Edna Ferber’s America
One Basket
By Edna Ferber
Double-day. 581 pp. $3.95.
Every writer has favorite words or phrases whose repeated use becomes tic-like with him. For Proust the word is “stupefy.” “Immense” and “in fine” are obsessive with Henry James. Writers of genius and writers of no genius alike have this habit of riding their ritual words to death. Edna Ferber’s word is “honest.” Honest pies, honest eyes, honest cakes, honest hats, honest tables, and other honest objects too numerous to mention are strewn across the pages like dandelions in this collection of short stories written between 1913 and 1942. Miss Ferber’s vocabulary is monotonous. Sometimes instead of being honest, things are “real,” as in “real soup.”
In her eyes things stopped being “real” and “honest” in this country about the time the automobile began to replace the horse; the ready-mix cake is a symbol of our moral degradation. I had never read Miss Ferber before, and having always thought of her as the George M. Cohan of letters, I was surprised to find her detesting the America that is, while celebrating the America that was—we simply do not measure up to our forefathers, who felled the forests, forded the rivers, and drove the wagon trains across the Rockies. What ails Miss Ferber is nostalgia for our mythic past—the past, that is, seen as a monster pageant of History’s Great Moments. From this perspective it appears that our character weakens as our standard of living rises.
These stories are concoctions that resemble the restaurant pie, the delicatessen food—“highly colored, artificial, chemically treated, tempting to the eye but unnutritious. . . . A green pepper stuffed with such burden of deceit as no honest green pepper ever was meant to hold”—and the city apartments of which Miss Ferber repetitiously disapproves. A few stock characters and well-worn plots have served her for forty years and it seems strange that a writer who long ago discovered the convenience of prefabrication should so hate everything modern.
Miss Ferber hails from Wisconsin, the heartland of the Populist movement, and hers is the suspiciousness of the small-town Midwesterner toward the big city and big-city ways. Her distaste for the big-city rich whom she sees as a weak, self-indulgent, idle lot is equaled only by her condescension toward the urban poor: “They all said verse for voice, and earl for oil, and berled for boiled; when they spoke of ersters they meant the succulent bivalve and the winged creatures in the park trees were boids to them.” Miss Ferber’s humor inclines toward the elephantine. And again: “Such was the Comet family life. Theirs was the spendthrift and almost luxurious existence of the American working class. Ready-made clothes, white shoes, Sunday papers, telephone, radio, pork roast, ice cream, the movies. A somewhat sordid household, certainly, but comfortable, too. Bookless, of course. Extravagant with its quarters, its half dollars, and its dollars.”
The mindlessness Miss Ferber deplores in the urban working class becomes a positive virtue in her bucolic types who are cast on Rousseauian lines. Lives of back-breaking toil, up with the lark, to bed by dark, gnarled, sunburned, stolid, they are meant to represent the salt of the earth, the backbone of the nation, but actually they resemble dumb beasts of burden more than men. Whatever their social class, or locale, Miss Ferber’s stereotypes converse in irascible grunts. Occasionally they rise to a platitude or two.
A good woman is, by definition, a beria (housekeeper) whose floors you should be able to eat off of. If a female character is a slattern, the experienced Ferber reader will immediately deduce that she is also a shrew, an unloving mother (if she has any children), and a bridge-party gadabout who will drive her husband to an early grave with her frivolous demands and incessant nagging. By the same token, if a female has “a serene brow” and “clear eyes that see straight” we also know she keeps a clean house. Chances are she won’t get her man. The American male is a Samson who is a sucker for Delilah and does he ever live to regret it! Other than condemning him to a lifetime of misery with the Wrong Woman, Miss Ferber’s demands on the American male are not excessive—his role is merely to work hard until he drops dead in his tracks. For this Miss Fetter considers an honest home-cooked meal and the aforementioned clean house sufficient compensation. Sex gets into these stories only by the most deviously indirect hints, usually in the person of a very young auto, mechanic or hog driver Miss Ferber elfishly identifies as Pan whose entire grasp of the spoken language apparently consists of the phrase, “Swell chanst!” to indicate the chances of success of the ladies who chase him. His I.Q., I should judge, is about 69. Miss Ferber appears to find him devilishly attractive.
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In “The Light Touch” (1931) Miss Ferber compares an adult, civilized France with a puerile, barbarous America. As always, Miss Ferber has a moral. Didactic arrogance is a common enough trait in our writers—at all intellectual levels—hut seldom has an attitude of moral superiority been made to express a middle-class view of life more narrow and priggish. Miss Ferber’s France is not the France seen by her literary masters, or the one celebrated by our own expatriates. It is a bourgeois France, sober, thrifty, stodgy, and “mature”—a word I’ve lately begun to associate with prunes.
The flighty, extravagant daughter of a rich American family marries a well-to-do French banker and practically overnight becomes a model French wife who knows the French husband is head of his household—no henpecking in France. “So the Frenchmen kept their manhood and their self-esteem and the Frenchwomen kept their powerful feminine wiles and each was busy and content.” This idealized French couple bear no resemblance to Charles and Emma Bovary. All is calm, stable, unchanging in France, while America is hustle-bustle, upheaval, and discontent. Comes the depression, which coincides with the death of the French husband, and the American heiress is whisked back to America by her brothers who stupidly think they are doing her a favor. She is reluctant but her son is eager to emigrate. America soon cures him of his boyish enthusiasm. His American cousins are cretins interested in nothing but baseball scores and all his attempts at serious conversation about the state of the world are frustrated. He comes to a conclusion and the point of the story: “They talk and act like children but I have been listening and they are bitter and disillusioned and they don’t care any more, and that is why I think it is no use here. They are soft from these last fifteen years. The first blow has felled them.” Back he and his mother go to France.
Nine years later France fell and the events set in motion by the Dreyfus case culminated in Vichy. If Miss Ferber has had any second thoughts about her country’s stamina or of the risks involved in prophetic moralizing they are not recorded.
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