Life

Life*

Painting the Veil, Mr. Maugham Does Not Gild the Lily

The Story. In Hongkong, one afternoon, a door-knob turned. The door did not open. But the turning of the knob alarmed two people who were getting dressed in the shelter of the door to which the knob was affixed. Could it have been Walter? Kitty did not think so. Her companion, an athletic adulterer of 40, left her. Kitty sat down to wait for Bacteriologist Walter Fane who, at this point, had been a cuckold for about a year.

It had been Fane, after all, who turned the knob. Kitty asked him to divorce her. She would marry Charlie Townsend, she said, who loved her and would be the next Colonial Governor. At this Fane laughed unpleasantly. He made an offer: if she would bring him written assurance from Townsend that he would marry her, written assurance from Mrs. Townsend that she would divorce Charles, he would do as she asked. Otherwise he would require her to accompany him to Mei-tan-fu, a cholera-stricken town of which he was taking charge.

Townsend told Kitty that he loved her with all his soul; but, after all, there were other things to consider. … A plague town, of course, was dangerous but not necessarily fatal if one took precautions; he advised no unboiled water, no lettuce. She returned to her husband, delighted to be going to Mei-tan-fu, where people were dying.

In the death-struck town, Fane went about his work, spoke little to his wife. She decided that he had brought her there to die. She showed her scornful acquiescence to this design by helping herself one evening to salad. He followed suit. Every night after that they sat facing each other, munched the lethal lettuce.

The inscrutable, saturnine heroism of her husband began to move her, if not to love, at least to admiration. He took cholera. She knelt beside his contorted body, begging forgiveness. His lips opened. She bent to hear his last words. “The dog it was that died,” he said in a blackening whisper.

She went back to Hongkong, confronted Townsend, told him, one af-ternoon, what an ass she thought he was. He responded by kissing her. Her bones turned to water. “It’s no use,” she thought afterwards, “I am a slut.”

The Significance. Readers who prefer literary works which do not require, for assimilation, anything more than spectacles, will perceive after reading the first sentence (“She gave a startled cry”) that this is their kind of book. It is true that Mr. Maugham’s material has served many a dingy charlatan; true also that his style is undistinguished. But he has a rare grace: humility. He wants to tell a good story, but he does not distort the pattern thrt life imposes upon even the most shoddy events. He writes sensationism with an air of having his manner dictated absolutely by his material. His story is as compact as a surgical dressing.

The Author. W. Somerset Maugham took a medical degree at Heidelberg, practiced for a while in the slums of London. Now 50, black-eyed, broad-framed, diffident, he is a restless traveler. His most famed novel, Of Human Bondage, a best seller ten years ago, has had a steady sale ever since. Miss Thompson, a short story of his, was made into a play−Rain−with startling results. His dramas, however, are potboilers. His other novels, short-story collections : The Moon and Sixpence, The Trembling of a Leaf, The Hero, Mrs. Craddock, Liza of Lambeth, On a Chinese Screen.

Tobacconalia

SMOKE RINGS AND ROUNDELAYS−Selected by Wilfred Partington−Dodd, Mead ($2.50). Some hold that Old King Cole’s wide reputation as a ban vivant rests largely upon the gusto with which, in enumerating his postprandial wants, he demanded, first of all, his pipe. The bowl, the fiddlers three were afterthoughts. Such persons belong to the Old Jimmy-Pipe Club, a somewhat fatuous association fostered chiefly by columnists, mass advertisers and female novelists desirous of articulating Big He-Men; for, since Cole’s day, tobacco has sunk to a low place in literature. The cigar usually proceeds from the stained teeth and loose lips of Mammon. The cigaret has become a stock in-gredient of feminism and neurasthenia.

But there have been days when tobacconalia really lent a fragrance to letters. Wrote Charles Lamb:

For thy sake, Tobacco, I

Would do anything but die. . . .

Poet Henley once began: “If I were king, my pipe should be premier.” “Hail, social tube,” sang Dr. Syntax. Moreover, there is an ode, well-deserving of immortality, by one Francis Hoyland: On An Old Maid That Chewed Tobacco.

These and other pungent crumbs are now swept together by Mr. Partington, sifted and spiced with historical notes, moistened with fat slices from Barrie’s My Lady Nicotine and convivially offered to the fuming public.

Man Pays

O’MALLEY OF SHANGANAGH−Donn Byrne−Century ($1.25). It was a rare, lovely lady that de Bourke O’Malley saw in her white religious robes in the convent garden. She saw a fine young sunburned soldier, and his speech was gentle. So she gave over being Sister Ursula and became Joan O’Malley, religious no longer, though she had given herself in marriage to her Lord Christ Jesus.

She and de Bourke traveled and were happy. She would go back to Ireland, she said, to bear his son. But the son never came. She wasted, thinking herself cursed and taken in adultery by this earthly marriage. When they did go back to Shanganagh, the old place lost its sweet peace, the ivies fell, the servants left. O’Malley took brandy. Gossip told him she had resumed her white, gone back. He foreswore his name and foreswore that gallant Irish fable: “The woman pays.”

Such an artless man is Mr. Byrne, he can tell you a simple story in no time. Later, as you think back, the setting deepens, the figures grow, you do not forget them.

Marc Connelly

He is the Fantastic Half of Kaufman and Connelly

Beggar on Horseback recently returned for a short run in Manhattan after a remarkably successful road tour. In my opinion, it is the most important work of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. It is filled with Mr. Connelly’s curious fantasy and delicate humor−the same that promises to be in evidence when his new play opens in the autumn, that was notably apparent in the small sketch he recently wrote and acted in for The Dutch Treat Club Show, annual performance of that jour-nalists’ and artists’ society.

Connelly was born in McKeesport, Pa., educated at a private school and never went to college. Instead, he did various jobs for a newspaper and, finally, drifted into the playwriting business via Dulcy. He is short, alert, slightly bald, young, with a funny, short laugh that punctuates almost all his remarks. He is a parlor entertainer of great order and his acting has something of the pantomimic grace and comic pathos of Charlie Chaplin. His gift for making the witty remark might have been his undoing, for it is a rare one and makes for popularity; yet Connolly has kept, as has Don Marquis, the really fine quality of his imagination unsullied. An idea of beauty is quite as important to him as one of comedy. He is not afraid to let himself indulge in fantasy, vastly important to the U. S. at a time when so many of the younger men are turning to the noisome side of life.

That James Stephens and Michael , Arlen found Connelly a friend is an excellent commentary on the quality of his mind. Both Mr. Stephens and Mr. Arlen have a respect for chivalry and a love for fantasy that separates them from most present-day writers. I suspect that if Marc Connelly ever finds time to sit down and write prose fiction, he will find himself doing something of real importance. A little Irish blood goes a long way toward making a poet and I suppose there is Irish in Mr. Connelly (and in Mr. Marquis). If you are interested in the graceful, the light, the quixotic and the truly humorous, watch Marc Connelly. Beggar on Horseback is a vivid contrast with the other expressionistic play on the boards, Processional, is far superior in the quality and clarity of its imagery.

J.F.

*THE PAINTED VEIL−W. Somerset Maugham−Doran ($2.00).

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