Books: Young Felix–

Young Felix*

Pollyanna Is Brought Up-to-Date

The Story. Young Felix Hunter is a person of invincible amiability. He would greet Lucifer himself with undiminished good humor. A large proportion of his early life appears to have been devoted to a demonstration of his affability in the face of continued reverses. No ray of light is shed upon his drab existence that is not promptly followed by compensating catastrophe. Each misfortune he welcomes with an apt witticism. It is said of him that he proceeds ” triumphing from failure to failure.” Many of his set-backs are in themselves inconsiderable. They form an overwhelming aggregate.

He is born into an agreeably futile and wholly poverty-stricken family; education brushes him lightly by; diphtheria and a consequent period of paralysis afford him early opportunity for cheerful submission; he becomes identified with an advertising firm, then another, in which his native ingenuity and artistic talent bring him reasonable success. An abortive love affair with a co-worker is ended abruptly by the lady’s untimely suicide; he finally marries a childhood sweetheart, against his mother’s passionate protest, and finds in her a voracious wife who does her best to swallow his soul and finally runs away with another man; he loses his mother—a miracle of sympathy and self-abnegation—on the same evening; he finally sees a new beauty opening for him in a new love. This time he loves ” for character, which is the only true thing to love for.” We leave him, a successful artist, engaged in a romantic passage at a music hall bar, in the course of an air raid which proposes to blow both participants effectively to pieces.

Every figure in the story of Felix is defined with simple, unerring strokes. No character so much as shoves his nose in that he is not promptly pinned down and held up for inspection. We know them all and like practically all of them— Felix himself, sensitive, delightfully vain, adroit, an artist fundamentally, hugely enjoying a world which has little for him save hard knocks; his mother, capable, heroic, un-questioningly devoted; Grumps, the bibulous Scotch grandfather, one of the most keenly observed and original figures in recent literature; the histrionic and ineffective father; Godfrey, the actor-brother, with a sonorous voice and the manner of a Grand Duke; Aunt Julie, the Incubus, who descends in all her Victorian smugness on the Hunter household for a protracted and intolerable visit; Felix’s wife, ” a passionate, exciting pet”; old Jacob, his friend, obstinately liberal, who is ” one of the men who deliberately choose their wives!”

The Significance. Frank Swinnerton is chiefly known as a technician. The story of Felix’s childhood and youth is told with an adroit simplicity that gives a minute picture without the semblance of effort. Every episode comes with the force and inevitability of life itself. He is never melodramatic, never sordid. He is consistently interesting. He has the invaluable faculty of exploiting the significance of the casual. He does not feel it necessary to take his characters apart in order to show how they work. Unquestionably they all have complexes and repressions and psychological eccentricities. But Mr. Swinnerton is far more concerned with making them human.

Similarly Mr. Swinnerton, while showing no cowardice in the face of the demon, Sex, keeps a healthy sense of proportion in regard to it.

The Author. Frank Swinnerton was born in London in 1884. He is the author of The Happy Family, On the Staircase, The Chaste Wife, Shops and Houses, Nocturne, September, Coquette. According to Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, Nocturne is “the perfect novel.”

He is editorial adviser to the firm of Chatto and Windus, publishers, and writes literary criticism for the Manchester Guardian. He is also a professional dramatic critic.

Blasco Ibanez

He is the Most Dynamic of Novelists Dr. Smythe, of the International Book Review, came out of the elevator. “Well,” said he, “that human dynamo is upstairs waiting for you!” Human dynamo, Blasco Ibanez certainly proved to be. Dark, white-skinned, brisk, almost jerky in his movements, with hands which noticeably wear several jeweled rings and gesticulate in square, but expressive fashion, the great Spanish spinner of yarns is a perfect echo of the life he has led. He does not speak in English. I speak no Spanish, little French. He spoke in French and I understood. A friend put my questions.

Ibanez is a man of tremendous, incalculable dramatic imagination. This is curious because he does not like the theatre. He has never written a play. I think that I know why he does not like the stage. It is confining to the imagination. It sets mechanical rules within which the fancy may not indulge itself by great leaps of time and place.

In youth Ibanez was a political orator. He waged battle for causes. He fought duels. Now he is publisher, journalist, novelist. His publishing firm has published in the form of cheap little paper books practically all of the world’s masterpieces for the benefit of the Spanish people. Publishing on a grand scale—yes!—for Ibanez is just that —grandiose. Life for him, I fancy, is a brilliant gesture.

His novels are written at high speed. I was particularly interested in his methods of writing. “I sometimes dictate an article; but never one of my stories,” he told me. “Those I write in long hand very rapidly. The actual time it takes me to produce one of these novels may be very short—as short as two months; but on the idea, on the development of the plot, I may have been working for years.” Those who have watched him work will tell you that he can carry on a conversation while he is writing. This is because the writing is purely a mechanical expression of the outline which has been smoldering for months or for years in his conscious mind and being, enriched and elaborated in the subconscious.

Mr. Kennaday of the Foreign Press Service, tells me that he has spent evenings with Ibanez when the fiery gentleman has outlined story after story after story—all of them good. It is a pity that there are not 48 hours in a day, and that the fertile-minded Spaniard cannot write with both hands at once.

His next novel, to follow The Temptress, has already been published in Spain. It is called Sa Reina Calipa.

I liked Ibanez. I wonder if it would be possible for anyone to know him well. Like most men of exaggeratedly fertile brains, his real self lies somewhere very deep within. He tends to speak in periods. His words, too, are gestures; this, however, is the world of make-believe and of romance. It is his world. He moves in it serenely and triumphantly. He is a giant of a novelist, a swift spinner of glowing tales, a man with a passion for accomplishment who has been endowed with sufficient vitality to pursue his images to their creation. Long life to him and his vigor!

J. F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

A PREFACE TO LIFE—Edwin Justus Mayer—Boni ($2.50). The candid autobiography of a youth whose physical and spiritual adventures touch upon Harlem and Hollywood, “William Blake and Joseph Conrad, manufacturers, magnates, movie-stars, sweat-shop-workers, policemen, poets, editors, reporters. The growth of a mind, the rise of an intelligence, the development of an interesting and hostile point of view. Well written, fertile of ideas, suggesting one of the many possible answers to the query: ” What’s wrong with civilization in general and American civilization in particular?”

LAZY LAUGHTER—Woodward Boyd —Scribner ($2.00). The Montgomerys and their relatives were charming people but oh, so lazy—and Dagmar Hallowell was no exception. She did try to make out the firmest sort of a schedule for herself sometimes —a schedule that included rising at seven—but how could she ever keep it when she always overslept? She débuted, she considered a stage career, she tried to be a working-girl, she fell in love—but in each case laziness sucked the strength from each promising adventure. At last she plucked up courage to go to Chicago —and for a little while she seemed to have conquered the family curse (she was intermittently employed at some rather useless work, but still, employed)—the right young man reappeared just when he should—and then her brother, Herbie, having slept himself out of the Marine Corps, got sluggishly involved in an impossible intrigue — the family fortunes failed—all there was for Dagmar to do was to marry a middle-aged bear for money to take care of her whole ineffective family—and so she did. A pleasant and amusing novel.

— YOUNG FELIX—Frank Swinnerton— Doran ($2.00).