putterings 537 < 538 > 539 index
puttering around with the workmen...
“I hit a nail where it wasn’t.”
“The precision of that!” exclaimed Myron with admiration.
Myron also did some varnishing of the oak timbers on the outside of the house, for he had a Ruskin feeling that he must contribute to the labor of his dwelling, and Delia said that Myron’s contribution was the best of all because it was done in a “spirit of pure craftsmanship” and the timbers he had varnished gave a “lift” to the house that it would not have had otherwise.
Myron was really happy puttering around with the workmen, and they didn’t mind because he let them do what they pleased. He listened very carefully to their conversation to get “the interesting American speech rhythms,” and he said their language was very vivid. He liked to recount at dinner how one of them had said, “I hit a nail where it wasn’t.”
“The precision of that!” exclaimed Myron with admiration. “It has such a virile impact.”
ex Bravig Imbs. The Professor’s Wife (1928) : 46 : link
same (via hathitrust) : link
reviewed in The New York Times (November 11, 1928) : link paywall, but —
In every college, or at least in those which have come within the scope of the reviewer’s acquaintance, there is the English professor who is a liberal, who keeps up with the kaleidoscopic procession of modernity in literature. Not that he has much to say for the latest manifestations of the human spirit on the printed page, but he likes to create the illusion that his mind is open. The strange thing about this liberal is his complete disinterest in contemporary life as it appears outside the pages of contemporary books. One wonders just how he is qualified to pronounce judgment upon such books as “Main Street” when he has only contempt for the fleshly counterparts of Doc Kennicott’s rough friends.
Bravig Imbs has caught this strange creature, this liberal, in his amusing first novel, “The Professor’s Wife.” Professor Ramson of Otterby likes to pull at his pipe and discuss Conrad; he is pleased to bring Rebecca West to town. But the disturbances of modern life, the ragged ends of twentieth century America, do not enter the Ramson household. Myron Ramson raises his eyebrows at T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” but admits “The Wasteland” has disturbed him. He has scarcely bothered to get close enough to contemporary life to know whether it is a wasteland or not, but that makes no difference. He wants to be just modern enough, in the swim, but not too much in the swim.
A butler, an exceedingly intelligent, a delicately ironic butler, tells the story of the professor and his wife. Mrs. Ramson loves her little pronunciamentos. “Oh, children,” she says to every one under “don’t plunge into such a melancholy subject. That man Eliot is only a vers de société man, and not a very clever one at that.”
There are other academic personages in “The Professor’s Wife.” 'For instance, the professor who thinks Edith Wharton the one modern worth literary deification. There is the professor who objects to Dr. Ramson’s “conceptual” method of teaching — whatever that may be. And there is a delicious evocation of a whole collegiate group in Mr. Imbs’s discussion of the undergraduate vogue of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She is all the rage, but one Sunday the Rev. Dr. Fosdick speaks in chapel. He gives a “modern fillip” to his discourse by quoting from “Renascence” — the more pantheistic lines. Mr. Imbs’s remark is:
The esthetes shuddered with horror at these lines without knowing who had written them * * * and then, when it dawned that the poet was the beloved Edna, dark suspicions as to her poetry began to rise, for the quotation was far more apt for a sermon than to be used lightly over the teacups.
Bravig Imbs attended Dartmouth, so perhaps the home of Dr. Ramson is Hanover. At any rate, the character seems to be typical, and it is certainly an amusing centre of learning that Mr. Imbs has adumbrated in this informal fictitious history. A few real people, such as Robert Frost, James Stephens and Rebecca West, visit the centre of learning. Mr. Imbs mingles them with his narrative nicely and unobtrusively; he needs them to lend pertinence and point to his fictitious academic community.
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Bravig Imbs (1904-1946), writer (novels, poetry, memoir), radio announcer (U.S. State Department, postwar France), friend (for a while) of Gertrude Stein
wikipedia : link