putterings 509 < 510 > 511 index
in his succession of plans, in his putterings and hammerings, he escaped her completely
Paul walked to school, two miles through drifted roads. Marjy couldn’t go. She followed her father around the place, growing wilder every day. And Franklin, in rough clothes, unshaven, dashed about from one scheme to another. He wouldn’t listen to a thing she suggested. Somehow, in his succession of plans, in his putterings and hammerings, he escaped her completely, as if all his desires lay beyond her reach. He and Marjy would come in, snowy, stamping and shouting, “Where’s dinner, mamma? Your farm hands are starved! We got that pig pen almost built. Why don’t you come help us?”
“You think I’ve nothing to do?”
And then they were off again, leaving her in the dreary, lonely house, with her old mother.
ex Helen R. Hull, The Surry Family (1925) : 32
link (google books)
U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
- review in Time Magazine (January 18, 1926) : link (accessed 20250123)—
Small-Town
THE SURRY FAMILY — Helen R. Hull* — Macmillan ($2).The sins of a small-minded, small-town father and mother visited upon children of inherited sensitivity, constitute no original motif. The stupid marriage and wry resignation of the son, the wary adventures in friendship and moderately happy marriage of the daughter, are not particularly gripping developments. The validity of such a story depends on the extent to which the author can invest mediocre personalities with, not alone human naturalness, but significant human naturalness. By that token, these Surrys are only soso; just small-town folks with no claims on reserved seats in the grandstand for famed literary characters. But Miss Hull is well worth reading; she gives pleasure. She is precise without being precious or pompous; vivid without being vivacious — or “vital.” She is one of the clear-headed people of this verbose world who know the force of the unspoken word.
* Not to be confuse [sic] with E. M. (“Shiek”) Hull - review by Frederick P. Mayer in The Virginia Quarterly Review 2:3 (July 1926) : 461-462 : link (jstor)
“The Surry Family” is another of the many books that diagram life in a small town. It is carefully written, faithful to the facts, and tries to be fair to the people. It is not satire, nor is it bitter, like “Main Street.” It seems to have no idea beyond getting the Surry family on paper and showing how these people lived. It gets the pathos of cramped living and nasty living. Its people — stupid Paul, shrewish Wilma, weak Franklin — stand out one from the other with true signs of life, and the courage of Marjy in her search for finer living achieves a simple beauty in the telling. But the book is undistinguished. It is adequate; it does what it sets out to do, and does not falter seriously. But there is nothing it does do supremely well; there is no great rise of power, no special beauty in what it has to tell or in how it tells it. Neither in style nor content does it give much to feel glad about once it is read. Perhaps this is it peculiar merit; it tells about undistinguished people with style that is undistinguished, not too highly colored for its material. There is much to be said for it in these terms. But the materials of American life ought to be possible of illumination, no matter where we find it, and “The Surry Family” does little but convince us that the American middle class in Michigan is a pathetically middle class.
Helen R. Hull is listed in two other of these putterings :
008 and 024