Word: athena
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week What People Said, a 614-page, dramatic first novel, laid in imaginary Athena, Oklarada. offered the first work of fiction to tempt comparison with Middletown in Transition. On the surface Author White's Main Street still looks much as it did in Main Street and Babbitt. Like Sinclair Lewis. Author White gives no solution for Main Street's inhibiting culture, offers no antagonist capable of creating a better one. But Author White's novel carries an undercurrent, nowhere found in Lewis' books, of those acute undersurface tensions detected by the Lynds...
Main characters of What People Said are drawn from two of Athena's leading families. Idealistic Charles Aldington Carrough is a famed country editor and Progressive. His closest friend is persuasive, charming Banker Isaac Norssex. Their sons share the family friendship. Lee Norssex goes into his father's bank. Junior Carrough, a Rhodes Scholar, goes to work on his father's newspaper, marries a shrewd New York newspaper woman, is elected to the State legislature. Occasionally he backs some bond legislation or kills a news story at Lee's suggestion...
...Banker Norssex to the Progressive Governor's Mansion. According to Junior and his wife, it sputters just as stinkingly in the homes of the suddenly "unbearably honest" Oklaradans, since they tolerate a society that breeds embezzlers and hypocrites, as it breeds the unemployed who snarl so ominously in Athena's ears. But such talk is only between Junior and his wife. Publicly they hold their tongues, not wishing to wreck the paper...
When the Norssex case breaks, Editor Carrough is in the Orient. Junior is relieved because he imagines his father, if he had been in Athena, would have stuck his neck out to defend his old friend. But when Editor Carrough returns, and is asked to use his personal influence to lighten old man Norssex' stiff sentence, he keeps his neck as firmly in his collar as any other Athena businessman...
Perhaps no other people have had the healthy animation and the sensitive and earnest imagination of the Greeks. Nature held for them a kind of religious ecstasy: the mountain, the water, and the wood were peopled with divinities. There was Athena, queen of the air; there was Poseidon, god of the sea; Hephaestus, god of fire; Hermes, messenger and herald of the gods. Alas, that such a way of looking at nature should ever pass away...