putterings 328 < 329 > 330 index
of cycles, streets, tides
Martha nodded. “This came a little while ago. There are messages in it for you.”
She gave him Blanche’s letter, and as he stood by the gas fixture, reading it, with the light upon his frowning face, she gazed at him, trying to judge him as if he were a stranger.
Yes, he was a man. Living in the house with him, darning his big socks, hearing his deep, resonant voice, she had nevertheless kept on thinking of him as a boy, and even now that she told herself he was a man, she found it difficult to grasp the actuality.
He was a Wheelock, too. Curious how often Nature, in transmitting traits, would skip a generation. Alan was not at all like Harris — poor Harris, always vaguely puttering about — but was like his grandfather. People spoke of the resemblance, and she had always seen it, but never so clearly as [228] she saw it now...
... And now, with a sense of profound discovery, there came to her a vision of Alan and his grandfather, not as separate entities, but joined together like the two halves of a shining circle, all but complete.
Of cycles the whole of nature and of history seemed to be composed — cycles of space and time...
Her mediations were interrupted by her nephew’s voice.
“My goodness!” he muttered...
— Ada (Hilt) and Julian Street, Tides (1926) : 227 : link
same (U California) copy, via hathitrust : link
(Anderson University copy, via archive.org) : 227 : link
- Tides is helpfully reviewed by Rick Horton at Strange at Ecbatan (December 15, 2016) : link
- New York Times review (November 6, 1926) : link (paywall)
critical —
“But it is the function of literature to convey, through creative insight, the inner motives, conflicts and desires of people so that we can understand them more fully than it is possible to understand them in life. ‘Tides’ ignores that function. Its people apparently have no inner lives.”but —
- “A sterling rounded story of Chicago in the flourishing eighties, of old Zenas Wheelock and Martha, his wife, of the early aristocracy, of Blanch Holden and her runaway marriage with clever erratic Ray Norcross, of Alan Wheelock, solid young business man and the tangle Blanche made of their lives when she married Ray and left Alan to ambitious, vulgar Leta Purnell; last the villain of the piece, W. J. Shire, realtor of the tribe of Babbitt. It is a fine piece of reportorial history that catches the flow of the tides in the changing western world — first Chicago — then New York — and recreates for the present day the manners, customs, and people out of which has come the present. In a fine sense it is an old-fashioned book in the best style of the 1890’s.”
ex “Book Notices” in The English Journal 16:3 (March 1927) : 243 : link (jstor)
—
Julian Leonard Street (1870-1947), author, journalist, enologist, gastronome
wikipedia : link
Ada Hilt Street (1881?-1926; attended Smith College 1898-99)