A Shelf of Recent Books

BURTON RASCOE

TO those who come after us, the contemporary epoch in literature will most likely seem to be the most subjective and the most selfconscious in history. It is, for good or ill, the era of the recorded personal reaction. The era is as prolific in memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, collections of letters, and biographies as the Eighteenth century, and it is immensely more fruitful in autobiographies of the first or almost the first rank than any other period. Our novels, from the best to the worst, are in the main autobiographical. After presenting his claims to immortality with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, both of them narratives of his boyhood, Mark Twain left to be published after his death a chaotic and remarkable autobiography. Anatole France's fame perhaps rests most solidly upon those tender reminiscences of his childhood, My Friend's Book, Little Pierre, and The Bloom of Life. The Education of Henry Adams is undoubtedly one of the great personal confessions of literature. And the most original and most luminous figjUg ures of the time, James Branch Cabell, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, have been subjective and autobiographical. To this illustrious company comes now Sherwood Anderson with A Storv Teller's Story (Huebsch), a personal narrative that has at times the freshness and simplicity of Lawrence Sterne and again the tone and timbre which made Winesburg, Ohio so often a book of deep and troubled beauty. In A Story Teller's Story, Mr. Anderson has let his imagination play like a warm light over the bare facts of his career. He has spoken from the heart with frankness and humility, with always a sort of pagan delight in gleams of color against the gray monotony life so often affects, and the gratitude for a hint of joyous living.

H. L. MENCKEN is the nearest JEJL approach to a Voltaire that America has ever produced. As a socio-political irritant, stinging and blistering life into contemporary culture and attacking fallacies, superstitions and absurdities that have a general currency, he is invaluable. He has already left his mark upon his time; he has been the most vital critic we have had. His equipment is superb. He has a mind as logical and scientific as Huxley's; he has courage and audacity; he is individualistic, incorruptible, sufficent unto himself; he has energy, humor, erudition, and knowledge and experience of life; and he has a style that is fresh, clear, direct, incisive and rich in happy metaphors. Prejudices: Fourth Series (Knopf) is his best book to date. In it he has to a large extent confined himself to general ideas and avoided literary discussion. He lets the wind out of the toy balloon of the upholders of the socalled American tradition; he exposes the scientific ignorance of those anthropologists and psychologists who take their cue from the Ku Klux Klan; he attacks the swindling politicians and hypocritical false patriots; he animadverts most amusingly on the subject of monogamy and other "high and ghostly matters"; and he closes his book with several pages of imagist poetry of genuine distinction.

THERE is no need ever to take the second or third best even in social contacts and conversation so long as books are published like Anton Chekhov's Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics (Minton, Balch), edited by Louis Friedland. With this book one may sit by the fireside of a winter evening and listen to the intimately informal chats of a man possessed with a genuinely deep culture, intimately versed in the ways of human nature, a physician with a broad practical experience, and a literary artist of the first rank. In Stanislavsky's memorable book, Mv Life in Art, recently out, wre got a delightful picture of Chekhov as a gay and likable chap, magnanimous, clear-headed, sane-minded, witty and happy. That impression of him deepens after a reading of his own book.

IN A Naked King (A. & C. Boni) Albert Ades, the young Egyptian who collaborated with Albert Josipovici on that magnificent novel, Goha the Fool, has made a study of a genius in relation to his environment and acquaintances, w'hich is dramatically intense, moving, mystical and ecstatic. In Henri Fauvarque, Ades has created and celebrated a great character lyrically and convincingly. Fauvarque is at once god-like and absurd, a sublime egoist, helpless in practical matters and mercilessly acute in penetrating the limitations and deceptions of others, a man heroically minded among meanspirited people. His friends, whom Ades lias drawn with sure, economical strokes, live upon the vitality and energy Fauvarque radiates; and when they turn upon him it is because of envy and because of a consciousness of their own weakness. Fauvarque's relation to his wife, to whom he is king and she his most faithful subject, is a charming idyll, beautifully conceived and carried out.

ELIE FAURE is the first biographer to deal with Napoleon (Knopf) as an aesthetic matter and not as a subject for moral or political discussion. To Faure, Napoleon is the lyrical embodiment of the spirit of action, manifesting itself martially in the domain of material things, just as Jesus was the lyrical embodiment of the action, manifesting itself religiously in the domain of spiritual things. Jesus and Napoleon, according to Faure, were two sides of the same medal. Proceeding from this basic assumption Faure presents one of the most original studies of an heroical figure that is to be found in literature. It seems morally revolutionary to us perhaps largely because Napoleon is so close to our own times.

STORIES from the Dial (Dial Press) inspires the hope that the Dial will find enough stories to yearly offer us such a book. The collection includes Sherwood Anderson's "I'm a Fool", one of Anderson's very best stories; Conrad Aiken's richly suggestive and masterly little story "The Dark City"; and Ivan Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco", one of the finest short stories ever written.

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FORD MADOX FORD (Hueffer) is a writer whose years have not brought him hardening of the arteries either physically or intellectually. His heart and head are young; he shows an enviable mental resiliency; he is capable of eternally re-orienting his point of view and keeping himself receptive to new ideas, to all the literary and artistic innovations of his time, and to the tastes and prejudices of his juniors. There are few men who are his peers in the mastery of English prose, and probably none so versatile as he in varying both medium and manner and still making them seem perfect instruments of expression. The first novel he has given us in several years, Some Do Not (Seltzer) is a brilliant and beautiful literary work. The central character, Tietjens, is conceived perhaps with a slightly sardonic if sympathetic eye; and his ineongruousncss to the modern scene is perfectly delineated. Some Do Not carries this reviewer's recommendation unreservedly as a novel of distinction.

ROCKWELL KENT, deriving much of his inspiration from Blake, is himself a less mystical, but still somewhat mystical modern Blake, with his uplifted head touching the stars but with his feet touching solid earth and his hand extended to clasp hand in friendship with all sorts and conditions of humanity. His new book, Voyaging (Putnam) provides a philosophy against the defeat and death of the spirit. In it, he tells of a sailing voyage to the edge of Cape Horn with a curious crew of eccentric characters who follow the sea.

JOHN GALSWORTHY'S The White Monkey (Scribner) is the story of a woman who learned to forget and so brought a measure of peace and happiness into her life which might have been tragic and futile otherwise. The novel is an appendage to the Forsyte Saga, and primarily concerns Fleur, the daughter of Soames Forsyte and his second wife. Fleur's heart had been steeled against love when she was prevented from marrying her cousin; and so when she marries Michael Mont it is not out of lqve but out of a bitter cynicism and something of a desire to revenge herself against the world and its ways. She refused to feel anything except the memories she cherished. She gathered about her a set of dilettantes who, like herself, were afraid to face reality,and began to play with life, carelessly and disdainfully. Michael has both humor and fortitude of spirit, and Fleur wins, through him and her child, to a new view of life.

WITHOUT varying his formula in any degree whatever William J. Locke continues to write a novel annually about a man who lives his own life in bohemian or vagabond fashion, philosophizes quaintly and amiably about life, and delights thousands of readers. The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne (Dodd, Mead) is our dear old Locke character all over again, and he is just as quaint, amusing and entertaining as ever.

STELLA BENSON can be counted on for civilized entertainment, wit with a spicy taste of ifialice in it, some excellent character drawing, and a pretty good story. And this she provides in Pipers and Dancers, wherein the pert and shallow Ipsie Wilson, who opens her heart to all and sundry, gets many buffetings, overestimates herself until others underestimate her, and finally matures enough to be loved by a man who is her best friend and severest critic.

IF Ben Hecht had not already written pretty much the same story in Erik Dorn, his new novel, Humpty Damply (Liveright) would be more impressive than it is. The hero, Savaron, is Dorn all over again, a phrasemaker who is having troubles with his wife, a rebellious and tough-minded cynic who refuses to be disciplined into the tight, middle-class respectability of the dull people whose conformities he despises. Humpty Dumply is less lyrical than Erik Dorn, but in some ways it is more mature. Savaron, like Dorn, leaves his wife; but, whereas Dorn returns to his wife broken and defeated, Savaron kills himself. Both Dorn and Savaron arc disillusioned idealists, with a highly romantic streak of sentimentalism in them which keeps them forever trying to recapture their illusions, and thus, while they suffer anguish themselves, they inflict an unnecessary cruelty on others.

THE Wind and the Rain (Doran) is the autobiography of Thomas Burke, that colorful writer who achieved an instantaneous reputation with the publication of Limehouse Nights. The new book was in type, so I hear, when a cable from London postponed the printing until some paragraphs were omitted, for the inclusion of which a libel suit had been threatened. Whatever the excisions, however, the autobiography remains a glamorous and vivid one.

ERNEST BOYD'S Portraits: Real and Imaginary (Doran) contains the article entitled Aesthete: 1924 which, with a commentary on it and its consequences (also included in the book), made the first issue of The American Mercury an instantaneous success. It also contains a number of synthetic portraits of various literary figures of the day, and some excellent informal and unconventional sketches of literary personages here and abroad. I he book is genuinely amusing and it contains some incisive criticism.

THE most distinctive editorial feature originated by the "Bookman", was the series of anonymous portraits of authors entitled The Literary Spotlight which has now been brought out in book form. In a country where flattery in print is often a vice, it is refreshing to read these amusing and often importantly critical sketches. Since anonymity has permitted the writers to exercise less critical caution than they would be likely to exercise otherwise, they have given us a series of valuable portraits.