Book Reviews
Jean Huguenot.ByStephen Vincent Benét. (Henry Holt.)
Flowers in writing are like flowers on a grave: they commemorate death. And Benét’s first novel was a little too prone to floral decoration. In his third book,Jean Huguenot, his work as a stylist is noticeably improved. He still remains all poet in his prose, and, as ever, reads the better for it. Yet he has reached a saner manner of writing that does not overwhelm and cloy as did parts ofThe Beginning of Wisdom.
Despite mechanical improvementJean Huguenotmarks a lull in the author’s literary progress. You are moved along for two hundred or so pages by glowing language and well-drawn situations. And just when the book has become really enjoyable—well, all pleasure in it begins to subside. You are dropped, like a deflated balloon, into a flat and tasteless completion. Why, oh, why, you say, couldn’t he have given us something else—anything else? The spectacle of Jean Huguenot Ashley turnedcocotteis neither appealing nor revolting; it is just plain drab. Perhaps Benét is true to nature in his picture, but—read it and see if it doesn’t affect you in the same fashion. The story is worth while for three-quarters of its course—and then, being so near the end, one might as well finish it, anyway.
J. R. C.
The Florentine Dagger.ByBen Hecht. (Boni & Liveright.)
Ben Hecht is mountebank of words par excellence: their swirling shapes, their sounds, their shifting colors, as he juggles them so adroitly before our bewildered eyes. The subject-matter of his books serves only as a pattern, an excuse for weaving a tapestry of fascinating and often amazing phrases. Whether it is a psychological study in the manner of Dreiser, like Gargoyles, or an all-night detective story, like the present book, isan altogether incidental matter. It is the words that count. That may perhaps explain why Mr. Hecht should suddenly decide to perform before such a bourgeois audience, descending, so to speak, from the Palace to the four-a-day. He evidently realized that the world was quite bored by anything he had to say, but perfectly entranced by the way in which he said it.
The Florentine Daggerwas written with Prof. Hart’s Psychology of Insanity on one hand and the Memoirs of the de Medici Family on the other. Taken as a dramatic presentation of certain psychological phenomena it is brilliant enough to make itself endeared by every psychology professor in the country. Everyone in the book, from the last member of the fastidious de Medicis to the old actress, is troubled by complexes and obsessions of all sorts, so that a miserable and uncertain rôle is assigned to each. All the time-dishonored devices of the mystery story are faithfully observed, although its technique on the whole is genuinely successful.
Mr. Hecht has in this book, as in all his others, displayed his incredible faculty for choosing a new literary technique as casually as most writers choose their stationery.
W. T.
The Blind Bow Boy.ByCarl Van Vechten. (Alfred Knopf.)
Carl Van Vechten is an elegant dilettante. His books are the essence of trivial and charming existence. He is fond of cats, George Moore, Rolls Royce motor cars, and cravats by Charvet. He is apathetic to Corot and Monet, to Ibsenism, midwestern mediocrity, and synthetic gin.
The Blind Bow Boyis of inferior quality toPeter Whiffle, just asPeter Whiffleis undoubtedly inferior toMemoirs of My Dead Life, but it is good reading and by far the most intelligent intellectual mixed grill of which the reviewer has partaken this season.
The fact that Van Vechten is in the good graces of the greatest of all American whim-whammers, Henry Mencken, is in itself a warrant for the six editions into which the book has already run. It may also prevent it from running into another six.
The Blind Bow Boyis the story of a summer opera season in New York, an international alliance in the person of Zimbule O’Grady, and the delightful exploits of the Duke of Middlebottom, who lived by the Julian Calendar and in this case “contrived to evade all unsatisfactory engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly ignorant”. There are also some trivial protagonists who strut through the book in a manner slightly suggestive of exaggerated and overdressed Weiner sausages.
The author has an unfortunate habit of becoming enamoured of one character for a chapter or two, and then without warning shifting his affections to another, a failing which gives the reader a somewhat biographically errant point of view.
It is also unfortunate that Van Vechten cannot follow a more clearly defined theme, for he has no sense of plot, shading, or climax. His stories are a series of photographically vivid scenes, innocent of all structural liaison, and hanging together only by virtue of the bookbinding which keeps them from fluttering away to the various literary hemispheres.
It is, however, very satisfactory reading, for in his multiplex catalogues of names and places the author gives the reader a vivid sense of personal familiarity which is quite flattering. No doubt this effect is obtained by mentioning so many aspects of contemporary civilization that everyone must needs have come in contact with at least some few of them.
L. M. B.
A Son at the Front.ByEdith Wharton. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.)
As the most and vagueness surrounding the late war are slowly cleared away by passing time and subsiding emotions, and the conflict settles into a semblance of perspective, the more recent books that deal with it show an increasing grasp of its essentials, and a higher understanding of its trials and lessons. Where once were only trees, we can see a forest now, whose outlines are becoming more distinct as the shock of the cataclysm becomes amemory. It is past, now, and irrevocable, open to description or interpretation.
Speaking sincerely from the depth of her own experience, Edith Wharton here gives us a faithful picture; not of the mechanics of the war, but of general and specific reactions to it. Paris is the setting almost throughout the narrative, that of an American painter whose son, born in France, is drawn by the logic of his instincts and sympathies into the struggle. The scenes and events of the war, its growing tragedy and sternness, and their gradual effect on John Campton, are recorded with an insight and understanding that fascinate, while their subject-matter grips. The author shows a keen grasp of small details, as well as of large issues and their significance. Her style is delightful—a silver rapier that here waves benignly, and there strikes humorously or satirically, with great precision. Several delicate threads of narrative underlie and emphasize the main theme—Campton’s art, Paris visibly changing, and the younger Campton’s love affair. The story never falters as it traces out that “huge mysterious design which was slowly curving a new heaven over a new earth”. The author, in that design, points us to a philosophy of the war, a personal moral, comprehending its soul.
Our growing literary heritage from the World War contains few contributions more authentic or more inspiring than “A Son at the Front”.
R. P. C., JR.
The Dove’s Nest.ByKatherine Mansfield. (Boni & Liveright.)
Here are stories that are literature: they move us by the presence of the genuine elements of literature, and not by the elements of painting, music, or any other art. Their language is neither colorful nor melodious, but it is significantly expressive, related inextricably to the subject matter. They help make the short story as distinct a literary form as a landscape by Cezanne or a sonata by Beethoven. Katherine Mansfield, scarcely a year after her death, has come to be regarded as one of the most finished artists that ever worked with the short story as their medium.
The present collection includes several unfinished fragments which are invaluable to anyone interested in her art or in the short story as a whole. They are cross-sections of her method which enable us to see the processes that produce the half-dozen little masterpieces at the beginning of the book.
“The Doll’s House” is at once the best and the most typical of all the stories she has written. It shows us in an unforgetable manner her complete mastery of the difficult trick of epitomizing the whole of life in a minute and almost ridiculously petty episode. All the aspirations of the many, all the heartless prejudice of the few, are concentrated in a toy lamp in one of the little rooms of a doll’s house. It might easily be sentimental, and very likely ridiculous, if it were not for the implacable aloofness of her art. Again, in “A Cup of Tea” we have a bitter, though inoffensive, exhibition of the quality of mercy by somewhat the same whimsical concentration on little things. A lady of high degree is accosted on Bond Street by another lady of lesser degree who requests the price of a cup of tea. The first lady, thinking it would be a charming adventure, takes the pathetic creature into her own home for her cup of tea. She is impressed by her own magnanimity, even considers doing something more worthwhile for the stranger, when the great lady’s husband appears. Because the latter ventured the remark that the visitor is really quite pretty, because the great lady suddenly detects the shadow of age on her face as she passes the mirror, the visitor is forthwith despatched with a few shillings, and the great lady asks her husband that evening, “Do you think I’m pretty?”
All the stories of Katherine Mansfield are more or less like that, displaying the difficult accomplishment of a worker in miniature, and, like the art of the miniature, possessing a rare and almost forgotten spirit.
W. T.
The Lyric.ByJohn Drinkwater. (Martin Secker.)
None of the “sound and fury” of modern literary theories (signifying nothing?), and little that is arresting is to be found in this essay on the lyric; its argument has a stately conservatismwith enough that is fresh and new to make the whole of interest.
Drinkwater pins much faith on Coleridge’s definition of poetry: “poetry—the best words in the best order”. After declaring this to be the one and only true definition, later in the text he admits that there can be no proper definition of poetry, since so much depends on the individuality of the poet. So perhaps we can forgive him the contradiction on the score that he relieves us of the necessity of having our ideals of poetry destroyed forever.
The author advances an interesting theory of poetic “energies”, the forces that cause the creation of verse. He classifies these into several types that cast a new light on the whys and wherefores of poetry. The lyric itself is well defined. Perhaps the most interesting passage is his clever answer to the accusations against form made by the sponsors of free-verse. Their own lack of form, however, he treats not with diatribe, but interested tolerance.
A. M.
Within These Walls.ByRupert Hughes. (Harper & Bros.)
It is the natural tendency of every generation to consider much less vivid and wicked those that have come before. We still hear of the “old-fashioned” mothers in sentimental appreciation or pity—as contrasted with the obstreperous rising generation.
In this light, it is interesting to read Mr. Hughes’ novel, which has as an obtrusive background the very vital and naughty New York of 1825-1875. With a slight hesitation for touches that obviously cater to our surprise, we would class the bulk of this background as authentic. It is the main theme of the book. A restless melodramatic movement of indifferently drawn characters across this setting gives the author his excuse for it. The action is too stereotyped in its thrill to be in itself worth while, and it is given the reader as substitute for an ability to define the characters into lasting silhouettes. Mr. Hughes’sforteis a running-fire, rat-tat-tat description of stirring events (as the great fire of 1837) which never fails to work one up, and is thus highly effective.
However, the author does hew to the line of his purpose, and gives us an interesting (however faithful) picture of the growing New York, and its groping fight for an adequate water supply. Daniel Webster enters in two places—once as toper, once as orator—with doubtful appropriateness.
One does not for the most part feel in sympathy with the book.
R. P. C., JR.
The Powder of Sympathy.ByChristopher Morley.
The Powder of Sympathyis a collection of whimsical, verbal morsels, colyumistic in length, but not for the most part in character. Discourse upon the shortcomings of the Long Island Railroad, or upon the vicissitudes of mongrel dogs in pedigreed kennels no doubt is admirable colyum copy; but Mr. Morley has included in his latest book an equal quantity of semi-serious discussion about books and about authors. We can think of no one who can impart to the reader his own genuine enthusiasm for good books so well as Sir Kenelm Digby’s publicity agent. (Incidentally, we consider Mr. Morley’s observations on Sir Digby’s character, habits, and work as the most titillating particle of sympathetic powder to be found in the whole book.)
It is a book for every mood. If you feel the need of a laugh, pick up this salmon-colored work and choose at random from the forty odd titles that speak for themselves. If you are beginning to wonder whether you will ever again find prose that will thrill you with its bold and powerful use of the strong red roots of our English vocabulary, read “Santayana in the Subway”. If you still have a morbid interest in the higher side of the culinary art known as distillation, you will find enlightening Sir Kenelm’s directions for making “ale drink quick and stronger”. In any case once you open this book you will forget where the blues begin.
M. T.