Page:The Family Album.pdf/16

8 “But pop wouldn't leave the town where he had been born and ignored. . ..

“Well, that started intimate hostilities between pop and mom, and pop as usual finished second best. . . .”

He is always leaving out the intervening, the logically necessary, step, and giving you premise and conclusion as if suddenly. It is one part of his peculiar nature, and others bring him full into the stream of mad humor which is one of the most entertaining of current phenomena. It is engagingly irresponsible; it has none of the usual points of reference, it exists intensely by itself and has probably not a vestige of social or philosophical significance. What on earth does he mean when he says, “Not that pop wasn't optimistic, because he wasn't”? And how on earth does he manage to make it seem to mean everything as he places it in his sketch? How, in fact, has he managed to make the character of the narrator of the Family Album seem so definite?

My only suggestion for an answer lies in the book itself—in the irreducible quality you call his personality or his style. He writes and thinks as no one else writes and thinks; in a way it is lunatic; in another way, not the very greatest way, but in a refreshing way, it is genius.