Praise and prejudice

The new books in review

GEORGE DANGERFIELD

UNFINISHED CATHEDRAL, by T. S. Stribling.—With this novel, Mr. Stribling brings his Southern trilogy to a triumphant conclusion, and does it against all kinds of drawbacks. Unfinished Cathedral, like the third volume of most trilogies, seems to be heading a bit dustily for the last round-up; its veteran hero, Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, is perhaps a little weary of being in print; and in any case the industrial present has none of the deep colors of the past, so far as the South is concerned. From an æsthetic point of view, moreover, few novelists of consequence are more apt to get on one's nerves than Mr. Stribling. His more thoughtful dialogue sounds like the sad dead voice of a ventriloquist's dummy, his love passages are always inept, and he can mangle a sentence almost beyond recognition when the fit is on him. Yet the fact remains that his picture of the new South is just as original, just as indelible, as his two pictures of the old.

The scene is laid in Alabama during the late lamented boom years. It opens with a real estate orgy in the Tri-Cities of Florence, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia, and a meeting of Southern realtors coincides very neatly with a lynching which is just prevented because, as the Colonel tells the mob, it would be rotten for business. The Colonel has become a patriarch, a banker, and prime mover in the scheme to erect a nightmare Cathedral; his career, which started with a theft, is all set for an honorable and peaceful finish. But the story ends with the collapse of land values, and the destruction of Colonel and Cathedral by one and the same bomb. Whether it was a labor union which hired the assassin, or whether he was encouraged by certain wealthy men whose mortgages the Colonel had threatened to foreclose, Mr. Stribling leaves to his readers to decide—he is not interested in the boom as the effect of a vicious system. What really preoccupies him is the fact that it didn't come off. All that gogetting and back-slapping and make-believe for nothing! So, too, the important thing about the love of the Colonel's wife and Jerry Catlin is that it ought to have been consummated and wasn't. In fact, the whole story of Southern life during an unnatural business fever is base.d upon the simple, ironical difference between what men are and what they hope to be. In the hands of a naive writer, this would be just too bad. But Mr. Stribling is only naive in certain matters of syntax and sex; otherwise he is that very rare phenomenon, a simple writer with simple and startling vision. Any scene he draws—a meeting of Rotarians, an empty church, a mob, a procession of negroes, a court room—is so instinctively organised as to be almost shocking. A writer who has the courage of his simplicity is bound to be original: and that is why Mr. Stribling's Trilogy is likely to survive any number of more finished productions—not because it is heroic, or rich, or panoramic, but because it cannot possibly be duplicated. (Doubleday, Doran. $2.50)

JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS. VOL. I, by Thomas Mann.—Joseph and His Brothers re-interprets those half-dozen oddly confused and oddly noble chapters from the Book of Genesis in which Jacob cheats Esau of his blessing, and flees to his uncle Laban, and serves fourteen years for Rachel. It ends with Rachel's death in childbirth, while her first son Joseph is still only a fanciful and tale-bearing young man. These primitive, obscure, and frequently unlovable Jews are made an example of the whole early history of man: of his struggle to find God; of the spiritual man who is blessed, and the earthy man who is cursed; and of how human destiny—if it is to make any sense at all—means the constant renewal of the fight between these two types. The story itself is an amazing contrivance in which the characters as symbols in history and as ordinary men—subtle, mystical, thieving, lustful—play their double role without in any way confusing the reader. It is a wonderful tribute to Thomas Mann's scholarship and philosophy, but first and foremost it is great story telling: and it is hereby acclaimed, along with the works of Celine and Malraux, as being far and away the best of this year's foreign imports. (Knopf. $2.75)

GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS! by James Hilton.—Mr. Hilton has already had three novels published in this country, and it seemed to me a rank injustice that he should have been so neglected, when really glaring second-raters, like Miss Phyllis Bentley, have been festooned with laurels. There is just a chance, though, that this warm, generous, and justly proportioned little novel will bring him a sprig or two. It is all about the modest career of a schoolmaster. Schoolmasters, as characters in fiction, have had a raw deal in the past: they were either monsters of depravity or else they called forth the too, too ready tear. Mr. Hilton's story errs a little on the tearful side, but his Mr. Chipping emerges from it as one of the most likeable of English pedagogues. (Little, Brown. $1.25) (Note: Mr. Danger field's Literary Check List will be found on page 72.)

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SEVEN FAMOUS NOVELS, by H. G. Wells.—This collection of scientific romances makes ideal holiday reading. It should he enough for the faithful just to mention the titles:—The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the IF or Ids, The First Men in the Moon, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine—880 pages of what is, after all, the neatest fiction that Mr. Wells, that great but untidy novelist, has ever achieved. (Knopf. 82.75)

OUT OF CHAOS, by Ilya Ihrenbourg.—With more stiffening in the central theme—a love triangle badly out of drawing—this would have been a fine novel. In its present shape, it amounts to an atmospheric study of young Communists at work in a Siberian steel town. A little whimsical at times, hut don't let that bother you. (Henry Holt. $2.50)

WINTER IN MOSCOW, by Malcolm Muggeridge.—Pseudo-fiction, with some of the leading characters very thinly disguised. Mr. Muggeridge was sent to Russia by the Manchester Guardian, spent eight months there, and returned to tell all. Though too cocksure and too one-sided, this is an exceedingly clever hook, but it would have carried far more weight if Mr. Muggeridge had come out of ambush and given his characters their proper names. (Little, Brown. 82.50)

TO THE VANQUISHED, by I. A. R. Wylie.—This melodrama piles up more evidence against the Hitler regime, and for its facts alone, is well worth reading. But as a novel it is too strained and too selfconscious, with a tragic veneer that cracks under inspection. Miss Wylie's methods are shrill and monotonous: she is so anxious for us to miss none of the horrors that her prose becomes a kind of screaming in short sentences. There is also a love story between a radical's daughter and a young Storm Trooper; but, try as you will, it's difficult to believe in. (Doubleday, Doran. 82.50)

THE PHANTOM EMPEROR, by Neil H. Swanson. — Mr. Swanson, blending an equal portion of Fenimore Cooper and Rafael Sabatini in his romantic philtres, has based his latest piece of derring-do on the lunatic career of one James Dickson, who proclaimed himself Emperor Montezuma II in 1836, and came to grief with his little army in the frozen wastes between Duluth and Winnipeg. (Putnam. 82.50)

I, CLAUDIUS, by Robert Graves.— I, Claudius, a worthy mixture of erudition and guesswork, purports to he the autobiography of that Roman Emperor Claudius who was murdered and deified in A. D. 51. Mr. Graves' honesty may cost him a few readers, for Claudius, as even the histories indicate, was an amiable bore, and he is made to speak in character. But the scene, which swarms with Romans in search of Mr. Cecil B. de Mille, is too varied and too interesting to be neglected. (Smith and Haas. S3.00)

THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY, by Ellery Queen.—Mr. Queen takes his alter ego over the jumps with the usual flourish. Philatelists may guess the answer, hut the ordinary layman will be forced to confess himself completely buffaloed. Highly recommended. (Stokes. 82.00)

SHADOW ON THE WALL, by H. C. Bailey.—This is the first fulllength novel about Mr. Fortune, who is by way of being the ace of medical detectives. Dope, blackmail, dirty work around the House of Commons, and four murders—you can't afford to miss it. (The Crime Club. 82.00)

EYES IN THE WALL, by Carolyn Wells.—Here is one to miss. Mr. Fleming Stone is called in to solve a piece of butchery among the artists of Washington Square, South. When it is all over, Carolyn Wells has committed almost every variety of literary mayhem, but her murder is a poor thing. (Lippincott. 82.00)

THE HOUSE IN THE HILLS, by Simonne Ratel.—Marital difficulties in the Auvergne country, described with a luminous accuracy. Though too limited in its scope to he a general favorite, it contains three of the most engaging children in current fiction, and is altogether worth your attention. (Macmillan. 82.50)

THE ROAD LEADS ON. by Knut Hamsun.—Having reached the stage where one novel by Knut Hamsun is completely indistinguishable from another, I can only report that a new tale of Segelfoss has landed gently in our midst. (Coward-McCann. $2.50)

SHORT STORIES, SCRAPS. AND SHAVINGS, by Bernard Shaw.— There are two real short stories in this collection—Aerial Football and The Miraculous Revenge, both of them delightful; also two discarded scenes from Rack to Methuselah, in which Mr. Chesterton is parodied almost as well as he parodies himself; also that dreary piece of verbiage, The Little Black Girl; and ten other trifles. This brood would not have been so disappointing, had it been fathered by a lesser man. (Dodd, Mead. 82.50)

MODERN ART, by Thomas Craven. —"Why is it," asked an old sheep rancher of Thomas Craven, "that our artists can discover nothing in America worth painting? Why do they everlastingly paint studies and not real things? And why, in the name of God, do they kowtow to the French?" Mr. Craven answers this pertinent inquiry by aiming a series of tremendous upper-cuts at France, Bohemianism, and the French Moderns. It is impossible to dismiss Mr. Craven as a critic, or discount his thesis altogether; but in this case he has allowed his prejudices to run amuck. Particularly in its attacks on Picasso and Matisse, Modern Art is a kind of critical shadow-boxing; the blows appear to be vigorous and bruising, hut they only bruise the thin air. (Simon and Schustet. 83.75) G. D.