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Book Review: Queed
Sep. 19th, 2023 04:02 pmAfter my visit to Mankato, I’m not quite ready to let go of Maud Hart Lovelave yet. In addition to reading some of her own non-Betsy-Tacy books (about which more anon), I’ve been reading some of the books that her characters read in Betsy-Tacy, starting with Henry Sydnor Harrison’s 1910 bestseller Queed, mentioned in Carney’s House Party.
Queed was evidently THE hit book of 1910. Queed is the name of our unlikely hero, a scholarly young man who is writing a book about sociology - at a rate of twenty hours a day, stopping only for mealtimes. In the chill evenings, he works in the dining room, and irascibly banishes his landlady’s daughter if she dares to intrude to work her algebra, as his work is clearly so important that it deserves perfect silence.
The book is, of course, about his closed bud of a life opening out - at first, somewhat hilariously, mainly through the proddings of wounded vanity. When he finds himself too physically weak to thrash the typesetter who introduced an error into one of his articles, he takes up exercise. When he learns he’s about to be fired from the paper because his articles are so dull, he takes up the art of newspaper writing with the same ferocious energy he has hitherto applied to sociology, determined to show those rascals that he can write just as well as they can!
But, in between exercise, and newspaper writing, and accidentally befriending the landlady’s daughter, and then accidentally making yet more friends, he begins to realize that… perhaps… he needs to allow the principle of altruism that animates his sociological theories to animate his own life, as well? That, in fact, perhaps that principle is worthless if it doesn’t influence his own actions?
This is just an EXTREMELY 1910 plotline: the sound mind in a sound body theory, the idea that active good works in one’s immediate vicinity is the most important thing that human can do, the gently ironic humor with which the story is told. There’s an earnestness about it which I suspect was popular when it came out, and made it sink like a stone when the modernists came in during the 1920s.
Reading it in 2023, it also jumps out at you how thoroughly this book has embraced the white Southern point of view. The book is set in an up-and-coming Southern city (never named), loyal to the United States but loyaller still to its rapturous memories of its Confederate soldiers. Black people appear in the briefest glimpses, always as servants. The end of Reconstruction was an unvarnished joy, and loathing is heaped upon the memory of that villain Henry G. Surface who had the audacity to join the Republicans.
Queed was evidently THE hit book of 1910. Queed is the name of our unlikely hero, a scholarly young man who is writing a book about sociology - at a rate of twenty hours a day, stopping only for mealtimes. In the chill evenings, he works in the dining room, and irascibly banishes his landlady’s daughter if she dares to intrude to work her algebra, as his work is clearly so important that it deserves perfect silence.
The book is, of course, about his closed bud of a life opening out - at first, somewhat hilariously, mainly through the proddings of wounded vanity. When he finds himself too physically weak to thrash the typesetter who introduced an error into one of his articles, he takes up exercise. When he learns he’s about to be fired from the paper because his articles are so dull, he takes up the art of newspaper writing with the same ferocious energy he has hitherto applied to sociology, determined to show those rascals that he can write just as well as they can!
But, in between exercise, and newspaper writing, and accidentally befriending the landlady’s daughter, and then accidentally making yet more friends, he begins to realize that… perhaps… he needs to allow the principle of altruism that animates his sociological theories to animate his own life, as well? That, in fact, perhaps that principle is worthless if it doesn’t influence his own actions?
This is just an EXTREMELY 1910 plotline: the sound mind in a sound body theory, the idea that active good works in one’s immediate vicinity is the most important thing that human can do, the gently ironic humor with which the story is told. There’s an earnestness about it which I suspect was popular when it came out, and made it sink like a stone when the modernists came in during the 1920s.
Reading it in 2023, it also jumps out at you how thoroughly this book has embraced the white Southern point of view. The book is set in an up-and-coming Southern city (never named), loyal to the United States but loyaller still to its rapturous memories of its Confederate soldiers. Black people appear in the briefest glimpses, always as servants. The end of Reconstruction was an unvarnished joy, and loathing is heaped upon the memory of that villain Henry G. Surface who had the audacity to join the Republicans.
