Books: Angry Man's Romance

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Maine Boy. Absence of fear in the face of hard facts comes naturally to Novelist Roberts—he comes from Maine. Even before there were 13 colonies, Boston theocrats found out that the rest of the country might or might not go as Maine goes, but Maine would keep right on going its own way. One of the earliest men to settle there was Richard Nason who arrived in Kittery before 1639. Toward the end of the last century, Grandmother Jane Nason Tibbets used to take six-year-old Grandson Kenneth Roberts on her knee, tell him bedtime stories about Indian massacres—burning villages, murdered and mutilated men; women and little children trudging through the deep snow and the dark forests to Montreal while their captors, with scalps dangling and dripping at their belts, knocked on the head anybody who felt tired.

Grandmother knew stories about the Old French War too, in which Maine men made British officers' eyes bug by capturing impregnable Louisburg. In the American Revolution, Benedict Arnold led Maine men through the blinding blizzards to attack Quebec. With him went two of Kenneth Roberts' great-great-grandfathers. And there was the persecution of the Tories by the rebels.

Until Kenneth Roberts was 40, it looked as if Grandmother Tibbets had talked to no purpose. Roberts seemed perfectly content as a newspaperman. Out of Cornell (where he had edited the Widow), he went to work on the Boston Post, stayed there eight years as reporter, feature writer, humorous columnist. He went to Manhattan for brief spells on Puck and the old Life. Then World War I took him to Siberia as a captain in the military intelligence. Thus began nine years of roving in which he covered Europe, Asia and Washington, D. C. for the Saturday Evening Post. Twelve years ago Kenneth Roberts was a top-flight U. S. foreign correspondent.

In 1922 Roberts published Why Europe Leaves Home. It described the new wandering of the peoples in war-dislocated Europe, warned vanishing Americans that unless they tightened restrictions on immigration, the U. S. would soon be a disposal plant for most of Europe's human waste. Boldly he stated a premise that every stockbreeder knows, most liberals deny: "Races cannot be crossbred without mongrelization any more than dogs. . . ." His book hastened the passage of the Restrictive Immigration Law.

Roberts had dedicated his book (like three later ones) to Booth Tarkington, one day dropped in to see him. Roberts said he wanted to write a novel too.

Grandmother Tibbets' stories had been swirling around his head all those years. Moreover, he had read Schoolmaster-Postmaster Charles Bradbury's History of Kennebunkport, was determined to write a novel about the Louisburg expedition. He was in one of his rages because he had collected so much research that even in his own mind he could not condense it into an outline of anything resembling a novel.

Novelist Tarkington, one of the kindliest and most helpful writers in the busi ness, soothed and encouraged Suppliant Roberts. Trouble was, he said, that he had the makings of two fine novels, maybe even three or four. Let Roberts write the story of the Quebec expedition first.