box 4/9
Badearzt
or Graesler
okt
29. U a. u an un n u d .
CUTHBERT WRIGHT
71
wife beside him, aging like himself, never again to see the white
caps on that well-behaved sea taking the form of sirens, nor gleam¬
ing figures darting in and out among the dunes. The ultimate
autumnal storm has effaced the cloven hoof. It is the complete
triumph of Time.
This little story speaks for itself, and if the reader happens to
like the miliez and the people involved in it, he will have nothing
with which to reproach the story. To say: This is not a good
novel because aging doctors and invalids and shop-girls do not
interest me, is nonsense, and yet, sometimes uliconsciously, this is
the attitude of nearly all readers and of a great many reviewers.
It is comprehensible and human, but it is, none the less, not criti¬
cism. The possession of such an attitude toward contemporary
fiction is what makes the large amount of current generalization
about Russian or German or even American novels extremely dan¬
gerous and misleading. When a person says to me: I find the
people of Floyd Dell or Waldo Frank or some Muscovite, stimu¬
lating and thrilling creations, and the people of Francis Carco and
Ring Lardner and Gleason, the playwright, sordid and quotidian,
I say: O do you? in the tone of one who has just heard pro¬
nounced a preference for boiled tripe and an utter detestation for
red wine. Yet, in implying such preferences and rejections, I am
putting myself wholly in their position, the position of the servant¬
girl who will read of nothing but duchesses. Let us then keep
our preferences for social miliezg and social types in the novel to
ourselves, and confess that, within its limits, Doctor Graesler is a
little work of capital excellence.
Curnazar Wiour
Badearzt
or Graesler
okt
29. U a. u an un n u d .
CUTHBERT WRIGHT
71
wife beside him, aging like himself, never again to see the white
caps on that well-behaved sea taking the form of sirens, nor gleam¬
ing figures darting in and out among the dunes. The ultimate
autumnal storm has effaced the cloven hoof. It is the complete
triumph of Time.
This little story speaks for itself, and if the reader happens to
like the miliez and the people involved in it, he will have nothing
with which to reproach the story. To say: This is not a good
novel because aging doctors and invalids and shop-girls do not
interest me, is nonsense, and yet, sometimes uliconsciously, this is
the attitude of nearly all readers and of a great many reviewers.
It is comprehensible and human, but it is, none the less, not criti¬
cism. The possession of such an attitude toward contemporary
fiction is what makes the large amount of current generalization
about Russian or German or even American novels extremely dan¬
gerous and misleading. When a person says to me: I find the
people of Floyd Dell or Waldo Frank or some Muscovite, stimu¬
lating and thrilling creations, and the people of Francis Carco and
Ring Lardner and Gleason, the playwright, sordid and quotidian,
I say: O do you? in the tone of one who has just heard pro¬
nounced a preference for boiled tripe and an utter detestation for
red wine. Yet, in implying such preferences and rejections, I am
putting myself wholly in their position, the position of the servant¬
girl who will read of nothing but duchesses. Let us then keep
our preferences for social miliezg and social types in the novel to
ourselves, and confess that, within its limits, Doctor Graesler is a
little work of capital excellence.
Curnazar Wiour