The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Briefer Mention (December 1923)

BRIEFER MENTION

The Back Seat, by G. B. Stern (12mo, 240 pages; Knopf: $2) is a neat, satirical comedy of family life, or of that substitute for family life which a popular actress and her husband and daughters can achieve. On the surface it is a very successful compromise that Leonora and her stay-at-home husband have instituted, but the surface cracks and the daughters insist on growing up and annexing such properties of their mother as stage careers, a lover, and the popular favour. The back seat itself shifts its position, and is occupied by various members of the family in turn. Leonora is, however, the livest and strongest of the family, and despite a temporary eclipse emerges triumphantly in the foreground again, while Robert retreats to the back seat to count over the years before his Leonora shall retire from the stage and make him comfortable. The child Sally ought to be broadcasted for the benefit of all child psychologists. Her "Narcissus complex" is—to the reader—a new sort of farce, delightfully funny, and convincing as well.

 

Jane—Our Stranger, by Mary Borden (12mo, 353 pages; Knopf: $2.50) depicts the ineffectual dent made in the adamantine composite of pre-war Parisian aristocracy by a wealthy, strong, naively moral American woman. The first half of the book reaches descriptive tentacles about the plot and renders thoughtfully and suavely the overtones of French social culture. The latter half, narrated by Jane herself, releases the action with dramatic objectivity. The effect of the novel is that of a painting in flat colours done by a hand that knows how to give design to unusual flexibilities of style and to convey an impression of substance by outlines.

 

Bunk, by W. E. Woodward (12mo, 370 pages; Harper: $2) is a laudable try at keeping three bright-hued balls in the air at the same time. One is satire, another is fiction, and the third is philosophy. It's a good trick, if you can do it; Mr Woodward isn't quite agile enough. Just when he works up to the applause, he drops one of the balls, and the spectators—having seen H. G. Wells put over the same act years ago on the big time—walk out on him.

 

Tantalus, by Dorothy Easton (12mo, 297 pages; Knopf: $2.50) traces the revitalization of a middle-aged English vicar, habituated to an outworn creed, through his love affair with a young French governess. The subtleties necessary to lend distinction to a not unusual story are discriminatingly chosen and placed with admirable casualness where they are least looked for and yet most effective. The nature background, which gives the keynote to the emotional development, is painted in with reticent words that somehow are fresh and evocative. In spite of breathless sentences and meaningless exclamation marks a spontaneity is conveyed that is delightful in itself and particularly appropriate to a book written about the spirit of youth.

 

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.

 

Galimathias, by Matthew Josephson (8vo, 46 pages; Broom: $1). To discover fresh idioms; to regard familiar objects in the light of another poetry; to be personal and new: these qualities are praised in theory and until they are attained. For Galimathias they procured only a brief chorus of ridicule, justified in small part by the fact that it has the defects of its qualities. Often it tortures the language needlessly. It has gusto, however, and a satisfying loud rhetoric and movement as fine as a Swiss watch. The critics who damned the book most briefly, even, out of their irritation with new forms of beauty, should have been able to appreciate the cadence of a phrase like, "The white foam of the long cataract which from beginning to end is not the colour of water."

 

Second Contemporary Verse Anthology, edited by Charles Wharton Stork (12mo, 208 pages; Dutton: $3) consists of poems selected from the last three years' issue of Mr Stork's magazine, prefaced by an article on the aims of the magazine, and the editor's definition of poetry. "I believe in this anthology," Mr Stork states, "because I have had so little to do with its making." And yet he has surely had as much to do with its making as can be done by an editor who sets a premium on certain qualities in poetry and gives them the freedom of his magazine. The qualities here encouraged are simplicity, direct appeal, "humanism," "as opposed to the egotism of the futurists." Some of the verse thus selected is of very high rank. In rather a large per cent of the rest, picturesqueness and form are more prominent than intensity of feeling. There is such a thing as trying too hard to be universal, but at least there are poems enough in the one hundred thirty-nine of this anthology to please several tastes.

 

Some Aspects of the Life of Jesus, by George Berguer, translated by Eleanor and Van Wyck Brooks (8vo, 332 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $4) is an attempt to turn psychoanalysis to the services of religion. Christ's appeal is situated in the fact that his own life was a parallel in actuality to the various myths and legends exemplifying the "Oedipus complex," and thus he "translated into life the secular dream of the peoples." By an emphasis on psychological rather than historico-empirical truth, the author is able to preserve the miracles even in the act of explaining them away. His distinction between spiritual truth and the degeneration of such truth into material fictions, and his examination into the laws underlying such degeneration no doubt call for an enormous amount of skill, so that the book, while it contains bits of subtle exegesis, does not suffer from vagueness and shiftiness of approach.

 

Damaged Souls, by Gamaliel Bradford (12mo, 385 pages; Houghton Mifflin: $3). This is a gallery of psychological portraits of men prominent in American public life. The portraits rely on many documents and letters for details, the virtues of each man being dwelt upon by way of proof that he was merely damaged, not lost. The author feels that the common characteristic of the group is lack of analysis of their own motives and natures, coupled with limitless discussion and explanation of their conduct. The book is interesting, and on the whole, more than average fair in its conclusions.

 

The Child at Home, by Cynthia Asquith (12mo, 278 pages; Scribner: $1.75) might be described as a conservative manual for mothers who have no need to consider the economic aspects of their maternal relations; it indicates—with not too much condescension—how they can "get on" with their children, maintain the proper social and intellectual contacts, and that sort of thing. Lady Asquith recommends reading a Shakespeare play aloud as "an excellent family occupation"; also, in having the little one's picture taken for the precious album, it is a "waste of money to go to a cheap photographer."

 

As I Like It, by William Lyon Phelps (12mo, 236 pages; Scribner: $2). In this volume of random opinions gathered up from Scribner's Magazine, we see Mr Phelps discuss very patiently whether or not This Freedom is a greater book than If Winter Comes; we learn of his delight in reading Christopher Morley; and we watch while, with simple impregnability, he informs us that he is both a Puritan and a Rotarian. One is always a bit disarmed by Mr Phelps, he writes with such tolerance and good nature, indeed he possesses any number of sterling qualities—even has them printed, as it were, on his business cards like a telephone number. In this volume Mr Phelps' opinions range anywhere from the bluntly wrong to the bluntly right, it doesn't much matter which.

 

Race and National Solidarity, by Charles Conant Josey (12mo, 227 pages; Scribner: $2.50) is an argument for the intensification of group consciousness on the part of the white race and for a policy of deliberate exploitation designed to insure its world dominance. This thesis is theoretically more rational than the ideal of internationalism inveighed against; but it is even less empirical. The author successfully deflates illusory ethical values sanctified by democracy. He is less sound in his reasoning about politics and economics, and does not take the possibly very active development of the subject-races into consideration. The book lacks the trenchant dryness that makes for clarity and force in an argument; too much of it is in the form of a pedagogical peroration.

 

Building the American Nation, by Nicholas Murray Butler (12mo, 374 pages; Scribner: $2.50). In this series of lectures, written to be delivered in England, Mr Butler sketches in strictly orthodox fashion an outline of American history from the beginnings of colonial federation up to the present. The author succeeds in implicating his facts very smoothly with the portraits and policies of leading American statesmen. On reading the pages on the revolution, we see how admirably fitted Mr Butler was for his diplomatic task of interpreting America to England, for he insists that all the faculties which the colonies possessed for revolution were in the direct line of English tradition. The somewhat difficult problem of Jefferson is handled with equal ingenuity. If the book adds nothing to American history, at any rate the review of the facts is clearly and earnestly performed.