Pieces of Hate; And Other Enthusiasms — Reading Companion

A Preface That Bites Its Own Tail

The preface is a mock review, written in the third person, that dismisses the book’s merits. Broun writes that “the author is honest, but the value of that quality has been vastly overstressed.” He compares honesty in writing to honesty in poker—taken for granted, not praiseworthy. The preface also accuses the author of haste: “all the vices of haste are in this book.” This self-criticism is not false modesty; it is a rhetorical strategy that primes the reader to expect imperfection, then rewards them with wit and insight. The preface ends by noting the book’s jumbled sequence of “stories, essays, dramatic criticism and the rest,” suggesting no overarching plan. This lack of structure becomes a structural principle: the collection proceeds by association, not logic.

The Young Pessimist’s Formula

In the excerpt on college disillusionment, Broun traces a familiar arc: the young man discovers that romance, drink, and tobacco fail to deliver the joys promised by literature. He writes that “the young pessimists, generally speaking, have allowed themselves to be bound in a formula as tight as that which ever afflicted any Pollyanna.” The complaint is not about gloom but about predictability—the same story of lost faith, told over and over. Broun illustrates this with a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, quoting Amory Blaine’s lament that “all Gods dead, all wars fought; all faiths in man shaken.” But Broun undercuts the grandeur: “Nobody wrote as well as that in Copeland’s course at Harvard.” The effect is to puncture literary pretension while acknowledging its power.

Cinderella and the Motion-Picture Rights

In “Glass Slippers by the Gross,” Broun turns to the modern retellings of the Cinderella story, noting that she “generally goes by some other name. It might be ‘Miss Lulu Bett,’ for instance.” He confesses to liking Zona Gale’s version but admits that “Cinderella is beginning to lose fa[ith].” The fragment is telling: the essay likely argues that the archetype has been overused, drained of its magic by repetition and commercial exploitation. Broun’s method here is to take a familiar tale and examine its contemporary incarnations, using popular culture as a lens. His tone is wry, not dismissive; he acknowledges his own enjoyment even as he critiques the trend.

Broun’s essays reward readers who enjoy a writer thinking aloud, changing direction mid-paragraph, and undercutting his own arguments. The collection’s unevenness is part of its charm: a sharp critical insight may be followed by a sentimental passage that the author himself would mock. Read these pieces as performances of a skeptical, self-aware intelligence, not as settled judgments. The preface’s warning—that the author “does not learn fast”—is an invitation to watch him try.

I came back to Broun’s self-mocking preface, where he quietly dismantles his own sentimentality, and it left me thinking of how an older voice teaches by coaxing rather than correcting. The uncle’s letters in Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew — Background and Themes carry that same unhurried patience—less about answers, more about learning to distrust one’s own cleverness. Both feel like warm company for a quiet evening.