Word: tomming
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Devil in the Cheese (produced in Pasadena a year ago). In Tom Cushing's play, a piece of cheese before bedtime brings on a good dream in which the secret chambers of a girl's mind are explored. Everywhere, the seeker finds the radiant image of her lover enshrined in fancy as President of the U. S., single-handed conqueror of South Sea Island tribes, hero in all things. This sublimated suitor is, in reality, a ship's steward, opposed by the girl's father who prefers a colorless favorite of his own choosing. The action...
...Tom White, on the other hand, at 58, can only shudder, or pretend to, at the "dark and awful things" he saw in barns, woods and alleys. It is not for him to live within himself. He must paint a dismal background against which the present will seem bright. So that he can say: "Those boys of a drab and dirty day, grown mature, have performed a miracle . . . modern civilization ... a great agricultural empire ... a rich industrial commonwealth . . . out of the bottomless cornucopia of Providence," etc., etc. He accuses men his age of overmuch pride in their material achievements...
...Neither of their fathers paid much attention to Tom White and Huck Anderson. Their mothers gave them such "raising" as they got, which accounts for some of the differences between Tom and Huck now. Tom's mother was a college graduate and he was her firstborn. Huck's was a village girl (fictionized into a beautiful Italienne) who bore seven "brats" and drudged...
...Huck's book is offered as fiction, Tom's as an essay, but the contrast between them is broader than that. For while Huck Anderson is trying to make a work of art, still he is one of the most self-obtrusive of artists and in propounding his way of life he trespasses on sociology; and while Tom is trying to point a social moral (in effect: "Behold, we do, and should, serve youth far more nobly than youth was served yesterday!"), still he implicitly adorns a tale (in effect: "What a wonder that I turned...
...What may redeem Tom is his own first sentence, the generalization: "All men are blowhards." But how far removed from Huck's amiable unmorality is all this Tom-talk of moral credit. How strange that two products of like environments should see things so differently in retrospect. How odd that Huck the outcast should write with such contentment while Tom the respected citizen has loathing in his memory and joy, strident because vicarious, only in perfections yet to be. Both the books are written for middle-aging people. Who shall say which is wiser...