the book and read a sentence or two. Then, with some impatience, she tossed the volume aside. Why, she wondered, did authors write in this uncivilized and unsophisticated manner? How was it possible to read an author who never laughed? For it was only behind laughter that true tragedy could lie concealed, only the ironic author who could awaken the deeper emotions. The tragedies of life, she reflected, were either ridiculous or sordid. The only way to get the sense of this absurd, contradictory, and perverse existence into a book was to withdraw entirely from the reality. The artist who feels the most poignantly the bitterness of life wears a persistent and sardonic smile. She remembered the salubrious remark of a character in Andre Salmon's La Negrésse du Sacré Cœur: There is only one truth, steadfast, healing, salutary, and that is the absurd. This book was mush, as sentimental, she felt, as a book by Gene Stratton-Porter—she chose a name at random, realizing that she did not know much about Gene Stratton-Porter except what she had read in the newspapers. This extremely heavy attempt on the part of Waldo Frank to take life seriously was just as sentimental as the attempt of Gene Stratton-Porter to take life, well as she found it. She recalled Georg Kaiser's sardonic play, From Morn to Midnight. How much higher it loomed in her consciousness, how much more lingering the sting, than plays which, on the surface, appeared to be more bitter, plays such as Dreiser's
