Praise and prejudice

The new books, in review ,

George Dangerfield

FOR PATIENT PEOPLE.—Franz Werfel's immense novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, promises to be a bestseller in a big way; is a mixture of greatness and tedium, in the proportion of one part to three; and is recommended, with some reservations, to all patient people.

On Musa Dagh, a low, sea-girt Syrian mountain, in the early days of the war, a handful of Armenians defend themselves against the best endeavors of the Turkish soldiery to dislodge and murder them. This is Werfel's heavy theme. He fills it with a swarm of gnat-like characters, who buzz about in a melancholy and often rather aimless fashion. Also—in the moments when he describes a piece of fighting, a massacre, or a death—he breaks into sudden, surprising, and certainly great prose.

THE LIBERALS IN RETREAT.—This is, and perhaps unfortunately, something more than a novel. Nobody but one of that vanishing race of Liberals could have written it: every page breathes "The self-determination of small nations" and other battle-cries of a fading past. It is, in fact, a rear-guard action, fought by General Franz Werfel of the shattered Liberal army against the inevitable advance of the modern world. Werfel fights stubbornly, now and then inflicting considerable damage in a brilliant sortie of prose: but generally retreating with a careful, dragging, passionate weariness, determined to defend his cause until his last breath, or page 832.

With all these oppressed folk who bold out against their so-called allies and ancient enemies for forty days of heroism, gunfire, misery, ecstasy, and starvation; with the priests, aristocrats, deserters, witchwives, lovers and assorted proletariat—

Werfel does enough. And yet, when the story is over—when the Armenians, except for their leader Bagradian, have happily escaped via a French gun-boat, something still remains unexplained. The real Armenian character has slipped away, you still can't understand it, it's an enigma—an enigma which looks at you with sad and strangely irritating eyes. For long stretches of the book, I mean, I was rooting for the Turks. (Viking. $3.00.)

SCIENCE AT PLAY AND OTHERWISE.—With popular science it is always children's hour. Even Sir James Jeans opens his Through Space and Time in the slow, mossy tones of a party Santa Claus. He compares the world to a mince-pie, among other distressing things.

Fortunately this does not keep up long enough to spoil the book's splendid and essentially poetic theme. Sir James proposes a journey through the Universe, beginning with this world and how it exploded, belched, and wriggled itself into its present shape; then to the frozen horrors of the moon; then across the gassy sun; past Mars's idle wilderness, the fogs of Venus, the "foul and pestilential congregation of vapors" which is Jupiter, and up among the forty odd million stars, some of which are 1,000,000 times bigger than our sun.

Elsewhere the author has a little message for mankind. If the history of the world, he suggests, were as long as a 1934 novel (and it couldn't be longer), then the history of mankind in comparison would be no longer than the last word on the last page. This peculiar thought—together with Jeans's picture of the silent, infinite, and indifferent universe around us — is enough to give you a fit of the glories or a fit of the jitters, according to your temperament. Either should be worth your money. (Macmillan. $3.50.)

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN.&emdash;It's a relief to sink with William Beebe, the bathysphere king, into a fish-lit midnight half a mile beneath the sea. In Half Mile Down, Dr. Beebe's honeyed prose is occasionally unequal to the business of describing such a scene: but to make up for it all there are eight colored plates of lunatic, deepsea organisms, and more nice photographs than I could count, including a fetching study of Miss Gloria Hollister in shorts, and a portrait of something called the sabretoothed viperfish and rightly. This bears a diabolical resemblance to Carroll's Jabberwocky and the late Arnold Bennett, has two long whiskers, thyroid eyes, and a large well-fanged permanently half-open mouth. It's a love of a fish. (Marcourt Brace. $5.00.)