Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)

A collection of essays published in American periodicals in the 1920's, except "The Man Who Made Mulvaney", first published in 1916 and here updated to serve as an encomium for Kipling, who had died in 1936.

"I have waited thirty years to hear some eminent English critic call him a great writer."

Gerould laments his diminished reputation, which she attributes partly to his constantly shifting style, which confused the literary critics, and his preference for short-form prose which wasn't taken seriously.

The last piece in the book is an excellent article on the Dempsey/Tunney fight in Philadelphia in 1926, which she witnessed, and describes in mythological terms as a battle of Titans. This, and the one on Kipling have a passion largely missing in the others. She wonders why there isn't any quality fiction coming from the South:

"This, then, is our dilemma. We are given sentimental portraits of which the only convincing quality is a certain desuetude." "If the Southerner wants the Northerner to forget the child labor and lynchings and sharecroppers and chain gangs of the news columns, let him look to his fiction. At present, literary evidence is to the effect that citizenship in Dixie is on a lower level than elsewhere."

There are pieces on the American penchant for divorce, on the natures of essays and why they are no longer valued [Americans are getting stupid], etc. Most of them are traditional essays in which she presents a proposition and develops it. She doesn't spare the rod in her disparagement of the current social and cultural situation. Her style is of a cheerless New England schoolmarm with a ruler poised above your knuckles, but she develops her points thoroughly.… (más)

"None of our laws or statutes derives more directly from ecclesiastical influence than those concerning divorce; and about nothing else, really, are we in such a complete."

I hazard the statement -- and I have heard a good deal of unvarnished preaching on the subject of marriage from Catholic pulpits -- that the reason for the Church's prohibition of divorce, like its prohibition of anything resembling birth-control, is to be found, if you go relentlessly back, to asceticism pure and simple. To put it crudely, if you are going to marry and live after the flesh, the Church will, if it can, see to it that you escape none of the penalties of living after the flesh. So far as it can, the church minimizes, for the married, whatever may be the pleasures of marriage. It sees to it that there will be a minimum of passion and a maximum of sacrifice; because marriage itself is only a concession to the weakness of the race, the universal appetites that religion itself cannot deny. The Church will permit you to marry, but it will make you pay."

"It is not the guests of Ellis Island who are divorcing all over the place. It is either the Americans themselves, or the really Americanized. You can blame the inferior stocks that have deluged our country for much corruption of the body politic and the social system; but you cannot accuse them of giving us the divorce habit."… (más)

2602 The Great Tradition and other stories, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (read 2 May 1994) When browsing at random at the Briar Cliff College library I noted in the Nov. 25, 1938, issue of The Commonweal an article on Edith Wharton by Agnes Repplier containing this sentence: "Katharine Fullerton Gerould began her career with a short story called 'Vain Oblations' which was so relentlessly tragic that nobody wants to remember it, and nobody can possibly forget." This intrigued me and I found this book at the Morningside College library. It was published in 1915 and then sold for $1.35. It contains sight short stories (but not Vain Oblations--that story can be found on page 759 of The Bedside Book of Famous American Stories, edited by Angus Burrell and Bennett A. Cerf, and published in 1936 by Random House). Most of them are dire, but one, "The Miracle," ends happily with a stepmother becoming attached to her 5-year-old stepson after her own baby dies at birth. I don't think Gerould is a great writer, but I would read more by her if I had the chance.… (más)