612
BRIEFER MENTION
The Sun Field, by Heywood Broun (12mo, 204 pages; Putnam: $2) is an essayist's second, and less successful, attempt at fiction. The essays which were shot whole into the thin fabric of The Boy Grew Older are here more skilfully crumbled in by way of dialogues which are hardly conversations. The theme is sound: a ball player's life entangled with that of a bluestocking and their effects one on the other. But a faint air of artificiality hangs over the ball field as it does over the editorial sanctum of "say, The New Republic" and the names of living people and the street numbers one recognizes stare out of the pages like living eyes behind paper masks. Earlier Mr Broun broke all the rules and wrote an entertainingly bad novel; in this one he actually achieves dulness, chiefly because his interest in players and in pedants never quite becomes creative.
Graven Image, by Margaret Widdemer (12mo, 319 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2) is the work of a conventional and confused mind striving for clarity and freedom of outlook, but attaining neither. The theme is the viciousness of family pride, which, based upon fictitious virtue and strengthened by aggressiveness, is an imposition on all who come in contact with it. But the counter-theme, the triumph of family solidarity that is tolerant, obscures the moral issue. The emotions of the characters are reiterated until they are meaningless and escape the reader's realization. And as a conclusive, if comparatively superficial, evidence of the uncertainty of the author's mind, the syntax is loose and the writing of indifferent quality.
A Lighter of Flames, by William S. Hart (12mo, 246 pages; Crowell: $2) is—as they say in the advertisements—"not a movie," but there is every reason why it should be, and ample grounds for suspecting that it is even now being cut up into reels. Most of the sub-titles can be lifted from the text without embellishment, and all the action can be shouted through a megaphone by any literate young man with the visor of his cap worn behind. The picture star has romanced about Patrick Henry in a narrative more flowery than the prize-winning float in a Pasadena parade. Every phrase is a studio orchid; every page a still.
Robert E. Lee, by John Drinkwater (12mo, 128 pages; Houghton Mifflin: $1.50) recreates the atmosphere of the southern side of the Civil War very charmingly. Lee is presented as a soldier with a creed which would make a socialist gasp, but which steadies its owner in his choice of sides in the war, and makes possible his simple, brave devotion to a cause. A group of Virginian youths, "the flower of the south" lend atmosphere, and lighten the sombre situation, until the final tragedy extinguishes even their bravery of wit. Mr Drinkwater has been unusually successful in this play, and in his Abraham Lincoln in seizing not merely the spirit of the days of secession, but in bringing out the quality of the great leaders of both north and south. He realizes the hero worship which an American would have wrapped about both Lincoln and Lee, and without partaking of it, he still maintains an air of reverence, and displays in his drawing of their characters, those qualities which have made worship possible. He has not been so successful with the southern idiom, which, in this play, is undeniably British in certain details.
