FICTION: Books

Bloody Wren

The sons of the prophet are hardy and bold And quite unaccustomed to fear; But of all—the most reckless of life and of limb Was Abdul, the Bulbul Emir! . . . When they wanted a man to encourage the van Or to shout ‘Attaboy!’ in the rear, Or to storm a redoubt, They always sent out, For Abdul, the Bulbul Emir. . . .

The U. S. public sends out for Percival Christopher Wren. And Percival Christopher Wren, dripping valorous gore in quantities that would bring pallor even to the cheek of the great Sabatini, chuckles grimly. He flourishes his most elaborately cosmopolitan salute, breathes a fierce hymn to Duty and marches again to the abattoir.

If Beau Geste was a superbly sanguinary book—and it was—this latest* is truly magnificent. The hero is familiar to Beau Geste readers as Major Henri de Beaujolais of the Spahis and the French intelligence service. But you have no idea of this man’s training prowess and unblemished character until you read Beau Sabreur.

First, his uncle, a hawklike French general, wedded him to the glorious cause of carving an African empire for La Patrie, with words that made Kipling’s “Recessional” sound like a nursery rhyme. Then he was sent to a cavalry camp as a corporal, to fortify his stomach by sleeping near horses and to acquire respect for the Chinese puzzle that is French army discipline. It just happened that he could punch, ride, shoot, drill, sleep, spy, drink, disguise, obey, command and love-his-country better than any one else in that camp, and that his sense of humor had been developed on the famed playing-fields of Eton. So he was soon promoted to posts of great importance, intriguing with desert tribes across the Mediterranean.

Nothing could have hindered Hero de Beaujolais’ success, save the one thing that did, a woman. Mary Vanbrugh, U. S. A., came under his protection during a minor massacre that occurred just at a moment when he was supposed to keep alive himself at all costs. She refused to understand why Duty compelled him to leave the disturbed town, sacrifice his men and sneak down through the desert to see some powerful sheiks. He had to take her along. He fell in love with her. And then of course, when it was a question between her honor and his exalted mission in the sheiks’ camp, he scrapped the mission. . . . That is not quite the way the story ends, nor would it be fair to say more. Slapstick though it is, the conclusion of this book is one of the most surprising, ingenious and broadly humorous twists ever put to a tale by any one short of Mark Twain.

There can be no question of the author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of native and military life in North Africa. He is one of the few novelists on record who can spatter their pages with italicized words—jellabias, bassourabs, girbas, tohs, fil-fil, mehara, hareem, Bismillah!—without seeming unduly affected. His dialogs crackle, his humor sparkles. He lets Mary Van-brugh mock his hero throughout with snatches from the song of Abdul, the Bulbul Emir. He introduces Mary’s Cockney maid, Maudie, to ridicule “sheik fiction” of the E. M. Hull type.

The only taxes he lays upon his readers touch their credulity (he insists in the preface that all he tells has occurred in sober fact) and their squeamishness. Here is specimen Wren carnage: “It was no moment for kid-gloved warfare nor the niceties of chivalrous fighting, and I drove my sword through the back of one man who was in the very act of yelling, ‘Hack the -in pieces and throw her to the dogs,’ and I cut halfway through the neck of another … as I wheeled about, I laid one black throat open to see the bone and sent my point through another filthy ragged jellabia in the region of its owner’s fifth rib . . . from among seven bodies, some yet twitching in a pool of blood, a spouting Thing dragged itself by its fingers and toes towards the stairs. . . .”

The Author of this brave work is a handsome, grizzled relation of Architect Christopher Wren (1632-1723), now not far from 60, who has occupied his lively mind with fiction-writing since terminating a most gallant career in his motherland’s military and the French Foreign Legion. He has never visited the U. S., but will soon, ostensibly to sample the California climate but also to see with his own eyes large masses of the people whose literary a.nd cinematic blood-thirst has caused his last two books to sell into the hundreds of thousands. Big-game hunter, explorer, golfer, boxer, fencer, cricketer, he knew Jack London in the South Seas, Theodore Roosevelt in Africa.

Appanoose Jimmie

BRAWNYMAN — James Stevens — Knopf ($2.50). The satisfying quality of this autobiogaphical chunk of Americana is that calm matter-of-factness which characterized the same author’s chronicle of the great logger, Paul Bunyan. “Appanoose Jimmie” Stevens (changed to Turner in these pages), aged about 35, now lives with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., and, though he contributes successfully to the American Mercury, he has not yet succumbed to the green mists that often steam up from pages of print to obscure a new writer’s picture of himself. Appanoose is still at heart the hobo team-hand that he labored to become as a brawny lad of 15 in the hard-rock camps of Montana, Idaho and California, only instead of drawling his story aloud as he learned to do in tumbled bunk-shacks, glaring bars and chilly boxcars, he now puts it on paper with a few droll flourishes (for which he may be indebted to Mr. Kipling’s Just So Stories) and a care not to be coarse.

No one ever penned such a gambling scene as the one here, where young Jim, the camp “gaycat,” “fuzz-face” or “gazoony” is admitted to the Thanksgiving Day poker game and after long lucky hours lays four aces on the horse-blanket to beat Bully Black Hawk out of a monster pot. They gave the lad his moniker (nickname) after that and he skinned (drove) mules thereafter instead of walloping dishes.

Out in the great state of “Cal” in the great city of “Loss” he had his early troubles with girls and learned a good deal about city working-people who do not labor with their hands. After a year or two he fell in again with Gager, rhetorical old comrade, in earlier days, of Appanoose’s burly friend and guardian, black-browed Paddy the Devil. Together they joined the logging camps around Mount Lassen and it was there that Stevens picked up his exhaustive knowledge of Paul Bunyan, lava bears, sand gougers, lightning birds, waumpus cats, treehoppers, tigermunks, minktums and other creatures of times and times ago.

Again, Forsytes

THE SILVER SPOON — John Gals worthy — Scribner ($2). The rather interminable but very distinguished and always enjoyable Mr. Gals worthy continues his history of social evolution in Britain as seen through the clear prism of the Forsyte connection. He is as con scientious an historian as he is a craftsman, and the cycles have now reached the point where he must deal with Author Michael Arlen’s Mayfair folk; must speed up even his Tories to the modern tempo; and, in the political sphere, bring his anti-Socialism up to date.

This last he does by making Michael Mont — the slender dark youth who married Fleur Forsyte, if you recall (The White Monkey) — stand for an ascetic, enlightened Conservatism: no more grumbling over lost luxuries (the silver spoon) ; scientific improvements everywhere, like aeronautics and power lines; learn some enterprise from the Americans.

The more central, social prob lem of the book resolves to this: Fleur Mont, called “snob” by free-and-easy, expressionistic Marjorie Ferrar, retorts with “traitress,” “snake,” “no morals.” Marjorie Ferrar sues for damages and Mr. Galsworthy’s logical indictment of “current morality” issues from the mouth of an astute barrister who shows Marjorie Ferrar that ladies with liaisons cannot be slandered. But Mr. Galsworthy is no logic-chopper. The barrister is made to seem odious. And Fleur, though le gally victorious, is less commanding in London society than before. What you feel is a distinctly fine and hu man appeal for less unbalanced, nervous oscillation in the “circles” that society persists in forming, and for more comprehensive philosophy among people who insist — as a gay young writer lately put it — that “sex is fun.”

ALERT READERS — are not permitting the season to slip by without having read, or planned to read, books designated by the best current criticism as : Brilliant The Story of Philosophy — Will Durant ($5). A vivid, humanized chronicle of philosophers from Plato to Dewey. The Mauve Decade — Thomas Beer ($3). A gorgeous resurrection of U. S. devices and desires from 1890 to 1900. Winnowed Wisdom — Stephen Leacock ($2). Sense-strewn non sense by the gruff McGill University economist — perhaps the last he will publish. Rich Writing The Travels of Marco Polo — Translated by Manuel Komroff ($3.50). An honest merchant’s stupendous description of what no European had seen before him, nor many The since. Magnificent Idler — Cameron Rogers ($2.50). A simple, fluent, warm life of Walt Whitman. Hangman’s House — Bonn Byrne ($2.50). In the richest tradition of Irish romance.

*BEAU SABREUR—P. C. Wren—Stokes ($2).