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blackbird27's review against another edition
3.0
I make lists. One of the lists I'm proudest of recently is a list of 800+ more or less significant novels published during the 1920s. I haven't read all of them, or anything close (only a fifth of them were even written in English, and most of the rest haven't been translated). But researching it, going through Wikipedia rabbit-holes and Britannica entries and surfing scholarly histories on Google Book previews and plunging through magazines of contemporary criticism on, for example, unz.org, was a perpetual delight, made all the more so by offhand references to other important books which I'd never heard of and had to hare off in search of.
One of these offhand references, I think in the pages of the Bookman, was to this book, warmly praised there as a singularly beautiful, poetic but unsentimental short novel that, to the (forgotten) reviewer's mind, was the sort of thing that young people should be writing in the 1920s, and not the cynical or deleterious trash that made the news (like This Side of Paradise, today much better remembered). Robert Nathan would eventually be remembered, but mostly as a writer of books that got made into movies in the 1940s, like The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie. Unlike them, Autumn doesn't have a playfully supernatural element to the plot (unless the occasional twee anthropomorphization of animals' thoughts count), but Nathan seems to always have had a sort of wistful, elegiac, sentimentally ironic "oh you foolish mortals" tone.
Autumn is a novella about a couple of seasons in a Vermont farming town; although there is a central character (or to put it musically, a dominant repeated theme), an elderly and dreamy schoolteacher, it's more an ensemble piece than anything, and reading it reminded me strongly of the later Anne of Green Gables books, in which Anne herself nearly disappears amid the rambunctious youngsters and colorfully loquacious elders. It's the first year after the Great War, and there's friction between young and old, and the not-so-young and the very old, and many very beautiful passages about the countryside, and some trite heresies wrapped up as hand-me-down philosophy; Nathan's being of Sephardic background makes the occasional tweaks at conventional Christianity less wearisome than they might be if they were merely Menckenian.
In all, I quite enjoyed this brief interlude even though I feel as though I'd seen most of it before, though not necessarily better. One thing it absolutely is not, though, is unsentimental. Of course, 1921 standards of sentimentality are something quite different from the post-Hemingway standard of sentimentality, but it's oozing with the stuff. You can practically hear the flute from Peer Gynt every time dawn breaks.
One of these offhand references, I think in the pages of the Bookman, was to this book, warmly praised there as a singularly beautiful, poetic but unsentimental short novel that, to the (forgotten) reviewer's mind, was the sort of thing that young people should be writing in the 1920s, and not the cynical or deleterious trash that made the news (like This Side of Paradise, today much better remembered). Robert Nathan would eventually be remembered, but mostly as a writer of books that got made into movies in the 1940s, like The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie. Unlike them, Autumn doesn't have a playfully supernatural element to the plot (unless the occasional twee anthropomorphization of animals' thoughts count), but Nathan seems to always have had a sort of wistful, elegiac, sentimentally ironic "oh you foolish mortals" tone.
Autumn is a novella about a couple of seasons in a Vermont farming town; although there is a central character (or to put it musically, a dominant repeated theme), an elderly and dreamy schoolteacher, it's more an ensemble piece than anything, and reading it reminded me strongly of the later Anne of Green Gables books, in which Anne herself nearly disappears amid the rambunctious youngsters and colorfully loquacious elders. It's the first year after the Great War, and there's friction between young and old, and the not-so-young and the very old, and many very beautiful passages about the countryside, and some trite heresies wrapped up as hand-me-down philosophy; Nathan's being of Sephardic background makes the occasional tweaks at conventional Christianity less wearisome than they might be if they were merely Menckenian.
In all, I quite enjoyed this brief interlude even though I feel as though I'd seen most of it before, though not necessarily better. One thing it absolutely is not, though, is unsentimental. Of course, 1921 standards of sentimentality are something quite different from the post-Hemingway standard of sentimentality, but it's oozing with the stuff. You can practically hear the flute from Peer Gynt every time dawn breaks.
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