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

BRIEFER MENTION

The Horses of Diomedes, by Remy de Gourmont, translated by C. Sartoris (12mo, 249 pages; Luce: $2). De Gourmont gives his ideas the outlines of women, and offers them the caresses of Diomedes, Pascase, and Cyran. Sophistication at its summit becomes a lucid naiveté. He builds a sad Utopia wherein his mind blossoms in the restless colours of flesh. In an immortal garden besieged by decay, Diomedes moves idly between Pascase, his youth—acolyte yet alien, subtle but young—and Cyran, his age—a tempting destination barely evaded; aesthete turning ascetic as his hair whitens. Thus de Gourmont amuses himself with ghosts whose flesh is still capable of embraces; and indulges the hesitations of his spirit among amours that are exquisite, yet cannot relinquish their imperfections. He woos thought like an ironical lover who knows how to make a banal whisper profound. Having evaded both the violence and the ennui of his time, his imagination waits where only the monosyllable of the mystic is adequate; his murmurings are one step from silence. Thought glides elusively complete as all living things in the transparent pool of his style; a moonlight style in which shapes are distinct yet pliant.

 

The Victim, and the Worm, by Phyllis Bottome (16mo, 292 pages; Doran: $1.75) are two novels in one volume, each aptly described by its title. The Victim is an American millionaire who has decided to pass the last of his life in England as being the most peaceful place he can find. His beautiful daughter interrupts this dream, and, presenting a front of martyrdom to the world, manages to inflict suffering upon everyone about her, until her father sacrifices his happiness to save others from being her victims. It is vividly told, readable, and unimportant. The second story is rather more complex, and with better relief. Two people, a man and a young girl, adore a clever, domineering woman who shapes their lives for them, until, almost unconsciously, they find themselves defying her in small ways, and finally allying themselves for life against her. Phyllis Bottome is distinctly the "popular appeal" writer, but here and there, one comes upon evidences that she could write a better novel, even a realistic one, if she so desired.

 

Elimus: A Story, by B. C. Windeler, with twelve designs by D. Shakespear (16mo, 45 pages; Three Mountains Press: $3.50) depicts without mercy the collapse of a weak illusioned youth in a tough expletive pioneer world. The psychology of Elimus Hackett is established directly, without comment, in a few brief actions. He exists primarily as part of a firm design, as a topic for solid chunky vigorous prose. The omission of articles, the employment of compounded words, the skilled use of alliteration speed up the text which runs with an emphatic accent like that of an unmuffled motor exhaust. Elimus is a proof that Joyce and Lewis have revivified the language. In addition, the force of the prose is well translated in the black-and-whites of D. Shakespear.

 

The Florentine Dagger, by Ben Hecht (12mo, 365 pages; Boni & Liveright: $2). "Melodrama," someone has said, "may be a drunken plausibility," but it is hardly that in Hecht's new book. He has raided the roadhouse of popularity with the dexterity of a mutilated poet. Across the cadaver of a Broadway mystery story he flings the violent costume in which he dances best—and the effect is an accurate and illuminating portrait of Hecht. His glittering manikins are fantastically wilting tinsel, cinema apparitions that collapse with the turning of each page. The book is a danse macabre of Hecht's literary ambitions.

 

Grey Towers, anonymous (12mo, 286 pages; Covici-McGee: $2) might be characterized as the small boy's pea-shooter in the act of being matriculated in one of our larger universities. It demonstrates, with a great deal of ardour and some effectiveness, that universities are controlled by human beings whose weaknesses are not altogether academic. This has long been suspected, and doubtless will continue to be the case much after Grey Towers is out of print.

 

Modern Swedish Masterpieces, selected and translated by Charles Wharton Stork (12mo, 257 pages; Dutton: $2.50). What technical discoveries are offered? Has this particular mode of expression been driven further? What contributions to noumenal knowledge have been made? These are the likeliest questions an Anglo-Saxon, grounded in his own culture and familiar with general European literature, would raise when reading an anthology of Swedish short stories. The stories of Söderberg, Heidenstam, Siwertz, and Hallström indicate a literature of normal vitality and controlled execution, but produce no fresh conquests. Simple ironic tales, historical or costume chapters, "sophisticate" dialogue, and allegories are all done acceptably by them. Unfortunately, Mr Stork's ability to recognize masterpieces is, judged by his conduct in American literary life, somewhat open to question. Consequently, one's curiosity as to significant activity in contemporary Swedish letters remains unsatisfied.

 

Children of Men, by Eden Phillpotts (8vo, 471 pages; Macmillan: $2.50) and Brack, White and Brindled by Eden Phillpotts (8vo, 344 pages; Macmillan: $2). The first of these books ends the author's series of Dartmoor tales. He draws here so largely upon Hardy and even upon George Eliot that one has the feeling of having traversed his ground before in greater company. The situations are well handled, and the backgrounds convincing. The English countryside, however, seems to be as unpleasantly populated as the English town in Gilbert Cannan. The second book, Black, White, and Brindled, presents a series of short stories entirely different in character and with a setting as exotic as the earlier one was dull. The dazzling white and blue of the West Indies, the atmosphere of negro laziness and sudden, mysterious crime, come as a surprise—even a pleasant surprise—after the grey inevitableness of Men. The tragedy in the first is a creeping palsy which claims its victims and leaves no hope. In the second book, tragedy is only a way station, an obstacle, beyond which the heroes of the various stories find their way to peace and some degree of happiness at last.

 

Fox Footprints, by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth (12mo, 79 pages; Knopf: $1.50) is a Cook's tour of the East, with halts in Siam, India, Tahiti, and a stop-over of two months in China and Japan. Decoration, quaintness, exoticism, images. The moon over the tropics is a white curved bud, whereas the moon over Japan is compared aptly to a butterfly. There is no property more stage-worn than the moon, and the dents of time persist even when its cardboard disc has been painted over with all the nice colours of Miss Coatsworth's lunar and exotic vocabulary.

 

Charlatan, by Louis Grudin (12mo, 62 pages; Lieber & Lewis: $1.50) contains niceties of craftsmanship at the service, mostly, of fancy and fantasy. Mr Grudin concentrates, not upon the direct conveyance of an emotion, but upon the construction of a decorative, unexpected, and distorting armour to encase his feelings, or rather he sews together "his good fur coat of despair." We recognize the coat, but the despair is imperceptible: he gets the armour, but fails to establish the emotions. Irony, the grim disparity between a strong desire and its miscarriage in deed, cannot grow from a bare assumption of the desire and an embroidery of the deed. Mr Grudin, however, has more restraint than Bodenheim, his chief influence, and a poem like Diary shows a trend away from the rhetoric of sheer ingenuity.

 

April Twilights, by Willa Cather (8vo, 66 pages; Knopf: $2) consists largely of verses reprinted from an earlier volume with the same title. It was the epilogue to that first voyage to Europe from which the poet returns with a portfolio of classical memories: Antinous, Delphi, Poppies on Ludlow Castle, the dialect of Robert Burns, and finally the expected Envoi, which like the others is perfectly imitated, quotable, dead. Her later verses are American, even Nebraskan in their subjects, but their form is equally and coldly perfect. They give the impression of being cast, accurately, into a mould which was not intended for them; they lack redeeming inconsistencies and never vary from a pattern which is fixed by the first line. It might have been Miss Cather who inspired Boileau to write: "Un style trop égal et toujours uniforme / En vain brille à nos yeux, il faut qu'il nous endorme."

 

The Love-Rogue, by Harry Kemp (12mo, 229 pages; Lieber & Lewis: $1.75) is a rather free rendering of the Spanish drama of Tirso de Molina. The translator has been successful in catching the lyric qualities of the work, no less than the dramatic; he has done a welcome literary service in making available this source of all the multifarous Don Juan dramas, and has rounded out his assignment by a lively introduction and an exhaustive bibliography.

 

The Modern Traveller, by Hilaire Belloc (illus., 12mo, 80 pages; Knopf: $1.50) has satirical overtones of W. S. Gilbert and nonsensical overtones of Lewis Carroll, although it does not strike quite the same vibrant cords in either mood. The lines have a sting to them, and the entire expedition is a gay absurdity in verse of quick tempo and deft rhyming. The narrative lacks, however, in urbanity, and consequently—one hazards—in permanence.

 

Raw Material, by Dorothy Canfield (12mo, 302 pages; Harcourt, Brace: $2) is a score of instances out of human life, more trivial, surely, than true. The author states with smooth coyness her rather smug hope that these episodes will provoke original thought; but the conclusion of each is implicitly obvious in its beginning, and the desired meditations are suggested all the energetic and unequivocal innuendo of a sermon. The author's manner, which seeks effusively to enlarge the importance of her subjects, completely neutralizes it. The sketches have neither the spareness and elasticity of an outline nor the elaborated warmth of a fully developed short story.

 

Windows, by John Galsworthy (12mo, 91 pages; Scribners: $1). In this play Galsworthy is to be seen at his best. Something of the social appeal that vitalizes Justice stands forth in this drama, yet underlying and overspreading all is a subtle and skilfully woven strand of comedy that dominates the action. The author's technical expertness is nowhere better exemplified than in Windows, and only in a few instances have his characters been etched with more originality and reality.

 

The Machine Wreckers, by Ernst Toller, translated from the German by Ashley Dukes (12mo, 113 pages; Knopf: $2) is a drama centring around the Luddite rebellion in England in the early part of the nineteenth century. The author, a communist poet and dramatist at present serving sentence in a Bavarian prison for taking part in the Munich uprisings, is not, like Hauptman, interested so much in the spectacle of the workers' rebellion against the machines, as in the blind groping of the workers to establish a brotherhood of man, the painful awakening of class consciousness in the birth throes of the modern industrial era. Borrowing freely from the dramas of Shakespeare, of Hauptman, of Gorki, Toller has re-created the bitter tragedy of the abortive English revolution killed so effectively by the Reform Bill of 1830.

 

The Law of City Planning and Zoning, by Frank Backus Williams (8vo, 738 pages; Macmillan: $5) is an exhaustive examination of the legal basis for city planning in the United States, or rather, of the legal hindrances to a more complete development of civic utilities. Mr Williams' citation of foreign precedent, as well as our own more timid and tentative experiments in America, gives breadth to a discussion which is, alas! a little too technical for any one but the administrator or the practising city planner; but on the use of Mr Williams' data the orderly growth of our cities—to say nothing of their beauty—will not a little depend.

 

Psychoanalysis and Morality, by John Cowper Powys (12mo, 48 pages; Colbert: $2.50). Mr Powys has the knowledge and the temperament for speculation. He concludes that the findings of psychoanalysis will lead to a relaxation of the sex-taboo and the god- or universe-taboo, and he discusses the "identity-lust" and a morality which disassociates sex-sensation from sin, declares that evil implies "either cruelty or malice," and retains "the imaginative sympathy of Christianity and the loyal tenderness of Christianity." His exposition is the more persuasive for being cotched in varied rhythms, lively accents, and surprising images.