Talk:Gold and Iron

Reviews
The Nation, 25 May 1918: Of the three extended short stories or"novelettes" which make up Mr. Hergesheimer's new volume, "Gold and Iron," the middle one, "Tubal Cain," has to do with the theme and setting that may be recognized as his special property. They are the theme and setting of "The Three Black Pennys": a localism or regionalism already studied in perspective; human nature and action among a sturdy though long extinct race, the independent "ironmasters" of Pennsylvania. "The Three Black Pennys" may be recalled as in reality a group of tales interpreting three episodes in the history of a family, an industry, and, one may say, a nation. It is historical fiction in a real sense. And yet, though its effect is utterly different from that of "costume" fiction, its fidelity to costume and atmosphere is one of its extraordinary qualities. The story-teller easily transports his readers from the present to the exact period out of the past in which his fancy for the moment moves. His people wear the dress and use the accent of the eighteenth or the nineteenth century as their own; and we seem to recognize them and their manners as our own in some earlier phase—the phase of the miniature or the silhouette or the daguerreotype; which somehow ceases to be a quaint relic on the wall and becomes a living thing. His characters step out of their frames with a casual and comfortable air of being right and to-date, down to the last detail. "She wore an India muslin dress, wide with crinoline, embroidered in flowers of blue and green worsted, and a flapping rice-straw hat draped in blond lace. Her face was pointed and alert. ... Once Hulings caught her glance, and her eyes seemed black and—and—impertinent." So the girl Gisela is presented in "Tubal Cain"—and there we have her. In the same way of brief allusion—a tune, a fragment of political gossip, a piece of furniture, an attitude of mind—the past quietly reassumes its right to be the present, and we are content. Instance the moment of Hulings's loitering outside the gay ballroom at the famous Mineral Springs: "Without the colonnade towered against a sky bright with stars; the night was warm and still. Alexander Hulings was lonely; he attempted to detain the acquaintance met in the bar, but the other, bearing a great bouquet of rosebuds in a lace-paper cone, hurried importantly away. A subdued baritone was singing: 'Our Way Across the Mountain, Ho!' The strains of a waltz, the Carlotta-Grisi, drifted out, and a number of couples answered its invitation." Of the two other tales, "Wild Oranges" is a not very successful or sincere attempt to do a Conradian romance of the southern seas. Its thrills are claptrap, and its crucial struggle between the hero and the maniac a labored artifice. The third, "The Dark Fleece," a tale of an old New England coast town in the late fifties, is far better. It is the story of the return of a successful forty-niner to the grim, prim town of his boyhood.