural techniques, and he goes about the county working with and for the farmers, benevolently cor— recting their "ignorance," demonstrating the techniques, often freeing them from potential curses of the soil. Un— like some serpentine city-slicker—swindler (e.g., De Haven), Freeman would never dream of seducing the Fairview farmers into buying useless farm implements; he does not operate on a personal profit—motive basis, for his salary is paid by taxes, federal and county. Quick propagandizes that the county should be more than happy to pay its share to support a Freeman Clay, because he does——or can do——more than his part in making an Eden in twentieth—century America. Before leaving Thg Fairview Idga, and going on to discuss WE Hgyg Changed All Thgt, one should note that Quick's quest for form in 1919-—his wavering between fiction and nonfiction——is evident not only in the larger units of composition but in the diction as well. Quick was painfully conscious of his contemporary audience's reception of cer— tain key words; for example, he said in his nonfictional preface to Thg Fairview Idga: When a New Yorker or a Chicagoan, or one of the citizens of any town or city in the United States, 119 wishes to subject his fellows to the soft impeachment of lack of smartness or intelligence, he is quite likely to call him a farmer. This is a pleasantry; but it follows a tendency which inheres in the lan— guage as is shown by the words 'boor,‘ which meant 'farmer' before it meant cad; . . . 'villain,l who was once a man who belonged to a farm or villa, but now is any bad man; 'yokel,‘ once a farmer, but now a 'hick'; 'pagan,’ from 'paganus,‘ a countryman; 'heathen,’ a dweller among the heaths. To call a man on Forty—second Street a farmer is a soft im— peachment, now; but if farm life is not ameliorated it may sometime become an actionable epithet, like 'Villain' (pp. vii—viii). And although throughout this semifictional book Abner-Quick propagandizes a "socialized community," an Eden with various co—op programs and attitudes, he is nevertheless disturbed by the word socialism itself: The We are not a socialistic community. . . . it makes us rather furious to be accused of Socialism or any— thing that sounds like it. . . . Just another word on this accusation . . . : As a matter of fact, what have we been doing? We have been applying the old New England public school and town meeting idea to our present—day life. We brought the best of New England to the Corn Belt in prairie schooners before the great Civil War. We've got the old machine on our hands. Is it socialistic to repair it? (pp. 120—121). again: We people of the Fairview District are sometimes accused of conceit on account of the so—called social- ization of our neighborhood. I claim that there is no such thing as a taint of Socialism in it. My conten— tion is that we have carried right through to its logical conclusion, on a few lines, the sort of thing which my New England ancestors laid the foundation for in the free school and the town meeting (p. 146). reason for this protestation against gpglgllgm is made clear in W; Have Changed All EQEE- As WE Have Changed All That shows, Quick, together 120 with his contemporary Americans, was apprehensive about socialism because of its association with the revolution and chaos in Russia that grew immediately out of World War I. The words socialism, communism, and Bolshevism were loosely synonymous in the American mind at this time, and Quick reflected this feeling that grew into the Big Red Scares of the 1920's and later. Quick gave early examples of this——not only in Thg Fairview Iggg, and again in a notable nonfictional book published the same year, Eggm WEE 3g Peace (1919), but also in W2 Have Changed All That. Since W3 Hgyg Changed All Thgi is Quick's only work of fiction that has a non—American, Russian, setting, and since Quick was a co—author of this short novel, the cir— cumstances leading to its composition should be explained. From 1916 to 1919 Quick was a member of the Federal Farm Loan Bureau, directing thousands of tax dollars into agrarian communities and commuting between his city-office in the Treasury Building in Washington, D. C., and his farm-home called Coolfont near Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, where he wrote most of his nonfictional and semi— fictional propaganda in behalf of the American farmer.8 Because of failing health and the wish to write something worthier of the name literature, Quick resigned from the 8On Quick's life at Coolfont, see my "The House that Quick Built," in a forthcoming edition of Valleys 2i History (Hagerstown, Maryland). 121 Bureau in 1919.9 But President Wilson asked him to perform one final service for his country: the direction of the liquidation of the affairs of the American Red Cross in Siberia. Quick was certified as a Lt. Colonel and dis- patched by President Wilson to Vladivolstok, where he stayed from March to July, 1920, helping the Red Cross during the withdrawal of American armed forces. Although this task brought on a nearly fatal hemmorrhage and ruined his health, Quick was determined to keep his promise to a young noble- woman, whom he met in Russia. Quick met Elena Stepanoff MacMahon in Vladivolstok, whence she had fled, by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway, from Kazan, where her aristrocratic (though untitled) family had been dispossessed of their property and threatened of their lives by the Bolsheviki. Elena became a living symbol to Quick of the victims of the villainous Bolsheviki, and he not only listened to her story with great sympathetic interest but also promised to help her write it when they both arrived in the United States. They came back on the same army transport, the Madawaska, Quick in very ill health and Elena with her husband, an officer named MacMahon of the American army engineers she had met near Vladivolstok. Quick never again saw the MacMahons, who took up residence in Chicago, but he corresponded with them about kl 9Moreover, Quick was justly satisfied that he had done all that could reasonably be expected in establishing the Bureau and its function; see letter of Herbert Quick t0 WOodrow Wilson, June 19, 1919, in the Quick Papers. 122 the book he had promised to help her write. Quick fulfilled this promise in 1921, but the book did not appear until 1928, when it was released under the co—authors' names and under the title furnished by the publisher, WE Hgyg Changed All Thai (Bobbs-Merrill). The storyline of Quick's Russian novelette is a simple and clear one, based upon the flight experiences of Elena Stepanoff, who in the fiction is called Musia Krassin. Most of the story takes place in the city of Kazan and in the "House of Krassin," where Mrs. Krassin, her daughter Musia, and her son Loris illustrate the mingled emotions of pride, courage and fear in the face of the rudely intruding Bolsheviki. As the story develops, the resisting Loris is tracked down, despite the mother—hen precautions of Mrs. Krassin, and executed on the orders of a Bolshevik leader who at the same time has a romantic attraction to Musia. Musia finally flees all the chaos to Siberia. Quick's anti-Bolshevik theme is likewise clear: these villains were cruelly breaking up families and wantonly destroying a civilized, cultured way of life that it had taken cen— turies to build. Elena Stepanoff contributed the story, but it was Quick who put it down on paper, and the published version is filled with noticeable quirks of Quick's style. For example, the description of the invasion of Mrs. Krassin's great house by the "terrible squad of armed men" dressed in.peasant smocks: 123 This peasant's smock——he wished that he could somehow make her understand that he had never worn it until liberty came to Russia in the dictatorship of the proletariat. He was confused and exasperated. Just as she had hoped he would be. So he turned from the door . . . just as, with held breath, she had hoped he would do; and he entered the room across the hall. . . . She almost fluttered in before him, much as a hen— pheasant flutters away from the dearly—guarded secret of her nest. The squad paused outside. The man in the peas— ant's smock entered--entered the luxurious boudoir of a lady! (p. 18). The phrase "just as she . . . " and the sort of reserve and reverse confidence idea behind it was one of Quick's fa— ‘Vorites; he titled a whole chapter in Vandemark's Eglly "Just as Grandma Thorndyke Expected." The "hen—pheasant" jJnage suggests more of Quick's Iowa than Russia somehow, and_the use in the third paragraph quoted of a shock effect for~Puritan-Victorian minded audiences is typical of Quick. Fits use of explicit moralizing (a style he never completely afiroided) is in abundance in this short book, particularly irl the last chapter, the last paragraph of which is as fOllows: Fate had struck that family down in ruins; but that was the usual thing in Russia. Over all the former Empire it was the same. The people of the Krassin type had met their doom; and now the wave which had overwhelmed them was rising to engulf every mind, whether that of an aristocrat or not, which could not accept the ready~made, the daily—altered formulae of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. With which dictatorship, the proletariat had as little to do as the Krassins and their fellows. To all, save to the few maniacs who had overcome their keepers and assumed rulership, had come the same fate: desola- tion, disillusionment, dissolution, and the supreme trial of souls (pp. 262—263). L 124 But for all Quick's intent to depict chaos and dissolution, and notwithstanding the book's undeniable importance as an early example of American reaction to the Russian revolu- tion, WE Hgyg Changed All Tth is not as effective or graphic in its style as, say, John Reed's Egg D§y§ Thgt mmm. Quick had wanted his (and Mrs. MacMahon's) book titled, among other possibilities, A Dissolving Elgw 9f gggpg, and he had wanted it published right away when the Inanuscript was finished in 1921. But his publishers wanted the work expanded so as to be more fitting to a Russian story, to suggest the vastness of Russia. But this Quick would or could not do, for, as he said in a letter to Iiewitt Hanson Howland, of Bobbs-Merrill, on September 6, 1921: I am afraid the expansion of the Russian story is out of the question. In the first place, I am not in favor of it from a purely artistic viewpoint. The story is told. In the next place I have no idea how to do it, which is another way of saying the same thing. In the third place, I cannot possibly do it for this fall, even if the way lay open before me. In the next place my co—author is against it, though she does not say she will not go to worlk [sic] at it. Again, if it were published, 'twere well it were published quickly, for now it has the field to it— self in the way of being an inside study of the conditions from the inside. Mrs. McMahon says in a letter 'I don't think the expanding of the story would be for its benefit. There is nothing worse than a book which says too much.‘ By this I take it she means that tries to say more than its legitimate content. She instances Tolstoi's 'Cossacks‘, which is about the length of our story, and she thinks is a better work than Anna Karenina.1 \ 10In the Bobbs Papers. 125 When 1922 came Quick himself wanted the publication of his Russian story delayed; as his publishers put it in their 1928 preface—note to Wh Have Changed All That: With Mr. Quick Wg Have Changed WWW That was an interlude in the midst of writing his epic of the Iowa soil; the three novels, Vandemark's Folly, Whg Hawkeye, and Whh Invisible Woman, and the personal record of his early years, th Man's Life. He was unwilling to have its continuity of impression broken by the publication of a thing so different as this Russian story . . . (p. viii). The "three novels" named will be discussed in the following chapter, but first some generalizations are to be drawn concerning the books analyzed in the present chapter. Tfliese generalizations, in addition to those drawn in pre— ‘vious chapters, shed light on Quick's "epic" novels, the Midland Trilogy. The books that Quick wrote from 1909 to 1921, with iflie exception of his best fictional work of this period and (Hie of the best he ever wrote, Yellowstone Nights, were hfnavily propagandistic and dealt with contemporary problems. C[The central problem——from which all others seemed to radi- ate—~was the rapid urbanization of America. The main SOJJition was to b00st the morale of the farmers, to en— COILrage them to conserve or recapture, through peaceful means, the innocent, healthy, and cooperative if not "so— cialistic" life next to God's nature. Yellowstone Nights is a fictional representation of a pilgrimage to the God— giVEn and government-owned virgin land. Whh hhghh Whhgg Enid Eh; Fairview lggg are semifictional works that pointed 'the constructive and peaceful ways to the Garden of Eden 126 in twentieth-century America. Wg Have Changed All That is a propagandistic novelette that expressed Quick's shock over destructive, revolutionary change. Quick was repetitiously clear that the only proper place for his Adamic hero, who appeared in his pre—1909 books as well as afterward, was next to God—given nature, not in the man—made city; that the legitimate, moral and Ineaningful occupation for this American Adam was nothing but farming; and that the best social belief was a benevo- ]_ent collectivism, not a greedy individualism based on the rather capitalistic idea of the survival of the fittest. By 1921 Quick had clarified these ideas, which define his conception of the true American identity, but in doing so lie had moved away from the fictional form. This was un— fIDrtunate because Quick preferred writing fiction, rather thing nonfiction or semifiction. During the chaotic days of World War I and its innnediate aftermath, Quick was "deeply disturbed."11 Ehrents, he said in the preface to his nonfictional £222 BEE; 39 ggggg (1919), had been "moving with bewildering ralxidity" (p. i). It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to preach the ways to the contemporary Garden: the problem of form and diction was becoming too much for thn to handle effectively. However, it is to be empha- SiZed that in the 1909—1921 period Quick did succeed in \ 11Personal interview with Mrs. Raymond N. Ball (Herbert Quick's daughter) in Rochester, New York, April : 1966. 127 locating and clarifying one of the major subjects that would help him write a fictional work better than any he had writ— ten before, with the possible exception of Yellowstone Ni ts. This major subject was agriculture and its natural association with the myth of the Garden of Eden. In addition, what Quick needed in order to write a better fiction was a reconsideration of his past. The past would help him to re—establish his own personal identity with American culture and also to trace the origins of why that identity had become increasingly problematic during the twentieth century. The past would give him perspec- tive, and it would allow him full use of the Adamic myth. Quick's return to the past was a full—fledged return to the fiJ3tional form he preferred——but this is the concern of the following chapter. CHAPTER IV RETURN TO THE PAST: THE MIDLAND TRILOGY, 1921—1924 This study has now come to the work which the re— viewers of Quick's own day unanimously called his best fiction. Although the present chapter proposes to take up each of the three novels separately, first the circumstances and motives of the composition of the entire Trilogy should be made clear, because they help to illuminate the work; and a few generalizations should be suggested in advance of those which will appear during the course of each of the three detailed analyses and those which will appear at the end of the chapter. As pointed out at the end of the last chapter, what Quick needed (in addition to a non—urbanized setting) to Write better fiction was the past. He needed the perspec— tive and stability which the past provided in order to Present the American identity which he saw jeopardized by the growing chaos of the twentieth century. He had not looked to the past as a source for literature since writing his children's book, I_n m Fairyland g America (1901), Which was dedicated to his mother because it was she who had first led his steps into the land of wondrous fable; now, two decades later, he was returning to it. 128 he; 129 Actually, Quick had talked about writing his Mid— land Trilogy since one day in 1906, when he casually out— lined his "epic" story to Ralph Hale in the park in Indianapolis.1 But something had always interfered. If it was not the "squirrel track" of government work, then it was one of his propagandistic writings; in a typical letter, he described some of the distractions, though they were important activities in their own right, to Hewitt iHanson Howland (of Bobbs—Merrill): Dear Hewitt: I will send you the MS of the Fairview Idea just as soon as I can get it looked over. It is here waiting attention, but this is a big job on which I am engaged now and the matter of getting a little time off is difficult. I have just returned for instance from St. Paul, where I have installed the St. Paul land bank, which will do within a short time probably a hundred million dollars of business in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota, and brought the president of that bank back with me to a conference of the twelve presidents of the banks, at which a farm loan campaign covering the entire country will be mapped out. I realize fully what you say as to the diffi— culty of keeping a book like "The Broken Lance" in print. . . . I am convinced that the next work I do will be, compared to what I have done, monumental. . . . The trilogy of which we have talked is growing on me all the time and taking form in my mind. All I need to do now is to put it on paper. . . 2 Quick had mentioned his "three novels" to Howland at least 1Letter of H. Quick to W. C. Bobbs, February 26, 1921; letter of H. Quick to H. H. Howland, December 22, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 2H. Quick to H. H. Howland, March 15, 1917, in the Bobbs Papers. 130 as early as 19163; and by 1919 he seemed determined to rid himself of distractions, even to the point of a ritualistic burning of the present: Dear Hewitt: This is to inform you that having resigned my position as a member of the Federal Farm Loan Board my address is henceforth Berkeley Springs. Henry Cabot Lodge, whom his evil genius has struck senile o or something, gives his occupation in the Congres— sional as 'that of a writer'. In this alone I am at one with him. I am henceforth a writer. . . . It's cool here in the mountains, and when I get my packages unpacked and the bulk of what my secre- tary sent up burned, I think I shall be able to do some real work. . . . 4 1¥lthough two weeks later in 1919 he concluded a long letter, Ilargely on his anti-Bolshevism, with the comment "Yes, I expect to work on my novel again now—~if after three years 13 can take it up successfully,"5 Quick was usually very OIrtimistic about his chances at this time to put his long- Iilanned work on paper. Even after the trip to Russia that Iulined his health, he was confident that he could still manage to write his novels. In addition, Quick felt that he was uniquely quali- fied to tell the story of the American Midwest of the 1850's through 1890's: ‘_ 3H. Quick to H. H. Howland, January 17, 1916, in the Bobbs Papers. 4H. Quick to H. H. Howland, August 4, 1919, in the BObbs Papers. 5H. Quick to H. H. Howland, August 20, 1919, in the Bobbs Papers. ”Y'w—z'ru— _————————v 131 I lived this life, and am the only writing man who did. Garlend [sic] did not live it, nor did Hough, though the former was born in Wisconsin, and the latter in llinois. I was of the thing, as they were not. And he emphasized the biographical and autobiographical na— ture of the Trilogy: The story I have finished [Vandemark's Folly] is a mingling of the life of my father, of my wife's father, of our relatives, and neighbors. The second will be in some measure my own history and experi— ences. Quick's intention to write a personal as well as a cultural liistory suggests that by 1921 the American identity, in his 'view, was in so much danger of being lost that he could no longer deny an attempt to re-define it and also re—establish his relationship to it. Quick made this attempt in the three novels which were ultimately entitled Vandemark's Folly (1922), The }hawkeye (1923), and The Invisible Woman (1924). He made it Cilear that each of these novels was to be a self—contained Story and that all three were intended as a single work; 'VEuidemark's Folly, he said, . . is the first of three novels which will cover the history of Iowa from its early settlement to recent times. . . I have tried to make the story sufficient in it- self, and not dependent on its continuation for its interest. . . . I think it a good story. But in it I have prepared the way for the stories which will follow. The three will constitute a single work, 6H. Quick to W. C. Bobbs, February 26,1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 7H. Quick to w. C. Bobbs, February 26,1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 132 and will be the story of Iowa, and of the whole Middle West. It will be a sort of prose epic of the greatest thing in history of its kind. His goal was to arrange his memorable past into a coherent unity, to capture the "really true" of what can only be called the penetralia of his biography in the net of a cul— tural fiction that had "the lost prairie of Iowa in it."9 The overall design of the Midland Trilogy emphasizes growth and the consequences of that growth. It depicts the growth of the virgin land as it is impregnated by various pioneers and as each succeeding novel has a larger and larger framework setting. The setting of the first novel in the series is a township; the second, a county; and the third, a state. Quick originally wanted the novels titled so as to suggest this growth: You see 'Vandemark Township' is related to two books which are to follow. The next will be 'Monterey County' and the last 'Iowa'. They will make up one story.10 In addition to this progressive enlargement of the societal setting, the Midland Trilogy illustrates important stages in the growth of the individual hero (or heroine). First, there is "Cow" Vandemark, who represents the essence of adolescence; second, Freemont McConkey, who represents the meaning of the emergence of maturity; last, Christina 8H. Quick to w. c. Bobbs, February 26, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 9H. Quick to W. C. Bobbs, February 26, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 1OH. Quick to H. H. Howland, April 26, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 133 Thorkelson, who represents the rebirth of innocence. The relationship between the individual hero and his society, as both grow and develop, is explained by their respective outlooks on the land. The land is the most important symbol shared by the hero and his society, but the land poses a major problem in the Trilogy because as a symbol it does not have universally shared interpre- tations. One way to state this problem is to ask the question: after the virgin land, what? In answering this question, Quick gave, in effect, both a definition of the American identity and an explanation for its being threat— ened by the coming of the twentieth century. Moreover, in defining the American identity, or what it once was, Quick drew not only upon his own personal history and symbols but also upon the metaphors and mythic elements which are as old as the Bible and as recent as Mark Twain, and which, in 1921-1924, Quick believed were-—or should be—-still shared by the Americans. Vandemark's Folly (1922) The following analysis of Vandemark's Folly treats its facts of publication, its title, the dialogue behind it and in it (such as that between the new and the old, inno- cence and experience, romanticism and realism), its narra— tive viewpoint and characterization, its evocation of the past and the virgin land, its structure, its indebtedness to other authors, its use of the land as private symbol and public myth, and, most important, its broad mythic theme 134 which grows out of these features and transcends them. This first novel of the Midland Trilogy was ini- tially published in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1921. Although the financial rewards of the serialized version satisfied Quick, he did not like the condensation of his story in the Journal. He looked optimistically forward to the novel's being published in full in book form; and he had faith in treating a subject of the past, despite those critics who disparaged the past as a source for fiction. As he phrased these related thoughts in a letter of ac— knowledgement to a Bobbs—Merrill reader's response to the Vandemark story: I was very glad indeed to read the letter of your reader on the manuscript of the novel. I have felt no doubt that the story is a good one, though a reading of a recent number of the Dial makes me wonder whether I know what good literature is. Yet, I have confidence in the story, and the assumption on the part of some critics that old things have passed away and all things have become new does not much disturb me. I have great hopes of this novel. Anyhow, it has already brought me more ma— terial rewards than any story I ever wrote, and that comforts me. And I expect still greater returns from it in book form. It really represents some— thing. I am glad that the reader thinks so, too.11 Quick's oft—expressed concern about the novel's title was sometimes a hint also of what he thought criti— cally about the current state of romanticism in literature; in the same letter to Howland as that just quoted from, he said: 11H. Quick to H. H. Howland, April 26, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 135 Please do not allow the sentiment for a change of the name pervade your organization; for I shall be very difficult to convince on that point. I do not mean that I do not think there is any lack of impor- tance in the name, but I believe the name VANDEMARK TOWNSHIP is exactly the title for this book. In fact I think a catchy, theatrical name would be a weakness. Against such titles as "When Knighthood Was in Flower" let us put such titles as "David Harum" and "Main Street". Both the latter are very quiet and unim- pressive; but the books seem to have scored.12 Yet Quick allowed the title chosen by the editors of the Ladies' Home Journal to be considered by the Bobbs—Merrill people: I see by the papers as Mr. Dooley used to say, that the L. H. J. calls my story VANDEMARK'S FOLLY. If this pleases the force better than my own name for it, it may be considered. I have no idea as to whether, the names being equal, carryin the serial name on to the book does good or harm.1 The one feature that Quick never liked about the serialized version was its abridgement, because it left "all the guts out of the story."14 Short, abridged fiction had but rarely been Quick's forte, for his best literary talents were like Theodore Dreiser's, calling for the larger canvas to produce the effects of accumulating images and emotions. His strength was, of course, also his weak— ness, for even though the unabridged version of, in this case, Vandemark's Folly had the so—called "guts" left in, 12H. Quick to H. H. Howland, April 26, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 13H. Quick to H. H. Howland, September 1, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 14H. Quick to H. H. Howland, September 1, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 136 it was also quite wordy. But, again, the very wordiness or repetition was a method for the free exploration of the various facets of the central theme, a method including the use of suggested nobility, if not "knighthood" terminology, as regards a few of the American pioneers and most defi- nitely including the depiction of a certain type of hero, Vandemark, when he "was in flower." Quick's story is told in the "autobiographical style" by J. T. Vandemark, a character whose presence is felt in two ways: as an old farmer remembering and telling the story, and as the aspiring adolescent he once was. Quick explained why he chose a first-person narrator: As Dickens remarks in one of his prefaces, the autobiographical style has its limitations, but if its advantages had not outweighed them he would not have clung to it. Two of the great classics which occur to me are in this style—~David Copperfield and Lorna Doone. So also Tristram Shandy, if it can be said to have any definable style at all. And in the way of later popular favorites I remember Joseph Vance and Eben Holden. . . . Robinson Crusoe could not have been the wonder it is in any other style. I think I have the same reason for adopting it that De Foe and Blackmore had-—the inter enetration of an environment with a personality.1 In the same letter to Howland, Quick also wrote: . . . everything [in the novel] . . . has a reason for existence and has been considered. In the first place the type of man represented in the narrator must be established in the mind of the reader. This is essential, for what is said as well as the manner of saying it is all given color and even substance by his life—long environment and the changes therein. The story is not only a narration of what one man 15H. Quick to H. H. Howland, December 5, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 137 saw taking place, but of what he did not see, and of his thoughts and his philosophy.16 One cannot help but wonder what the "limitations" of this autobiographical style were, since Quick set few if any limits on what his narrator could know. In any event, if for no other reason than the autobiographical style, the character of the narrator—-like those to whom Quick ac— knowledged an indebtedness-—commands a central interest. The story's "Introduction" is double, but this was not entirely Quick's doing. He had originally written a one-paragraph introduction followed by the first sentence ——"My name is Jacobus Teunis Vandemark"--of the story proper. That first paragraph, to which his publishers objected, was (and is) as follows: The work of writing the history of this town— ship-~I mean Vandemark Township, Monterey County, State of Iowa——has been turned over to me. I have been asked to do this I guess because I was the first settler in the township; it was named after me; I live on my own farm——the oldest farm operated by the original settler in this part of the country; I know the history of these thirty-six square miles of land and also of the wonderful swarming of peo- ples which made the prairies over; and the agent of the Excelsior County History Company of Chicago, having heard of me as an authority on local history, has asked me to write this part of their new His— tory of Monterey County for which they are now canvassing for subscribers. I can never write this as it ought to be written, and for an old farmer with no learning to try to do it may seem imprudent, but sometimes a great genius may come up who will put on paper the strange and splendid story of Iowa, of Monterey County, and of Vandemark Township; and when he does write this, the greatest history ever 16H. Quick to H. H. Howland, December 5, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 138 written, he may find such adventures as mine of some use to him. Those who lived this history are already few in number, are fast passing away and will soon be gone. I lived it, and so did my neighbors and old companions and friends. So here I begin (p. i). Howland wrote Quick the objections of the Bobbs-Merrill staff: I think the first line of the second paragraph—— "My name is Jacobus Teunis Vandemark"-—a stirring opening. I think the first paragraph unattractive, and really unfortunate inasmuch as it plants in the reader's mind the thought that what he is being asked to read is a county history prepared for the Excelsior County History Company of Chicago, and he well knows what that means. Also, the paragraph is apologetic, the author admitting that he can't do the job as it should be done; this would discourage the reader for he is sure to accept the author's low estimate of his ability. The paragraph ends with: 'So here I begin.‘ Well, asks the reader-who-must—be—shown, why not begin there, then? I hope most ardently that if you feel the account of how the history came to be written is essential, that you'll put the pieces together and make an introduction of them.1 Quick was permitted the retention of the initial paragraph, and it is fitting that this was done, for it introduces an important aspect of the character of the narrator that Quick wanted to portray: that of the humble, untutored rural person whose successful adventures in life somehow and really suggest that he is a "genius." The several paragraphs (nearly four pages) of the "second" introduction, which Quick added in response to Howland's criticism, are also one of the fortunate tactics in the book, for not only is the narrator's old character further revealed and firmly established but also a credible 17H. H. Howland to H. Quick, November 29, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 139 verisimilitude is created for the "history." Here the old narrator reveals that he is still basically a trusting soul but that once his suspicions are aroused-—by such "travel— ing Swindlers" (p. ii) as the city—slicker agent for the Excelsior County History Company of Chicago—~then he is not to be fooled. No country "hick” or "Jonathan" or "Reuben" he! He would rather consign to the flames the manuscript he has begun than allow his vanity to be capitalized upon.18 In fact, old Vandemark starts to destroy the manuscript of his past adventures, but his granddaughter Gertrude comes to the rescue and, because of her sincere interest, per— suades him to continue writing the story. Gertrude's presence in the story adds to the veri— similitude. Her role is that of editor. As her grand— father writes the story in his own way, using his own "dia- lect" terms, she adds explanatory footnotes for the benefit 18Quick himself had very nearly the same feelings, as he wrote to Howland, September 27, 1921 (in the Bobbs Papers): As for the novel—-Vandemark's Folly—— . . . I thought you were enthusiastic about it. The verdict of your reader was certainly very favorable. It has attracted the attention of editors and publishers. One editor of a great magazine writes me that he got a gal— ley proof of it and read it because he was interested in it—-and the galley proofs are poor stuff on account of the condensation. He says, 'Aside from the regret that we did not have this it gave me tremendous plea- sure; it's a truly great American novel and I'll be disappointed if it doesn't have a great book sale'. And then he wrote about things he wanted me to do for him. Now I would not like to have this book published by you unless you have something of the feeling he ex- pressed. In other words, I should want you to feel that the work itself is something well worth while. . . 140 of readers who may well be from some other part of the country. The impression is of an old farmer really in the process of creating a manuscript, with the helpful interest of his watchdog—like granddaughter, who sometimes agrees and sometimes disagrees with his choice of expressions. Also, this introductory juxtapositioning of the old Vande— mark and the young Gertrude is the first instance of the motif of experience and innocence, of age and youth, run- ning throughout the story. (Another is, of course, that of the old Vandemark and the young one.) An important example of Gertrude's editorship occurs in the first paragraph of the story proper, where old Vandemark reports her preference for spelling the family name: She spells the old surname van der Marck——a little v and a little d . . . the first two syl— lables Written like separate words. . . . But she will know better when she gets older and has more judgment (p. 2). The Dutch van, separated, is (like German von, English sir, and French dp) too obvious a sign, or "mark," of the nobility for the taste of the old Vandemark, who says: The neighbors would never understand it . . . and would think I felt above them. Nothing loses a man his standing among us farmers like putting on style (p. 2). Old Vandemark will therefore not follow Gertrude's advice to use the nobiliary particle, but the suggestion grows that he is as noble as a knight and was perhaps even more so during the golden days of his youth when he roamed the 141 virgin prairie and cultivated it and established a veri- table family identity with it. This kinship of Vandemark and the land will be discussed in more detail later, but for the moment it may be noted that Gertrude van der Marck, in one of her explanatory footnotes, suggests the nobility of a prairie feature and, by association, of the author: 'Paas~bloeme' one suspects is the Roundout Valley origin of this term applied to a flower, possibly seen by the author on this occasion for the first time—-the American pasque—flower, the Iowa prairie type of which is Anemone patens: the knightliest little flower of the Iowa uplands. -—G. v. d. M. (p. 111). Gertrude supplies explanations for but relatively few of the terms which old Vandemark employs in order to evoke the past——Iowa of the 1850's and 1860's--a time and place so new and strange that the very elements in nature there wanted names, and a namer. The sense of a lost Edenic past is enhanced by old Vandemark's role as a his- torian who reports various customs of the good old days and, sometimes, refers to the present for the purpose of contrast. Taken all in all, the various terms which have been called "dialect" with respect to the Midwest and which are sprinkled throughout the novel do help to create the sense of a lost world. Some examples of these terms are as fol— lows: HEE.SEE (p. 265), meaning a person of power; high— gghd (p. 268), a severe storm of snow and wind; bottom (p. 219), an extent of land between the bed of a stream and the high land on either side, such bottoms being commonly 142 given the same name as the stream; breaking plow (p. 228), a plow specially made for breaking prairie sod; cutter (p. 406), a light sleigh; democrat ngph (p. 5), a light load wagon having two or more seats; full— bitei ' h(p. 111), high enough to furnish excellent pasture; hpp pp (p. 65), excited or angry; ijh (p. 311), to quarrel or talk im— pertinently; limpsey (p. 133), lacking vigor; lhhp hp (p. 134), to endure quietly; meech (p. 251), to move stealth— ily; nepoed (p. 117), killed by bandits (Gertrude explains this term in one of her footnotes); pp: (p. 213), success— ful outcome; plow—hard (p. 155), exceedingly hard and dry; puccoon (p. 112), plant of genus Lithospernum, yielding yellow pigment; pucker (p. 237), bewilderment; phhp (p. 212), Missourian; 229 pp (p. 318), to set to rights, to clean up; phlhh (p. 53), strong liking; sithering (p. 36), sighing (Gertrude explains this one); smear case (p. 159), sour milk cheese; tow—headed (p. 212), having blonde or whitish hair; Whph 3225 ng 3 php (p. 264), long ago.19 In his role as historian, old Vandemark reports certain social affairs or customs of the lost frontier. For example, there is "Captain Jenks," a . party game substituted for dancing to the fiddle where the latter was objectionable (couples 19These terms are examples of those fifty-seven terms which Clara Ellen Speake gleaned from Vandemark's Folly and alphabetically listed, with definitions, in her “A List of Dialect Terms from the Works of Hamlin Garland and Herbert Quick," M. A. Thesis, State University of Iowa, 1926. A few, like blizzard, are no longer consid— ered "dialect." 143 bowed, swung, and gayly 'bounced' as they sang, 'Captain Jenks got tight last night, / The gentle- man passes to the right; / Swing that lady if you're not tight, / For that's the style in the army '). Another party game was the "Needle's Eye," in which part— ners were required to kiss-— 'Let's have the Needle's Eye!’ 'I won't play kissing games,‘ said one of the girls (p. 282). The novel is a source—book for the tune titles that accom- panied such customs of that by-gone era: Oh, yes! I have seen [reports old Vandemark] . . . singing and hopping about to the tune of We Come Here to Bounce Around; and also We'll All Go Down to Rowser; and Hey, Jim Along, Jim Along Josie; and ‘Angelina Do Go Home; and Good- -by Susan Jane; and Shoot the Buffalo; and Weevilly Wheat; and Sandy He Belonged to the Mill; and I' ve Been to the East, I've Been to the \west I've Been to the Jay- -Bird's Altar; and Skip:to- My— Lou; and The Juniper Tree; and Go In and Out the Window; and The Jolly Old Miller; and Captain Jinks . . . (p. 282). Sometimes old Vandemark interprets the significance of such songs: The Little Old Sod Shanty ph the Claim was a popu- lar song of the eighties that . proved two things—-that the American pioneer had learned to build with something besides timber, and that the Homestead Law had come into effect (p. 226). Moreover, in his role as historian, old Vandemark comments on contemporary social problems or the lessons of the past that can be applied to the future. For 20p. 282; also see Clara Ellen Speake's "A List of Dialect Terms from the Works of Hamlin Garland and Herbert Quick," M. A. Thesis, State University of Iowa, 1926; and Geneva Waters' "Herbert Quick, Social Historian of the Middle West," M. A. Thesis, State University of Iowa, 1940. 144 example, he explains the problems of financial panics: All financial panics come from land speculation. Show me a way to keep land from advancing in value, and I will tell you how to prevent finan— cial panics (pp. 299—300).21 And he prays that America will be saved from the extremes of capitalistic monopoly and communistic revolution: "God save it from the mildews of monopoly and tyranny, and the Red rot of insurrection and from repression's explosions!" (p. 297). More often, however, old Vandemark laments the lost glory of the past-—those "far-off Arcadian days" (p. 304, n.), when all seemed young and fresh, exciting, chal— lenging, and truly worth while. The recurrent mood of his theme is, ”Oh, the lost enchantment of youth . . . 1" (p. 161). Why there was enchantment is illustrated, of course, in old Vandemark's story of the time when both he and his country were young. The story of the young Jake Vandemark is structured into three main parts.22 Part one (Chapters I—V) is built around Jake's adventures on the Erie Canal; part two (Chap— ters VI—XII) is about his journey westward to Iowa; and 21This is another instance of the autobiographical parallel between the opinions of old Vandemark and Herbert Quick; Quick had explained this thesis in detail in his article, "Lessons from Former Panics," Moody's Magazine, IV (November, 1907), 559-566. 22Quick did not formally group and label these three parts; instead, he proceeded in the opposite direction, as it were, by following Howland's advice to subdivide each of the twenty titled chapters in the novel, using simple Arabic numerals as subchapter heads. Letter of H. Quick to H. H. Howland, December 6, 1921, in the Bobbs Papers. 145 part three (Chapters XIII—XX) deals with his settling his own land. The whole story takes place in the 1850's and 1860's, most of it in the 1850's, when Jake (who was born in 1838) was a teenage pioneer. This story has three main levels of meaning: autobiographical, or personal insofar as Quick himself is concerned; literary; and literary-mythic. The first level of meaning derives from Quick's feelings about his mother; the second, his use of the literary character Huckleberry Finn; and the third, his use of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, and of the myth of the Northwest Passage to India. These levels are evident throughout Vandemark's Folly, but they are blended in such a way that the first dominates structural part one, the second is especially evident in parts one and two, and the third is the transcending in— terest in parts two and three. In part one, Jake is depicted as having a good mother, Mary, and an evil stepfather, John Rucker. The theme of part one concerns Jake's separation from his mother, a separation brought about largely by Rucker, who is clearly portrayed as a villain: he married Jake's mother not out of love but for the property he thought he would inherit from Jake's father, he was away from home as a traveling salesman much of the time and was more attracted to a "colony of Free Lovers" than to the Puritan—Victorian family life, he put Jake to work in a cotton mill when the lad was only six years old, and he beat young Jake's back 146 raw (pp. 5-9). This physical punishment prompts Jake to run away from home and take up "a new life" on the canal (p. 11). Jake's new life as a canal—boat hand soon becomes a disappointment to him because this life is incomplete with- out his mother. As he says, in Chapter III, "I See the World, and Suffer a Great Loss": If I could have forgotten my wish to see my mother it would have been in many ways a pleasant life to me. I was never tired of the new and strange things I saw —-new regions, new countries . . . (p. 29). Moreover, the world that Jake sees has terrible imperfec- tions--for example, the house of prostitution which he in- nocently visits—-which are a shocking contrast to his mother's moral purity. He continually tries to find her; once returning to the home she has mysteriously left, he sits under the "old apple tree" and contemplates: "What should I do? Where was my mother? She was the only one in the world whom I cared for or who loved me" (p. 42). It is inside the "old hollow apple tree" (which Jake and his mother "called our post-office") that he finds a note, with an old shoe, from his mother saying that she had been taken westward by Rucker-~ I read [the note] slowly . . . and turned my eyes west-~where my mother had gone. I had lost her! How could any one be found who had disappeared into that re ion which swallowed up thousands every month? (p. 44 . Jake then decides to go west, primarily in order to rescue his ideal damsel in distress, his "kidnaped" mother (p. 44). His passion to save his mother from Rucker becomes domi— nant, almost blinding: 146 raw (pp. 5-9). This physical punishment prompts Jake to run away from home and take up "a new life" on the canal (p. 11). Jake's new life as a canal—boat hand soon becomes a disappointment to him because this life is incomplete with— out his mother. As he says, in Chapter III, "I See the World, and Suffer a Great Loss": If I could have forgotten my wish to see my mother it would have been in many ways a pleasant life to me. I was never tired of the new and strange things I saw -—new regions, new countries . . . (p. 29). Moreover, the world that Jake sees has terrible imperfec— tions-~for example, the house of prostitution which he in— nocently visits--which are a shocking contrast to his mother's moral purity. He continually tries to find her; once returning to the home she has mysteriously left, he sits under the "old apple tree" and contemplates: "What should I do? Where was my mother? She was the only one in the world whom I cared for or who loved me" (p. 42). It is inside the "old hollow apple tree" (which Jake and his mother "called our post—office") that he finds a note, with an old shoe, from his mother saying that she had been taken westward by Rucker-— I read [the note] slowly . . . and turned my eyes west--where my mother had gone. I had lost her! How could any one be found who had disappeared into that re ion which swallowed up thousands every month? (p. 44 . Jake then decides to go west, primarily in order to rescue his ideal damsel in distress, his "kidnaped" mother (p. 44). His passion to save his mother from Rucker becomes domi— nant, almost blinding: 147 'I mean to find my mother!‘ I cried. 'Where is she?‘ . . . I ran . . . calling as I had so often done when a child, 'Ma, Ma! Where are you, ma!‘ . . . (p. 71). Although Jake does come across Rucker, the villain with a "sneaking sort of smile" (p. 71), he does not find his mother with him. Part one of the novel thus plays upon a classic theme, the quest of a son for his mother and against his father, but in Vandemark's Folly this theme does not spring from any literary source, such as Oedipus Rex or Hamlet. It is, rather, an example of autobiographical confession. To say that part one is autobiography is not to say, of course, that Jake Vandemark equals Herbert Quick.23 Yet there is the highly significant correspondence between Jake and Herbert, and that is the great love each had for the mother. There is no other way to explain or understand the quest that so obviously governs part one of the novel. There can be no doubt that Herbert Quick had an extraordinary love and respect for his mother, Margaret Coleman Quick, that lasted a lifetime.24 Furthermore, Herbert Quick's love for his mother 23The external particulars are certainly inconsis- tent in their correspondences; for example, Jake was born in 1838, Herbert in 1861, but Jake's blue eyes and blondish hair are a parallel description of Herbert (not Herbert's father, Martin, who supposedly was the model for Jake and who had a dark complexion). But these are mere external particulars. 24Personal interview with Mrs. Raymond N. (Margaret Q.) Ball, in Rochester, New York, April 6, 1966. 148 explains Jake's remarkable passion for the frontier land. The land in Vandemark's Folly is not only a virginal and feminine symbol but a mother symbol as well. It is Mother Earth. When Jake joins the great "stream of emigration," he is like-—so the micro—macrocosmic image suggests-~one little spermatazoon among many flowing toward the fertile valleys of the virgin West: I drove out to the highway, and turning my prow to the west, I joined again in the stream of people swarming westward. The tide had swollen in the week during which I had laid by at the Brestons'. The road was rutted, poached deep where wet and beaten hard where dry, or pulverized into dust by the stream of emigration. Here we went, oxen, cows, mules, horses; coaches, carriages, blue jeans, corduroys, rags, tatters, silks, satins, caps, tall hats, pov- erty, riches; speculators, missionaries, land— hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples fleeing from the law; families seeking homes; the wrecks of homes seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail; politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors hunting opportunities for founding news— papers; adventurers on their way to everywhere; law— yers with a few books; Abolitionists going to the Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugi- tive slaves; officers hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers 'hunting country'—- a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of birth . . . (p. 105). Although the pioneers have multivarious characteristics, they are all associated with the "birth" that will be given them by their new, Western mother. And, by implied con- trast, the civilization that "shot" them out is like a. father-- Down I went with the rest, across ferries, through Dodgeville, Mineral Point and Platteville, past a thousand vacant sites for farms toward my own farm so far from civilization, shot out of civilization by the forces of civilization itself (p. 105). 148 explains Jake's remarkable passion for the frontier land. The land in Vandemark's Folly is not only a virginal and feminine symbol but a mother symbol as well. It is Mother Earth. When Jake joins the great "stream of emigration," he is like-—so the micro—macrocosmic image suggests—~one little spermatazoon among many flowing toward the fertile valleys of the virgin West: I drove out to the highway, and turning my prow to the west, I joined again in the stream of people swarming westward. The tide had swollen in the week during which I had laid by at the Prestons'. The road was rutted, poached deep where wet and beaten hard where dry, or pulverized into dust by the stream of emigration. Here we went, oxen, cows, mules, horses; coaches, carriages, blue jeans, corduroys, rags, tatters, silks, satins, caps, tall hats, pov- erty, riches; speculators, missionaries, land— hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples fleeing from the law; families seeking homes; the wrecks of homes seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail; politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors hunting opportunities for founding news- papers; adventurers on their way to everywhere; law- yers with a few books; Abolitionists going to the Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugi— tive slaves; officers hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers 'hunting country'—— a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of birth . . . (p. 105). Although the pioneers have multivarious characteristics, they are all associated with the "birth" that will be given them by their new, Western mother. And, by implied con- trast, the civilization that "shot" them out is like a father—— Down I went with the rest, across ferries, through Dodgeville, Mineral Point and Platteville, past a thousand vacant sites for farms toward my own farm so far from civilization, shot out of civilization by the forces of civilization itself (p. 105). 149 To Jake's way of thinking, the Eastern civilization that fathered him is associated with cruelty, slavery, tyranny, physical pain, corruptness, hate, discord, unhappiness: evil. The prairie land, on the other hand, means harmonious beauty, musical love, and motherly inspiration to Jake; Quick's evocation of this land is nearly beyond the power of words: The prairie chickens now became the musicians of the morning and evening on the uplands, with their wild and intense and almost insane chorus, repeated over and over until it seemed as if the meaning of it must be forced upon every mind like a figure in music played with greatening power by a violinist so that the heart finally almost breaks with it——'Ka—a- a—a-a—a, da, ka, ka, ka! Ka—a-a—a—a—a—a—a, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka! KA—A—A—A—A-A-A, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka!'——Oh, there is no way to tell it!-- And then the cock filled in the harmony with his lovely contribution: facing the courted hen, he swel— led out the great orange globes at the sides of his head, fluffed out his feathers, strutted forward a few steps, and tolled his deep-toned bell, with all the skill of a ventriloquist, making it seem far away when he was on a near-by knoll, like a velvet gong sounded with no stroke of the hammer, as if it spoke from some inward vibration set up by a mys— terious current-~a liquid 'Do, re, me,‘ here full and distinct, there afar off, the whole air tremulous with it, the harmony to the ceaseless fugue in the soprano clef of the rest of the flock-—nobody will ever hear it again! Nobody ever drew from it, and from the howling of the wolves, the honking of the geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad voices of curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o—link, meadow— lark, dick—cissel, killdeer and the rest--day~sounds and night sounds, dawn—sounds and dusk—sounds—-more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding west across Iowa that spring of 1855, with his fortune in his teams of cows, in the covered wagon they drew, and the deed to his farm in a flat packet of treasures 150 in a little iron-bound trunk--among them a rain- stained letter and a worn-out woman's shoe (pp. 140-141). In Chapter V, "The End of a Long Quest," Jake finds his mother, Mary Brouwer Vandemark (as Jake calls her, thus cutting Rucker's name out of the family record, p. 75). But he finds that she is dead and buried, in Madison, Wis- consin. (This comes at the end of part one of the novel.) Though saddened, of course, Jake takes the deed his mother left him to some land farther west, the "Promised Land" west of the Mississippi, and continues his journey. And when he first sees the Iowa prairie he identifies it with his mother: It was not the thought of my mother that brought the tears to my eyes, but my happiness in finding the newest, strangest, most delightful, sternest, most wonderful thing in the world—~the Iowa prairie --that made me think of my mother. If I only could have found her alive! If I only could have had her with me! (p. 113). Moreover, the sight of the new land promises a rebirth for Jake: It was sublime! Bird, flower, grass, cloud, wind, and the immense expanse of sunny prairie, swelling up into undulations like a woman's breasts turgid with milk for a hungry race. I forgot my— self and my position in the world, my loneliness . . . the problems of my life . . . (pp. 112—113). And Jake subsequently associates with the new land all that which he associated with his mother——freedom, purity, har— monious beauty and love, happiness-—or the possibility of such goodness. In conclusion to this analysis of part one of 151 Vandemark's Folly, it should be emphasized that Quick's per— sonal symbols for the good mother and the wicked father are highly important to an understanding of why he wished to return to the past, in memory, by writing a story that had the "lost prairie of Iowa in it"; why he depicted (in pre- vious fiction as well as in the Midland Trilogy) rural life as desirable and urbanization as bad; why he depicted the land speculators (those who used Mother Earth as a mere plaything) as special villains, who (like Rucker, the crooked lawyer Jackway, and Buck Gowdy) could smile and smile and still be villains. Of course when, at the end of part two of Vandemark's Folly, Jake's "Plow Weds the Sod" (Chapter XIII), the personal significance of Quick's love affair with the land is subsumed by other significances. A noteworthy bridge from the personal world of Quicl to his public world was his use of an established American literary character. Few readers could fail to recognize the similarities between young Jake Vandemark and Huckleberry Finn: perhaps this is why Quick did not see fit to mention Mark Twain in any way, neither in Vandemark's Folly nor in correspondence about it.25 In any case, Quick's use of 25This is not to say that Quick was not expressly familiar with Twain's writings. In a brief article for Collier's entitled "Weeds and Literature," Quick explained why Twain did not "immortalize the tumbleweed along with the jackass rabbit, the coyote, and the sage-brush . . . in the days of Roughing It . . . ": "Mark Twain failed to mention the tumbleweed because he didn't see it." This undated article, which may or may not have been published, is in Miscellaneous Vol. I of the Quick Manuscripts in Des Moines, Iowa. Also, Quick did refer to Twain in the .r 152 Twain's character, especially noticeable in parts one and two of Vandemark's Folly, suggests the former's need to relate himself in some way to the public tradition of American literature. Jake is an extension of Huck in several senses. First there are the obvious matters of age and motivation. Jake's adventures on the canal boat occur when he is about twelve, while Huck's on the River occur when he is thirteen or fourteen. In Chapter VII, Jake's "Adventure on the Old Ridge Road" westward comes when he is seventeen. Like Huck, Jake becomes disenchanted by a corrupt civilization and his family life; even Jake's alcoholic stepfather, with his "yellowish beard all over his face" (p. 4), is like Huck's bewhiskyed and bewiskered Pap--cruel and selfish. Much of Jake's story is about his lighting out for the territory; he is a slightly older Huck who has further ad- ventures there. As Huck, cramped by "sivilized" ways and cognizant of the hypocrisy or greed or corruption of the towns, repeatedly yearns for nature as symbolized by the River, so does Jake have a romantic attraction to the in— nocent, unspoiled, virgin Land. Like Huck, Jake is bothered by the problem of Negro slavery (in the Underground Railway episode, pp. 92-105). Jake, like Huck, is finally willing to help Negro slaves other two novels of the Midland Trilogy: Twain's "story of the Jumping Frog" is mentioned in The Hawkeye, p. 426; Pudd'n-head Wilson is mentioned in The Invisible Woman, Do 139- 153 eéscape to a "heaven" of freedom; but as Huck ironically says -tliat he will "go to hell" for disobeying man-made law, Jake Igri—dibnically says that he will obey the higher moral law: 'Now,' he [Dunlap, an Abolitionist Jake meets on the trail] went on, as the negroes disappeared, 'you have it in your power to exercise the right of an American citizen and perform the God-accursed legal duty to report these fugitives at the next town, join a posse to hunt them down under a law of the United States, get a reward for doing it, and know that you have vindicated the law--or you can stand with God and tell the law to go to hell—~where it came from-—and help the Underground Railway to carry these people to heaven. Which will you do?' 'I'll tell the law to go to hell,‘ said I (p. 101). :[gilce Huck, too, Jake has a best male friend who is, in a enerise, a social outcast, but instead of this friend's being a. Inxnaway Negro slave, he is an immigrant from Norway, fifiiégrlus Thorkelson, trying to find a place in the sun of Auneelrican society. Like Huck's heroic endeavors to rescue a female in (iiES‘tress, Mary Jane, there are Jake's dangerous attempts (<3rlea successful and the other only partially so) to rescue V311?é§inia Royall and Rowena Fewkes. Moreover, Jake's feel— ir1é§ss for Virginia are like Huck's for Mary Jane: the awed IVEESIDect and protective stance of an adolescent's sincere 1‘3\fee, as for example when Jake, alone with Virginia on the tr‘EicLl westward, protects her from the wolves (pp. 157-158) 81161 from the outlaws (p. 178 $3 passim), and lets her have ~tll€3 whole wagon to herself at night. Both Huck and Jake strive to do what is right. 1351(311 has an innate sense of justice. For example, Huck 154 :feaeils disgusted and miserable when the Duke and King are 132Llrred—and-feathered because he knows that although they ‘wveanre "rapscallions" this punishment did not fit their C:thLmes. And Jake has similar feelings that tar-and- :f‘eaéathering was much too drastic a punishment for the "(3zrinm" of claim jumping (p. 246). Like Huck, too, Jake has a sense of responsibility. .FXIJ. example of it is his willingness to guard the county iifljiads in Chapter XV, "I Save a Treasure, and Start a Feud," ‘vviQLLch is reminiscent of the mysterious origins of feuds 12632?._§ as given in the Grangerford episode in Huckleberry JFHiJIn and also of Huck's efforts to save the Wilkes' gold. IBIth the most important example of Jake's good—willed re— Eslpcxnsibility, even to the point of what he considers self- Eseaczrifice, is his decision in Chapter XVII, "I Receive a I91?c>posal--and Accept." The situation is this: a wealthy :Lélrld—speculator, Buck Gowdy, has made Rowena Fewkes preg- rlElrlt but will not marry her.26 Growing understandably dessperate, Rowena finally proposes to Jake. Jake, even tl'lough he has long harbored the dream of marrying Virginia, aCBCzepts--but only after wrestling with himself in a way reIniniscent, again, of the "All right, then, I'll go to ]3633.1" passage in Huckleberry Finn. Because Quick did not want it publicized that any 26It is Magnus Thorkelson who marries Rowena, two (iEHYs after she gives birth to Owen Lovejoy Gowdy, and 't¥}is entire affair becomes the controlling issue in the f1rial novel of the Midland Trilogy. 155 <31? 'the Trilogy was his personal story,27 he employed two ruea:in.devices to keep the personal element private as well 2153 to establish a rapport with his public audience. One <>:f? these devices was his use of Twain's boy-—of an estab— Il.j.sshed literary character who had not lost the capability iscs enjoy the freedom and delights of innocent nature and \nrlnxa had the good sense to return to it, again and again, ‘1:<> escape the corrupting influence of the towns. The other (i.ervice was the Edenic myth, which will be discussed sslaxartly. Quick did not rely on Twain's character alone ‘t3630ause Huck Finn, though suitable in many respects, lacked El ‘very important ingredient: the dignity thought to be in- herent in titled nobility.28 Quick could not give Vandemark any title such as $3j_ry lord, or king. To do so would be to run the risk, iliilce Melville's (see note 28), of losing the contemporary IXnaearican audience. To do so would be un—American. To do 53C) would be to touch off a comical response-~and Quick did IlCD‘t intend a comical response——like that which derives fIT‘Om the intentional incongruity of Twain's Duke and King 131?Eancing about in sword play on an old raft in the middle \_ 27Quick said this even about that novel, The Eiéivvkeye, which he most freely acknowledged, in private, (3 be highly autobiographical. Letter of H. Quick to - L. Chambers, December 7, 1822 [1922], in the Bobbs Pa~1pers. - 28This problem is very similar to that of Mel— )743Lle's Ishmael when he confesses that he has only to do W15th a poor old shabby whale hunter and then, in the fol- C>Wing chapter of Moby-Dick, calls this hunter King Ahab. 156 (31? ‘the muddy Mississippi and persuading Jim and Huck to wait on them with all the trappings of royal splendor. Yet Quick vvealated to give his hero a title of nobility, and he did (as discussed above) build a suggestion of nobility into the name lagdemark and he also named Jake's dream girl Virginia Royall.29 If Quick's American audience had been capable of S eriously accepting the terminology of the Arthurian myth, Quick would have used it, probably with abandon, for not only would the "knighthood" terminology in that myth have satisfied his want but also the Arthurian theme of adultery would have enhanced its corresponding theme in Vandemark's Folly. But Quick had learned that "knighthood" parallels-- such as the experimental Arthurian language in a passage in Elle Broken Lance, already discussed—-—were not a popular Success in America; by 1921 he could not, though he wished to , express a favoring of "When Knighthood Was in Flower." The question naturally occurs: why did Quick wish tC) employ titles of nobility? One cannot help but answer that he somehow identified these titles with the glory of the past, a past not only of the 1850's but a past that a-1'1‘tedated even the explorers sent by the mother countries of Europe, and that he wanted to make sure his American audience would understand Vandemark as a high—ranking, 1noble person, and to remind his audience that there was Once such a person--in the days before urbanization brought \ 29Also, Quick did allow Vandemark to have a "Castor" in his house which was "a sort of title of nobility" (p. 306). 157 its train of problems to America. This problem of nobility -——:'L.e. , the manner of indicating it——was a knotty one for Quick, and it is difficult to determine whether the blame—- or praise, as the case may be——should fall on Quick or his American audience. \ In any case, Quick obviously did not draw upon "lcnighthood" or Arthurian-myth terms in Vandemark's Fo_lly. Instead, he drew from the Bible,30 which he had read and re— read since his boyhood in Iowa,31 and, more specifically, from what R. W. B. Lewis has called "the noble but illusory myth of the American as Adam."32 In the myth of Adam, Quick found a character as innocent as the boys he depicted in much of his previous fiction, and now he saw the further potentiality of that character to satisfy the want of no— bility in Vandemark's Ely, for Adam was not only high ranking but the highest ranking creature in his domain. Adam, created in the image of the Lord God, was lord, and master of all save the tree of knowledge, in a world as Wonderful as the Iowa prairie first seemed to Jake Vandemark. Even in part one of the novel there are hints that Quick had in mind the Adamic myth, though in a negative \ _ 3OUnlike his use of Huck Finn, Quick's use of the Blble is explicitly acknowledged several times in Vande— % Folly——all showing "the Bible to be an inspired WOr-k" (p. 258). p 31"I Picked My Goal at Ten—-—Reached It at Sixty," - 50. 32The American Adam (Chicago: I The University of Chicago Press, 1955), . 89. 158 way here. Jake is depicted as a child who is simply not at home in the corrupt environment of the East, and (unlike Huck Finn) he does not really learn to understand that en— vironment. Instead of making a choice based upon an ac- quired understanding of Eastern life, Jake instinctively recognizes his need "to be free more than anything else - . . [his need for the] fresh air" of an Edenic environ— ment (p. 28), and he continually hears the beckoning "voices of the West" (p. 50). When Jake is challenged by the bully- ing canal-hand, Ace, over an apple which symbolizes the alternative of tyranny or freedom,33 he hits out as blindly as Melville's Adamic hero, Billy Budd. When Jake goes with Captain Sproule to see the "worst vices and crimes" of the Eastern environment, the narrator makes it clear that a child should not see these crimes (p. 32); Jake is a child but "put in a most unchildlike position" (p. 26). East of the Mississippi, Jake is an apparently easy victim for such eJCploiters as the crooked lawyer Jackway because he does not understand their language; but although he does not kl’low his tort's from his tart's Jake does have an innate gOOdness which, in the last analysis, protects him. What he needs is the environment that will suit his Adamic C3171a.racter. At the beginning of part two, in Chapter VI, "I 33pp. 22-23. The apple that Ace snatches away from ‘Take means tyranny if Jake does not fight; it means freedom lf he does. Jake instinctively feels this issue, not I‘a.‘t:ionally. 159 lBeeczome Cow Vandemark," Jake's Adamic character becomes per- ifeectly clear. When he first sees the Iowa prairie, it is :1_j_kened to a "great green sea" (p. 111) which washes away ‘tikle wickedness of the Eastern civilization. The prairie sszynnbolizes the same baptismal function as the Atlantic c:ean did for his European forebears. Undergoing his birth -————or rebirth--as Adam, Jake responds in a manner suitable 13<> his archetype: I shall never forget the sight. It was like a great green sea. . . . all the swales were coated thick with an emerald growth full—bite high, and in the deeper, wetter hollows grew cowslips already showing their glossy, golden flowers. The hillsides were thick with the woolly possblummies in their furry spring coats protecting them against the frost and chill, showing purple-violet on the outside of a cup filled with golden stamens, the first fruits of the prairie flowers; on the warmer southern slopes a few of the splendid bird's—foot violets of the prairie were showing the azure color which would soon make some of the hillsides as blue as the sky; and standing higher than the peering grass rose the rough—leafed stalks of green which would soon show us the yellow puccoons and sweet—Williams and scarlet lilies and shooting stars, and later the yellow rosin-weeds, Indian dye-flower and goldenrod. . . . The wild—fowl were clamoring north for the sum- mer's campaign of nesting. Everywhere the sky was harrowed by the wedged wild geese, their voices as sweet as organ tones. . . . It was sublime! Bird, flower, grass, cloud, wind, and the immense expanse of sunny prairie. . . . I forgot myself . . . my loneliness problems . . . ; my heart swelled, and my throat filled. I sat looking at it, with the tears trick- ling from my eyes, the uplift of my soul more than I could bear . . . (pp. 111—113). Ijrlllke that of the East, the language of the prairie West j-SS music to the ears of this Adamic person (see p. 140 for a-1'1<)ther example). Instantly and instinctively in tune with 160 the nature which God created for him, Jake is what R. W. B. Lewis calls "The [Adamic] Hero in Space."34 As Jake says, "I was made for the open, I guess" (p. 115). And, as be- fitting his newly found identity and environment, Jake earns a new name: in the sentimentally trying process of trading his horses (Flora and Fanny) for cows (Lily and Cherry) and in the further trading of "one sound cow for two lame ones" (p. 120)-—cows which form the basis of Jake's subsequent agricultural prosperity and which he names (Lily and Cherry), like Adam naming the animals-—Jake becomes "Cow" Vandemark. As "Cow," a nickname suggesting kinship with one of the most 34The present paragraph on Vandemark is very similar to Lewis's interpretation of Cooper's Natty Bumppo. Lewis cites a key passage from Cooper to support his claim that Bumppo is "the full—fledged fictional Adam . . . : The trial successfully passed-—the trial of honor, courage, and self-reliance-—Deerslayer earns his symbolic reward of a new name. 'What we call him?‘ [as ks the dying Iroquois]. 'Deerslayer is the name I bear now. 'That good name for boy--poor name for warrior. He get better quick. No fear there'—-the savage had strength sufficient, under the strong excitement he felt, to raise a hand and tap the young man on his breast——'eye sartaine-finger lightning-~aim, death--great warrior soon. No Deerslayer—-Hawk—eye -—Hawk-eye—-Hawk-eye. Shake hand.‘ The new hero rejoices in his new name and status: 'Hawkeye! That's not a bad name for a warrior, sounding much more manful and valiant than Deerslayer.’ Like his closest equivalent in recent fiction, Isaac McCaslin, on the occa- sion of his first ritualistic encounter with Old Ben in William Faulkner's The Bear, Hawkeye could reflect (he virtually does) that 'he was witnessing his own birth'—— or rebirth as the American Adam: accomplished appropriately in the forest on the edge of a lake, with no parents near at hand, no sponsors at the baptism; springing from nowhere, as Tocqueville had said, standing alone in the presence of God and Nature." See The American Adam, pp. 104-105. 161 innocent and inoffensive of God's creatures, young Vandemark plods on across the prairie to his own farm land in Iowa (to a township which will soon bear his name), and, like Adam, he is lord of all the natural elements in this new, Edenic world because he is in harmony with it. This is not to say that the rest of the novel is merely one idyllic scene after another. No. Threats and temptations creep into Eden; complications arise as Cow Vandemark is confronted by difficulties, and the result of this confrontation is the most remarkable aspect of Quick's use of the myth. This will become clear when it is under- stood that Quick rewrote Genesis in two ways. In the first way there is no fall, but in the second way there is a fall. The characters in Quick's two versions of Genesis are as follows. In the first version, Cow Vandemark and Virginia Royall are Adam and Eve, and Cow almost plays the role of the serpentine villain too. In the second, Magnus Thorkelson and Rowena Fewkes are Adam and Eve, and Buck Gowdy is the Serpent. In both versions, Elder and Grandma Thorndyke represent the Lord God. As both versions are developed in the novel, the one complementing and giving meaning to the other, the land becomes characterized by two main and contrary viewpoints. The story of Cow and Virginia as Adam and Eve is told in Chapters IX, X, and XI, the thematic as well as the nearly exact structural center of the novel. In this key episode, Quick followed Moses very closely indeed, 162 emphasizing the theme of sexual temptation and including the use of such symbols from Genesis 2 and 3 as the secure and happy setting in nature, the forbidden tree, the serpent, and clothes. The cardinal difference is, again, that in Quick's first version of Genesis there is no fall. At the beginning of Chapter IX, "The Grove of Des— tiny," Cow is pictured getting up in the morning, whistling some popular tunes, preparing the first meal of the new day: happily minding his own business in the safe grove he for— tunately finds himself in. He is not alone here. Virginia is with him, lying dormant, she having escaped on the trail west from "that man," as she calls her villainous brother— in—law, Buck Gowdy (and there is a hint that this "snake" had intended to molest her sexually, p. 163), and having become an "Embarrassing Addition" to Cow's wagon in the previous chapter. Now the most puzzling symbol in Genesis 2 is the rib that was used during the first, and certainly most remarkable, surgical operation. Why a rib? Why not a phalanx or a kidney? An answer, a realistic correspon— dence in the imagery, is suggested when Cow Vandemark taps "the side of the wagon"-—which has been so much a part of him that it is a symbol of him and which is a covered wagon, with ribs supporting the covering-~in order to awaken Virginia, whom he calls by her first name. She emerges from this Adam's ribbed wagon in a birth—like trauma. (This trauma is actually induced by Virginia's fear that the per— son calling her first name must be the villainous Gowdy.) 163 Also, in this opening passage of Chapter IX, the narrator does not neglect to underscore the fact that the Lord God, represented by Grandma Thorndyke, entertained his own peculiar notions about sex and reproduction: To Grandma Thorndyke sex must have seemed the original curse imposed on our first parents; eggs and link sausages were repulsive because they sug— gested the insides of animals and vital processes; and a perfect human race would have been to her made up of beings nourished by the odors of flowers, and perpetuated by the planting of the pairings of finger-nails in antiseptic earth--or something of the sort. . . . every trace of the [biological] facts . . . had to be concealed, and if not they were ignored by Grandma Thorndyke. New England all over! (p. 163). It is a repetition of Genesis, too, since Grandma Thorndyke supposes that "our first parents," Adam and Eve, were themselves created by some special technique, if not by the "planting of the pairings of finger—nails in anti— septic earth," then "something of the sort," and certainly not by the commonly understood biological method. In the "Grove of Destiny" episode of Vandemark's Folly, Cow and Virginia are likewise depicted as being parentless, the pure products of some sort of virgin birth; it is even suggested that Virginia's birth, like Eve's, is associated with a rib image. And certainly out West, Cow does not have any parents in the common sense of that term, he hav— ing been born-—or reborn-—as Adam from the Edenic prairie land. (Even when Cow was back East, before he acquired his new name, his biological father did not appear, and he re— mains a mystery throughout the novel, and his mother was 163 Also, in this opening passage of Chapter IX, the narrator does not neglect to underscore the fact that the Lord God, represented by Grandma Thorndyke, entertained his own peculiar notions about sex and reproduction: To Grandma Thorndyke sex must have seemed the original curse imposed on our first parents; eggs and link sausages were repulsive because they sug— gested the insides of animals and vital processes; and a perfect human race would have been to her made up of beings nourished by the odors of flowers, and perpetuated by the planting of the pairings of finger-nails in antiseptic earth—-or something of the sort. . . . every trace of the [biological] facts . . . had to be concealed, and if not they were ignored by Grandma Thorndyke. New England all over! (p. 163). It is a repetition of Genesis, too, since Grandma Thorndyke supposes that "our first parents," Adam and Eve, were themselves created by some special technique, if not by the "planting of the pairings of finger—nails in anti— septic earth," then "something of the sort," and certainly not by the commonly understood biological method. In the "Grove of Destiny" episode of Vandemark's Folly, Cow and Virginia are likewise depicted as being parentless, the pure products of some sort of virgin birth; it is even suggested that Virginia's birth, like Eve's, is associated with a rib image. And certainly out West, Cow does not have any parents in the common sense of that term, he hav— ing been born-—or reborn--as Adam from the Edenic prairie land. (Even when Cow was back East, before he acquired his new name, his biological father did not appear, and he re— mains a mystery throughout the novel, and his mother was 164 characterized as being as good as the Virgin Mother, after whom Mary Vandemark is named.) In both Genesis and the "Grove" episode, the hero and heroine begin in an innocent state, parentless and sinless, with no curse on them. In both stories, biological sex is associated with sin, or a curse. And, as in Genesis, Cow-Adam cannot escape this curse, cannot remain antiseptically pure and innocent, if, by definition, he falls into sinful sexual activity. As the "Grove of Destiny" episode develops, and as the solitary and parentless pair make their way a bit far— ther west, Cow begins to recognize the female attributes of Virginia. He "notices" that she has some features differ- ent from his own, and he thinks of her as he would the live stock he has tended and knows so well: First I noticed that her hair, though dark brown, gave out gleams of bright dark fire as the sun shone through it in certain ways. . . . I have seen the same flame in the mane of a black horse bred from a sorrel dam or sire. As a stock breeder I have learned that in such cases there is in the heredity the ge- netic unit of red hair overlaid with black pigment. It is the same in people. . . . I was fascinated by that smoldering fire in the girl's hair; and in look- ing at it I finally grew bolder, as I saw that she did not seem to suspect my scrutiny, and I saw that her brows and lashes were black, and her eyes very, very blue—~not the buttermilk blue of the Dutchman's eyes, like mine, with brows and lashes lighter than the sallow Dutch skin, but deep larkspur blue, with a dark edging to the pupil. . . . Her skin, too, showed her ruddy breed . . . and her nose was freck— led. Glimpses of her neck and bosom revealed a skin of the thinnest, whitest texture—-quite milk—white, with pink showing through on account of the heat. She had little strong brown hands, and the foot which she put on the dashboard was a very trim and graceful foot like that of a thoroughbred mare, built for flight rather than work, and it swelled 165 beautifully in its grass—stained white stocking above her slender ankle to the modest skirt (p. 166). Cow's response to Virginia is thus as naive and as inten— tionally wholesome as his Adamic response to the beauties of the virgin prairie, and is Quick's imagined view of Adam's detailed response to Eve. Before Cow's study of Virginia's "powerful attrac- tions" (p. 167) develops into outright sexual temptation, Quick allows Elder and Grandma Thorndyke to appear on the scene in order to issue a warning about the welfare of Virginia and to further identify her with Eve. This brief scene is the only place in the entire Trilogy where Vir— ginia's original first name is disclosed: 'Her name is Royall,‘ said Grandma Thorndyke . . . 'Genevieve Royall. . . . She is sixteen years old. . . . Have you seen such a person?‘ 'No, I hain't,‘ said I. The name 'Genevieve' helped me a little in this deceit (pp. 168-169). While Cow and the Thorndykes converse, Genevieve Royall—— the original Eve royal—~is hiding in the wagon, and she and Cow feel justified in their "deceit," do not feel guilt or shame, because they have not committed a sexual sin. But the potentiality for such sinning and such falling from royal heights is just what the Thorndykes warn against when the Elder makes the reminder that Buck Gowdy is still "hunting high and low" for Virginia. Like the Lord God's warning Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit, the Elder's admonition says, in effect, beware of the serpent (pp. 169-170). Both the Lord God and the Thorndykes play 166 the important role of warners. Next, after the Thorndykes leave him and a highly providential rain covers the tracks of his wagon, Cow feels that no one and especially no villainous third party will be able to find him and Virginia; but he also starts to feel a little guilt: "We were alone. . . . I was suddenly possessed of the impulse to hide, like a thief making for cover with stolen goods" (p. 174). He then heads for a "rounded crown of trees" (p. 174), a grove even more ap— propriate than the previous one for his royal companion, and this becomes their "hiding—place" (p. 175). They hide not so much from Elder and Grandma Thorndyke——not so much from the Lord God Whose commandment they have disobeyed—— as from the serpentine Gowdy. And, as the situation develops, it becomes clear that the serpent is not to be considered as some fabulous third person, for only two are present in this "Grove of Destiny." The "evil spirits" (p. 179) of the "daredevil" (p. 185) Bushyayer bandit gang pass near Cow and Virginia's Edenic hiding—place, but they do not intrude. The Satanic serpent is, rather, an animalistic part of Cow himself, Quick's purpose here being to show the emotions of "the way of a maid with a man, Nature's way—-but a perilous way for such a time and such a situation": 'We've lost Gowdy-~forever' [says Cow]. I thought at first that she was going to throw her arms about my neck; but instead she took both my hands and pressed them in a long clasp. It was 167 the first time she had touched me, or shown emotion toward me—-emotions of the sort for which I was now eagerly longing. I did not return her pressure. I merely let her hold my hands until she dropped them. I wanted to do a dozen things, but there is nothing stronger than the unbroken barriers of a boy's modesty-—barriers strong as steel, which once broken down become as though they never were; while a woman even in her virgin innocence, is always offering unconscious invitation, always revealing ways of seeming approach, always giving to the stalled boy arguments against his bashfulness-- arguments which may prove absurd or not when he acts upon them (p. 175). The accumulating animal imagery in the narrative traces Cow's perilously growing resolution to act the role of the serpent. At night, when Virginia is asleep in the wagon alone, Cow's modesty is replaced by an animalism as he prowls "about silently so as not to rouse her, prowling like a wolf" (p. 176). And in the light of day: I had now in a dim, determined, stubborn way claimed this girl in my heart for my own; and I felt without really thinking of it, that I could best foreclose my lien by defeating all comers before I dragged her yielding to my cave. It is the way of all male animals—~except spiders, per— haps, and bees-~and a male animal was all I was that morning . . . (p. 182). Ever mindful of that "immemorial duty which man owes to woman" (p. 188), Cow watches Virginia "as a cat watches a bird" (p. 186). He lays "plans" for her "much as a wolf or badger might have done" (p. 192)--plans which become "poison plots" of "deviltry" (p. 194). He even finds oc— casion to "creep" on his "belly through the brush and weeds" (p. 182)--like a reptile——"crawling like a lizard" (p. 183). All these animal images are summed up in the final one, that of a ”snake," and Cow explains how 168 dangerously close he came to playing the role of that snake: 'What is it? Are you sick? What shall I do if you get sick!‘ 'No,' I said, 'I am not sick. I am all right --now.' 'But something has happened,‘ she insisted. 'You are weak as well as pale. Let me do some— thing for you. What was it?’ 'A snake,‘ I said, for an excuse. 'A rattle- snake. It struck at me and missed. It almost struck me. I'll be all right now.’ The longer I live the surer I am that I told her very nearly the truth (p. 193). During his state of "agitated" animalistic, snake- like emotions, Cow rationalizes that "no matter what hap— ,pened, it would be pure and blameless--for it would be us!" (p. 177). But this only heightens his temptation. Even 'the idyllic grove-—which is a miniature Eden (complete with Eitream, crabapple tree, and almost magically provided food) 811d which is described in detail in Chapter X, "The Grove 01? IDestiny Does Its Work"—-does not pacify him: We used to go fishing along the creek; and ate many a savory mess of bullheads, sunfish and shiners, which I prepared and cooked. We had butter, and the cows, eased of the labors of travel, grew sleek and round, and gave us plenty of milk. I saved for Vir— ginia all the eggs laid by my hens, except those used by her in the cooking. She gave me the dain— tiest of meals; and I taught her to make bread. To see her molding it with her strong small hands, was enough to have made me insane if I had had any sense left. She showed me how to make vinegar pies; and I failed in my pies made of the purple—flowered prairie oxalis; but she triumphed over me by using the deliciously acid leaves as a flavoring for sand- wiches—-we were getting our first experience as prairie-dwellers. . . . One day I cooked a delicious mess of cowslip greens with a ham—bone. She seemed to be happy; and I should have been if I had not made myself so miserable. I remember almost every moment of this time--so long ago (pp. 188—189). 169 The crisis in the "Grove" episode is indicated in the paragraphs immediately following the one, just quoted, about Edenic bliss versus "miserable" temptation: One day as we were fishing we were obliged to clamber along the bank where a tree crowded us so far over the water that Virginia, in stooping to pass under the body of the tree, was about to fall; and I jumped down into the stream and caught her in my arms as she was losing her hold. . . . 'Don't let me fall,‘ she begged. 'I won't,' I said—~and I could say no more (p. 189). The "more" that is implied-—perhaps over—implied--is that the "tree" here should bear some of the responsibility for, as in Genesis, "Man's miserable fall"; that the "fall" here is averted, athletically; and that the fall would be into a Inuddy "stream" that symbolizes time and human corruption.35 Emoreover, as Cow stands holding Virginia from falling into tile stream of temporality (not eternity), she expresses —; 35Vandemark's Folly contains eight pictorial illus— t1?€1tions, painted by N. C. Wyeth, intended to emphasize key EScenes. Of these illustrations, two are especially note- WoI‘thy. One (facing p. 190) shows Cow standing in the stZr‘eam, holding Virginia in his arms, he looking with a Ca-:L::f--like affection at the side of her face and she looking d<>\nnn.with a wondering, girlish smile at the stream, and bO‘tzhtheir shadows merged into one shadow on the tree in fl?-€3 immediate background, and the caption appropriately is, 3E>