A Shelf of Recent Books

BURTON RASCOE

OF Peter E. Wright I can learn nothing beyond the fact that he is (or was) a captain in the British army and that he wrote some comments on the Versailles conference which made a bit of a stir by their acid brilliance. Nevertheless I would pass the tip to first edition collectors that his novel, The Shirt, (Doran) will most likely be a highly prized item a few years hence. It is a satire of the first order, marvelously well sustained. To find its peers one must turn to James Branch Cabell in his purely satiric moments, to Anatole France's L'Ile des Pingouitts, and to Pierre Louys' Les Aventures du Roi Pusole. Wright unquestionably owes something to the France novel; and when we remember that there was a famous shirt in Jurgen, there is reason to believe that Wright owes something to the American. But his story is his own and his method of treating it distinctive. It is an elaborate and intricate satire upon contemporary British and American life, beliefs, politics, commercial methods, taboos and ideals. It is rich in ideas. It assaults with disintegrating logic the most formidable of our fallacies. Its raillery is urbane and worldly, wise, imaginative, and intelligent. The young hero, heir of an American financial baron, falls ill of green-sickness and his guardians and proctors look for the shirt of a happy man, by wearing which the young man may be restored to health. The account of the hero's up-bringing and education is a glorious spoof at the misplaced high seriousness of reformers, pedants, physical culturists, ethical culturists, Utopians and uplifters. Captain Wright is apparently convinced there is no hope for the eradication of the evils of the human race, for the reason that those evils arise out of an incurable stupidity. The Shirt is intellectual amusement of a rare quality.

STRAWS and Prayer-Books (McBride) by James Branch Cabell is a grave, beautiful and bitter epilogue to the Biography of Manuel and his descendants. Ill the prologue, Beyond Life, Mr. Cabell elaborated his theory of literature as an escape from life and urged the necessity of romancing about life to make life at all endurable. In the new book he takes up the theory again; but here, even to a lesser degree than in the earlier book, is he concerned with literature so much as with the limitations of life. It is the most personal book he has given us. So personal, indeed, is it, so bound up with his public career as a writer, so intimate a reflection of his likes and distastes, and so full of allusions to his other work, that I doubt whether any one not already familiar with Mr. Cabell's writings could make much out of it. He pays off old scores against enemies who have said stupid things about his work, and he does it with a malicious cleverness that is devastating. In the chapter called "The Thin Queen of Elfhame" he deals imaginatively with the Oedipus complex in the Jurgenic manner. Perhaps nothing he has written is more tenderly beautiful and ironic than the chapter wherein he interviews the boy he was in his twenties and advises him about a literary career. In fertility of ideas and in imaginative reach, it is my firm conviction, that we have never had any writer in America who is Mr. Cabell's equal.

THE death of Anatole France on October 12 invests J. Lewis May's Anatole France: The Man and His Work (Dodd, Mead) with a special interest. It is not as good a biographical study as it might have been from Mr. May's personal acquaintance with France; for in the greater part of the book he has done little more than Lewis Piaget Shanks did towards sifting biographical data from France's own work—and not done it so well. However, Mr. May does allude, for the first time I believe, to France's first marriage; he does not shirk the fact that France came from neasant stock; and he does correct some erroneous impressions which have persisted about the man. Chief of these, perhaps, is the false impression of France as a hermit-like scholar and writer who withdrew from the world into his ivory tower. On the contrary France was very much a man of the world; he was always something of a philanderer; he traveled a great deal; and he numbered among his friends all sorts and conditions of people. The best part of the book has to do with France's origin, his connection with the Parnassians, and his beginnings as a writer. Before he found himself France had earned a precarious living by all sorts of journalism, including contributions to a cook-book.

READERS of Vanity Fair are already familiar with The New Spoon River (Liveright) by Edgar Lee Masters. It appeared serially in this magazine. The mood of the new collection of poems is mellower, less scarifying than that of the first collection which brought Mr. Masters to the profoundly shocked attention of the English speaking world. Somewhat the same story of tragic futility, thwarted instincts, cruelty, dishonesty, and hypocrisy, however, is told of the new Spoon Riverites—but with a warmer note of compassion than appeared in the first book. The art of the new collection is, I believe, firmer and surer than that of the first; the book is richer too in variety; and, although Mr. Masters cannot hope to repeat the sensation caused by the earlier work, readers will find here a remarkable series of personal histories told with the utmost economy and with peculiar effectiveness.

SOME day there will be a public demand for a collected edition of the works of Harry Leon Wilson, gotten up in a style commensurate with Mr. Wilson's distinction as an American man of letters, and then will come out of obscurity all those earlier little masterworks of his which are now so hard to find in the second hand book shops. Meanwhile his new book, Professor! How Could You? (Cosmopolitan Book Corporation) is recommended very urgently to all who care for rich humour, shrewd wit, credibly absurd human situations, and robust but careful writing. Professor Copplestone is inspired to a revolt against the uneventfulness of his pedagogic life by a talk with a friend and by a potent bottle of sherry. He throws off restraints, eschews responsibilities, and begins a picaresque series of adventures with his new friends, among whom are bootleggers and circus performers, shimmie-shakers and a Hamburger Queen, a wild man from Madagascar and wild women from the Middle-West. A quiet, timid, ineffectual and kindly man, he is pathetically grateful for the chance afforded him to lead, even if only for a short time, the sort of life that has the thrill of adventure in it. The book has a warm human glow; it is audacious, high-spirited, virile, and very comical.

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HENRY CEARD'S A Lovely Day (Knopf), which Ernest Boyd has translated with affectionate care into English, is a literary gem, perfectly cut, with facets that twinkle merrily. It is concerned with the deflation of a romance between a very respectable middle-class French married woman and a neighbouring bachelor. The woman had dreamed that she might experience bliss in the company of the small-time Don Juan who thought of himself as a devilish sort of fellow; and the man had thought that the woman would call out his best talents in seduction. When an opportunity affords itself, he makes a rendezvous with her; and she, thinking to escape from the platitudes of a respectable married life by a gay adventure, accepts. They set out, trying to catch the spirit of irresponsibility and merry-making at the amusement parks and in restaurants, but before night has fallen they are bored to death by the jaunt, fatigued by the unaccustomed exercise, and exasperated by inconveniences. They have differed in matters of taste, quarreled, and become finally intolerable to each other. Their illusions are shattered, and they return to their respective homes, as innocent of wrong-doing as when they started out, their dream of romantic wickedness in a sad state of collapse. It is a delightful story, full of chuckles, and mirthful situations, veracious and charming.

THE surprising thing about May Sinclair's Arnold Waterlow (Macmillan) is that in this novel Miss Sinclair is not expressing her customary derisive contempt of the male of the species. Waterlow, as a rarity among Miss Sinclair's central male figures, is presented as a magnanimous and noble creature. Whereas Miss Sinclair has long given us a choice exhibition of prigs and egotists, all selfish, pompous, spineless and asinine, she presents Waterlow as a man of fine impulses, honour, sensibility and sentiment. His wife runs away with a musician; he finds happiness in a reciprocal, though not officially recognized, love. When his erring wife is discarded by her genius, he takes her back to his bosom, with patient forgiveness; and his mistress conveniently dies and so spares Miss Sinclair the trouble of dealing with the problem that would have been presented if she had remained alive. Miss Sinclair presents Waterlow as being in love with both his wife and his mistress; and his wife as being in love with both Waterlow and the musician. This situation is rare in English fiction but it is not at all rare in life. Miss Sinclair has perhaps idealized Waterlow too much and given him sentiments not altogether credible; but the novel has both depth and authenticity.

IN R. F. D. No. 3 (Harper) Homer LCroy exhibits a fortitude amounting almost to foolhardiness by ringing the changes on the same situation he exploited so successfully in West of the Water Tower—namely, the unfortunate consequences of an inopportune and illicit pregnancy. In the first novel, this contretemps spoils the plans and aspirations of a young man who had it in him to do bigger and better things than a hick town gave him a chance to do; and in the new novel the eventuality ruins a young woman's chances of ever getting away from the farm life she detests. And so he succeeds, despite an evident deficiency in imaginative resourcefulness in plot and situations, in telling effectively, if some times drearily, the pathetic story of the small town farmer's struggle against poverty, plagues, droughts, blights, floods and boredom. This aspect of the novel alone provides a salutary counterblast to the sentimental literature, usually written by city apartment dwellers, about the joys of farm life.

ARTHUR WEIGALL has salvaged all of the gossip and apocryphal tales about Caesar and Antony that are preserved in Suetonius and the ancient collectors of anecdota and has woven them into the spicily entertaining Life and Times'of Cleopatra (Putnam). While Mr. Weigall is intent upon attributing to Caesar a prodigious capacity for carnality, he is equally intent upon removing from Cleopatra any opprobrium. She had, for her times, quite a minimum of husbands; and toward her son, Caesarion, she was a model mother. Mr. Weigall writes a brisk journalese, and his interest in his subject has a certain fervour which he is able to communicate to the reader. If he is lacking in the skepticism of the better sort of historical scholar, he is also lacking in their tedious dryness. He has juice in him and it is possible that his history is as sound as most.

DON BYRNE spins tales of a fanciful turn in words that have a crooning melody. His new novel Blind Raferty (Century) tells of the wanderings and adventures of Patrick Raferty, the national poet, blinded by the plague, and of his enmity for Dafydd Evans, the Welshman, and his friendship for the Great Rory O'Rourke, the swashbuckler. It is a story into which a poet's imagination has gone and much fine writing.

HUGH WALPOLE has set himself to the task of understanding with sympathy and compassion the lot of three shunned, unwanted, patient and hopeful creatures, in The Old Ladies (Doran) and has given us the best of his novels as the result. The old ladies are nearing death. They live in shabby rooms, suspicious of one another, thrown terribly in upon themselves and their memories and their pathetic pride. Each measures her importance and bolsters her reassurance by taking measure of the faults of the others; and so it is a wistfully humourous, gently ironic microcosm Mr. Walpole depicts.

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THE publication of The Apple of the Eye (Dial Press) by Glen way Westcott marks the debut of a young American writer who, by all signs and portents, will soon be discussed as one of the most gifted of our native fietionists. He has perfected a prose style of extraordinary suppleness, strength, and beauty, devoid of the commoner ruses of rhetoric, a prose subtly cadenced and distinctive. This book is evidently a remembrance of things past in a Wisconsin farming community, and traces the growth of ideas about life in the mind of a sensitive boy. It tells meanwhile a story of maternal solicitude, of love affairs that wrecked the weak or strengthened the strong. Mr. Westcott has mystical leanings and his symbols are sometimes elusive; but his point of view is that of a developed and integrated personality; he is sure in his touch; he is an artist who disciplined himself and has learned how to write. That he has something of importance to say this book is proof.