Reviews of the Week
Paul Bourbon Stories
My Old Kentucky Home. By Elliot Paul. (Cresset Press. 12s. 6d.)
Loutsvn_LE, with its thriving university, with one of the best news- papers in the United States, with its deserved reputation as the greatest market for good Virginia tobacco, with its air of ease and cultivation, with one of the best French or French-style restaurants in the United States (not mentioned by Mr. Paul) is no mean city. But culture, horses, tobacco are not the note of Louisville. If all else failed, the city could still claim respect, even awe, as the home of bourbon whiskey, that golden fluid which inspired the only good poem ever written by a Chief Justice of the United States, that nectar which bathes Mr. Paul's recollections of his year in Louisville.
Mr. Paul arrived just as the first Roosevelt was giving way to the first Taft. His job was not romantic—a clerk in the team of Boston contractors and engineers who were putting in a new sewage system. But romantic or not, any job with which Mr. Paul associates himself attracts romance, comedy, tragedy, and the Kirby boarding house was no exception. It was as full of varied life as a Paris pension in Balzac. There was the rather sinister Uncle Whitner and his nephew Randy, a Casanova almost malgre lui ; there was Mr. Whele, the Jew with the tragic secret ; there was the little almost white child, Latch, and there were, above all, Donna Guillermina and her daughter Adela, the mother vivacious, credu- lous, gay, and Adele, obeying the stern daughter of the voice of God with a resolution worthy of the sangre azul in her veins, a heroine out of Corneille by character and a hairdresser by occupa- tion. This is only the beginning of the cast ; a romantic Irish- American contractor ; a solid Yankee engineer ; ladies of joy (by trade); joyous ladies (by taste) ; and the negroes who initiated Mr. Paul into the mysteries of jazz. For it was in Louisville that he learned that the word could mean music. In those remote days, the name even of " Jelly Roll " Morton was unknown outside a small circle of mainly coloured aficionados, but Mr. Paul war soon converted, and some of the most diverting and, sociologically, important parts of his record tell of the rise of jazz into semi- respectability in the music-conscious city of Louisville, where sound German taste was at constant war with native fondness for the sweet and simple and where neither party realised that there was a greater future for " the Louisville Superiors " than for Professor Salvatore or Graetz Brown. (It may prove something or other, but now that jazz reigns triumphant, I understand that the orthodox musical taste of Louisville is very highbrow indeed and that it is a home of amateur chamber music.)
Although Mr. Paul played on a baseball team, outdoor sport plays no part in this vivacious narrative, nor do the greater issues of Church and State. At the time of the sewage scheme's installation, the city had, by some aberration, a Republic administration partly elected by the docile and venal negro voters of that remote day. Such a state of affairs was, of course, as irritating as itching powder to the editor of the Courier-Journal, Colonel Henry Watterson, " Marse Henry," the C. P. Scott of Kentucky. (It would not be difficult to field two baseball teams of C. P. Scotts of Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, Northern California, etc.) Mr. Paul didn't like Colonel Watterson, neither did any of his friends, and the great editor appears only as a nuisance off. More in the picture is the Republican ward boss, Tom Fagan, with his mulatto mistress, Madame Zodiac (or Lola Dunbar), whose establishment specialised in changing the luck of distressed young white gentlemen. What would he think today if he were told that most negroes vote the Democratic ticket!
Then there was Charley Johnson who peached electrical psychology and nobly consented to be formally cuckolded to restore domestic peace to a brother Shriner. In short, there is an abundance of fun, good and Rabelaisian, and I shall return to Louisville with an awakened interest in its formally placid streets. Citizens of Louisville may not feel quite the same way about it. The pedantic among them may point to odd discrepancies in the text that suggest that Mr. Paul's memory is not quite reliable. There is that Serbian cook who got a sabre cut " fighting with the Swedes against the Russians." which would make him in 1909 at least 120 years old. But it is just a slip ; probably the sabre cut was got in the campaign that changed the life of Captain Bluntschli. Others may wonder why the minister who played such an ambiguous role in Indianapolis is " Harvey P. Shackford, D.D.," on page 286, and the " Rev. Rockwell Jelke Hummiston, D.D.," on page 393. But surely no better way of saving the reputation of the cloth coin be found than such confusing nomenclature ? Other details might be ques- tioned. I don't believe, for a moment, that Uncle Whitner Kirby thought that the Emancipation Proclamation affected Kentucky, but Mr. Paul (young, a Yankee and, I suspect, a Republican) may well have thought so. Mr. Paul tells us of his embarrassment when " I was trying to tell the exact truth and had no hope that what I said would be believed." He needn't worry ; 1, at any rate, would as soon think of doubting a word that falls from the lips or typewriter of Mr. Mencken. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is much more entertaining, as this book most abundantly
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