Books: Fiction: May 31, 1926

Olympians

The Myth. Read here* a myth which, with or without origins in fact, is one of the most delectable that ever issued from the seven hills of Rome. It is a myth with no central events, being a nexus of personalities—a body of legend attaching to five extraordinary women and an ancient cardinal, whose life apart from and above modern Roman society and whose peculiar aptitudes, including the superlative one of appreciating one another, have earned them a title that falls sinister on western ears, the Cabala (clique).

An openhearted young New Englander, steeped in Vergil, enters their midst, to find that their innocent schemes range from curing the sick oaks of the Borghese Gardens and ridding the Sistine of a faint smell of drains, to catholicizing France and re-establishing the Bourbon monarchy. Moved, amused, half suspecting that he is among current incarnations of the Olympians, the young American constitutes himself their Mercury—messenger, confidant, historian—setting down their biographies and a few episodes.

Leading the rest in point of authority is a spinster of 50, the last crisp leaf of a Dutch-American tree, incredibly wealthy, intellectual, unable to sleep until dawn and therefore noted for midnight suppers from which her guests escape with difficulty. Her private musicians fill the remaining night hours with concerts from esoteric composers, to which she listens with “the finest contrapuntal ear of her day.” It is she, Elizabeth Grier, ever alert for novelty, who attaches the young New Englander to the Cabala and involves him in its members’ affairs.

Mlle. Marie Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine is younger and, owning more shares in the Suez Canal than the Rothschilds, even richer than Miss Grier. Tall and gaunt, she has a Giottesque religious intensity and the emotional experience of a child. Hers is the plan to hold an Ecumenical Council and promulgate the divine right of kings as a dogma of the Church.

Cardinal Vaini, passing his 80th year among a gardenful of hobbling rabbits and the brilliant pagan writers of the new century, at his sequestered villa on the Janiculum, is an object of fear and reverence to the Vatican, of warmest affection to the Cabala. As a brilliant young theologian, he shocked his teachers by burying himself in China, a missionary with a pigtail. He built a cathedral and by sheer force of statistics won first a mitre, then the Hat. A pistol bullet fired near him by ecstatic Mile, de Morfontaine puts him in mind of how the faith of his young days has vanished into labyrinthine dialectic. He dies of old age at sea, a benignant saint returning to his yellow disciples.

La Duchessa D’Aquilanera, a strange ugly vessel of the haughtiest blood in Latin Europe, with an aristocratic limp, a cane between her knees and a prodigious appetite for lawsuits, concerns the Cabala less than her stripling son, who has fallen, as young Romans are expected to fall in their mid-teens, among many women, beginning with some warm young Brazilians. The New Englander is told off to inculcate hygiene in this young Marcantonio, whose passions incline also to driving highpowered motor cars and training with spasmodic vehemence to become an Olympic foot-racer. The hygienic regimen is balked by Marcantonio’s incestuous flare-up with his half-sister, ending in suicide.

Alix d’Espoli is the Cabala’s raconteuse, a Provengal princess living apart from her morose and dissipated husband. Her sweet, hysterical gaiety fills many pages. Her tragedy is the perpetual failure of strange loves with handsome Northerners, the last being James Blair, a Harvard scholar obsessed with his historical researches as a boy is obsessed with playing Indians.

After a year among these people, the young New Englander sails homeward, conjuring Vergil’s shade in the Bay of Naples and getting the assurance that nothing, not even Rome, is eternal; that some day even the U. S. will develop lofty culture.

The Significance of this book is simply that it is one of the most exquisitely written novels in the language; that it presents with intimate precision and a strangely appropriate supernatural overtone the richest strata (omitting Mussolini & Co.) of the oldest centre of Western civilization; that its humor and humanism have a warmth and refinement extremely rare among U. S. writers; and that, since it is Author Wilder’s first offering, it marks a distinctly important “arrival” in U. S. letters.

The Author. Thornton Niven (“Thorny”) Wilder was easily the most ebullient spirit of a strange band of “Pundits” in Yale’s class of 1920, which assembled fortnightly under the glad patronage of Dr. William Lyon Phelps for esthetic and intellectual diversion. Diminutive, birdlike in expression and gesture, he inherited mental fa-cility and unusual wit from a journalist father, Amos P. Wilder, who has long ranked as Yale’s most entertaining after-dinner-speaking alumnus since Chauncey Mitchell Depew. The younger Wilder has amassed his exhaustive first-hand knowledge of foreign cultures during vacations from his teaching post at Lawrenceville School.

NON-FICTION

Next Century

MIDAS, OR THE UNITED STATES AND THE FUTURE—C. H. Bretherton—Button ($1). The famed “Today and Tomorrow Series,” to which this is a worthy addition, invariably brings news. The latest news is this: the hidden cause of the dyspepsia so widespread in the U. S. is a universal custom of eating cold pumpkin pie for breakfast! Obviously, Author Bretherton is British. But that is his one fine careless rapture. He lived here (in California?) long enough to arrive at a fairly logical picture of the U. S. in 2026. He sees: all North America above Mexico under one flag; Pacific population increased at the expense of the Atlantic and Midland ;larger farms on the central prairies, with more machinery, fewer hands; a scientific method evolved by Europe for leeching the U. S., to mutual financial benefit; the rise of a U. S. technique in spending small amounts; the scrapping of street cars for automobiles; disappearance of the servant class; California as the land’s esthetic and intellectual centre—a sunny climate beside the sea where, as the East’s importations from Europe pall, and when the prairie land cranks have passed, American artists will take their labors. One memorable sentence: “The sea is the great civilizer; the mighty breeder of sanity.”

THE PENTON PRESS Co., CLEVELAND

*THE CABALA—Thornton Niven Wilder—A. & C. Boni ($2.50).