FICTION: Heralds

Heralds The autumn literary procession is not yet, but its heralds have come. They are the towering figures whose works must be printed by the scores of thousands far in advance of publication day. Mr. Beach.* Rex Beach is a powerful, practical man of action with a dry, direct humor on his pipe-tanned tongue. He has been a Yukon musher, a friend of Jack London, a firebrick magnate. He is a Florida landlord, and on his New York estate he is surrounded with a man’s outdoor things—golf, dogs, gardens. He has written many a forthright story of life as he has seen it lived—serials and short turns which often escaped being sound realistic literature by the narrow margin of a magazine ending. But let you not think such a man is without a vein of fantasy. None knows better than he what is manna to the soul-starved cinema public. He has subtly departed from realism in his latest story—veiling a manly man’s wrath at “this wave of repression we are suffering under”—for the orthodox figments that flicker nightly upon ten thousand screens, offending no one. The father, a handsome “Christer,”* is maliciously hypocritical to a degree that will be incredible even to Y. M. C. A.-baiters. He drives his wife to suicide; his daughter (whom he berates for wearing knickers [!] at golf) to the city. She has a voice, and outclasses even Otto Kahn’s description (to a Manhattan women’s club) of Soprano Mary Lewis, in the role of Ambitious Innocence. The trials that beset her, including “the heavy daddy” (amorous patron) of the Metropolitan Opera; a disorderly house, and Blackwell’s Island, thrillingly depict that legendary sink of iniquity that brings the rustics rushing from Sauk Centre. Before the good-night slide is flashed on, Hypocrisy chokes on his own stale pudding, most dismally, and Innocence marries the millionaire who has fallen in love with her radio voice. Mr. Curwood.† James Oliver Curwood of Owosso, Mich., is another manly man, but of far more primeval stamp than Mr. Beach. Having taken thought one day in a forest, he has “decided to live 100 years.” He owns an ice-cream factory; cows Owosso bootleggers. Nineteen years ago he foreswore the cramping confines of a newspaper career in Detroit to dedicate himself to exalting Life and Love as lived and loved by Silent Men and Pure Women in the timber-clad, river-laved God’s Country that lies north of the U. S. border. Year after year he turned off Noble-Souled stories, 24 of them in 19 years: The Honor of the Big Snows, Philip Steele of the Royal Mounted, God’s Country-and the Woman, The Courage of Marge O’ Doone, etc., etc. It was a super-human task, but Author Curwood was endowed for it by nature: on his father’s side he was descended from Captain-Novelist Frederick Marryat (1792-1848), whose rate of output Mr. Curwood even exceeded. It took Marryat 20 years to publish his 24 novels.* But there is another strain of blood in Mr. Curwood. Not without provocation does he describe himself in Who’s Who as “one of the foremost authorities on matters pertaining to the Canadian Northland”; as well as one who “spends several months each year in the wilds, traveling as far north as the Arctic coast.” In the foreword of his 25th opus it is now revealed “that the unhappy and misled Mohawk nation gave to him an Indian maid for a greatgrandmother.” This fact, “a source of unending pride . . . has grown into a humble yet valiant desire to write of times in which, if he had been the arbiter of his own destiny, he would gladly have lived.” For ten years he has been gathering the material, and “foot by foot the hallowed ground has been travelled” for an historical novel with the Anglo-French struggle in the 1750’s for domination of Canada as its background. Here, at last, is that novel. Its titular figure is Peter Joel, border mystery-man, who dyed his doeskins black, sooted his face and flitted through the forests as an angel of warning to settlers and of destruction to Indians, after a band of redskins had yanked his wife naked from her blazing bed and scalped her before his eyes. The hero—perhaps Mr. Curwood as he would like to have been—is golden-haired, steel-sinewed David Rock who, through his attachment to the humanitarian Black Hunter, is suspected of treason by his foppish, malicious French overlords and lives through to wed silken-lashed Anne St. Denis only by the slim width of a tomahawk blade. History pours forth aplenty through the tale, but not more than Mr. Curwood’s vast and romantic public can follow. All the characters have Souls, lofty or eternally damned. For each date set down there are at least two kisses and three burning looks. And even as David Rock carves his love-pledge on his powder horn in the first chapter, so does saintly Anne draw it forth from beneath her shawl in the last chapter, during a conversation between the two that is full of Cur-woodian epithets like “dear,” “sweet,” “precious,” “hallowed.” Perdita

THE EXQUISITE PERDITA—E. Barrington—Dodd, Mead ($2.50). Who will, may damn her, the unchaste nymph, Perdita Robinson. But there are extenuations. Her husband lavished their little on drink and mistresses. She was only 19 and three years wed unhappily. When brilliant Dick Sheridan heard her as “Juliet” and persuaded gruff David Garrick to train her, she was a desperate girl, desperate enough to keep Sheridan as a brother; virtuous enough, after London was at her feet, to show Sheridan her offers from the rakes and have him compose stinging refusals. Nor did she succumb to the Prince of Wales (George IV) in a guilty mood. To her he was verily Prince Charming, up to the moment of commitment. Her second seduction, by Charles Fox, was a helpless lady’s surrender to the slyest of flattery; he wooed her “parts,” her “unsuspected powers.” … So writes generous E. Barrington-L. Adams Beck, the double-barreled lady who has lately risen to fame as an expositor of Oriental mysticism (Splendour of Asia, The Ninth Vibration, etc.) and simultaneously as biographer of the Duchess of Fenton (The Chaste Diana), Lady Hamilton (The Divine Lady) and Poet Byron (Glorious Apollo). Her periods billow out like fussy, over-embroidered crinolines when she is in her role of sentimental raconteuse, but the historical reconstructions are superb—Playwright Sheridan scratching his wig for the fourth act of The School for Scandal; George III and Queen Charlotte reading their favorite divines under the lindens at Kew; and Perdita, fluffed in swan’s-down, waiting for the flushed royal moron who brought her low; Perdita, at last a wanton, having her final fling in a tiffany petticoat at the mildly curious court of Marie Antoinette. Danger’s Lover

TOM FOOL—F. Tennyson Jesse— Knopf ($2.50). Any lad that likes to lie at a railroad curve for the sensation of being obliterated, almost, by a rushing express train, is likely to come to no common end.* That is Tom Fould, or Tom Fool as they call him in the years that he courts high moments of danger sailing the world’s seas. His first woman, and one or two afterwards, taken not lightly, give him flashes of the same gathered intensity that comes in moments of imminent destruction. For a time, convalescing from a wreck, he finds “rounded contentment” with a supple, unpossessive Cornish girl, Jennifer. But she dies in childbirth and Tom wanders the oceans again, to shed life’s monotony at last by sailing a flaming ship into a towering waterspout. There is much overwritten “psychology” in the book, but also much sensitive color—the reflection of a ripple crossing a ship’s eager figurehead like a smile; a cloud of gulls “flickering like white flames” over brown glebe. The sea-lore is strong and spacious. Author Jesse, a grandniece of the late Lord Tennyson, has sailed many an ocean between spells of being a London literary celebrity and Crown servant.

*PADLOCKED—Rex Beach—Harpers ($2). *Slang epithet, college-coined, for a militant Christian of dubious sincerity. †THE BLACK HUNTER—James Oliver Cur-wood— Cosmopolitan ($2). *Most famed of Marryat novels is Masterman Ready, exemplary and exciting tale for small boys. Others: Peter Simple, Jacob Faithful, Poor Jack, Mr. Midshipman Easy, Frank Mildmay. *It was Author Maxim Gorky’s pleasure as a boy to lie right under thundering Russian freight trains, pressed for dear life to the ties, where the vibration, he says, “disembodied” him, as the act of will rid him of fear.