Books: Non-Fiction

” Upward, Not Northward”

FLATLAND — A Square — Little, Brown ($1.50). Some 40 years ago, critics hurled brickbats and bouquets, hurled them hard, at this small book, whose pseudonymous author was then headmaster of the City of London School, the Rev. Edwin Abbott Abbott, M.A., D.D. Now the book is republished with a foreword by erudite William Garnett, in view of the detection of a fourth dimension by Dr. Einstein. It is a geometric romance for non-mathematicians; an extremely simple fable with amazing implications and a vein of social satire that remains ageless.

On the single plane of two-dimensional Flatland, the inhabitants can, of course, see each other (and all things) only as straight lines. Fortunately, however, every Flatland creature has luminous edges; and there is chronic fog in Flatland, through the obscurity of which the slant of lines is quite apparent and a Figure’s angles and shape can be inferred without feeling all his sides’. The Flatland women are mere straight lines, like needles. Hence they are brainless; hence also dangerous, for they would puncture a male Figure upon collision. Quaint rules for women result. Society is ranked by the number and regularity of its members’ sides, from formidable isosceles-triangle policemen with sharp apexes, through an equilaterally -triangular bourgeoisie and square professorial, to a polygonal aristocracy and circular priesthood. The narrator is a square professor who, after a visit to the unbelievably benighted residents of one-dimensional Lineland, is introduced to Spaceland by a Sphere. With a great effort, he masters the conception of a Figure moving “up-ward, not northward” out of its plane. Ironically, he cannot persuade the Sphere that perhaps there are yet other dimensions, to be entered by solids by some motion unfamiliar to them.

At the other extreme of the universe there is, of course, Point-land,inhabited by a single Point who is perforce his own beginning-and-end, all-in-all, his own universe.

Domestic BE Shot

DOROTHY Dix—HER BOOK—Funk & Wagnalls ($2).”The most popular woman journalist in the world” has selectedthe most glowing bits of her daily stint to throw a beam into a naughty world;— has subtitled it: “Every-day Help for Everyday People.” Each monograph is loaded with domestic BB shot, aimed at the human race, fired regardless of target. The chapter headings, “How a Husband Likes to be Treated,” “Charm,” “Have a Goal,” “The Goat Family,” “Learn a Trade, Girls,” “Trial Divorce,” “An Indoor Sport,” “Should Women Tell,” “Queer Things about Marriage,” “Forget It,” “The Secret of Happiness” are like newspaper headlines: they promise everything, tell nothing. Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen in their philosophical moments, if sufficiently steeped in journalese and colloquialisms, might have written these same little pills of advice. Hence, countless readers will grin sheepishly and mutter: “Golly, that woman sure knows LIFE.”

The Author. Dorothy Dix, of course, is not her name. Fifty-six years ago, in Montgomery County, Tenn., she was christened Elizabeth Meriwether. She knew love early; married one George O. Gilmer at the romantic age of 18. Misfortune smote her. Now she says in her philosophy of life: “/ am not afraid of poverty. … I have earned my bread and butter for many years.” At 26 she found herself editing the women’s department of the New Orleans Picayune (now the Times-Picayune). Her printed words were bathed in the milk of human kindness; she dispensed the type of advice that people gobbled up. She became an oracle — thousands of letters swarmed upon her. She began syndicating her “stuff”—success smiled. She wrote books—more smiles and happy hearts. In New Orleans they admire this grey-haired, gracious “little lady.” She might have been prim, had she not been a woman of the world.

Wild Life

SANCTUARY ! SANCTUARY !—Dallas Lore Sharp—Harper ($2.50).Most latterday naturalists collect for museums and write for the news-papers. Not so Mr. Sharp. When he lies on his stomach for hours watching a painted turtle dig her nest, or stays awake all night on the Pacific shore to hear the night cries of snowy plover, he is wholly an amateur of wild life. His books are secretions, not products or “copy.” Hence, perhaps, the freshness and simplicity of his writing. He never seeks to impress his audience with the extent of his lore, and his experiences have been so diverse and so keenly felt that there is no need for literary dramatizing. It is enough to be nature’s mirror. The first of these essays describes the first visit of man to the Three Arch Rocks off the coast of Oregon, a surf-guarded, craggy home of seals and sea-lions, of murres, puffins, petrels and other seafowl in clamorous clouds. There is a chapter on extinct and vanishing species: the sturgeon and condor; an oil field that yielded 2,000 sabre-tooth tigers; peregrine falcons nesting in a skyscraper cornice; swarms of alewives (herring) rushing up a factory creek to spawn. Mr. Sharp has the faculty of reproducing backgrounds, from his native Hingham, Mass., to the swinging chain of peaks around Los Angeles. Every season is his favorite, every district full of won-der. A chapter called “The Wildness of Boston” reveals foxes and deer within sight of the city clock.

FICTION

Destiny-Man

A MANIFEST DESTINY—Arthur D. Howden Smith—Brentano’s ($2.50). Here are history, fiction, and destiny jumbled on a scale which D. W. Griffith would call a “spectacle.” One Peter Ormerod, fresh from Harvard, a successful Manhattan lawyer, goes to California in 1855 in behalf of his client, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Now Peter is often called “ugly” by his author, but he has steel in his biceps, adventure in his red corpuscles. In California where playboys dent the bars with their nuggets, he meets the “doctor-lawyer-journalist-soldier -states-man,” William Walker, the original “manifest destiny” man, who believes that “America must round her territories by the sea,” that he must help her by becoming the Napoleon of Nicaragua. Peter drinks deep of destiny, joins him. On the squalid, turbulent breast of Central America, they achieve momentary success. There is all the usual panoply of historical romance: the storming of ancient citadels, the intrigue of Bourbon-breath’d henchmen, the moneyed powers, the lovely Senorita de Avila who dies heroically so that Peter may live. Filibuster Walker, as some may recall, spurns the aid of the mighty Commodore Van-derbilt. So the Commodore who spits tobacco to the delight of Manhattan street-cleaners thwarts the destiny of Mr. Walker. In Honduras there is a final “spectacle”—a firing squad . . . the limp body of the destiny-man … a clatter of hoofs . . . the sparing of Peter, who returns to Manhattan, to the waiting arms of Lydia van Ruysdyck. They marry. He leaves for the Civil War. Says Lydia,: “I think des-tiny is just another word for life. …” The author has handled the personages of 1855-60 with a casual ease that his own creations lack. In addition to Messrs. Vanderbilt and Walker, it is Journalist Horace Greeley, Shipowner “Liveoak George” Law, and Abraham Lincoln who pop up at old moments to make the book plunging, rawboned historical fiction.

Wine and Amber

LESS THAN KIN—Charles Caldwell Dobie—The John Day Co ($2). Adrienne was a child of love, conceived in lyric sin. Her mother was Elizabeth Sinclair of the amber eyes, inscrutable, majestic, heiress of a clan which had its roots in the shade of a southern plantation and its later branches in opulent California; her father, the great Kajetan, fiery master of the piano, a sort of Pietro Mascagni of fiction, with huge handfuls of blue-black hair and the hot blood of Italy’s vine-clad valleys. Elizabeth Sinclair died soon after Adrienne was born; Kajetan, like a wanton Ulysses, had left for other shores. In Laguna Vista, California, a delicious world began to unfold itself to Adrienne . . . bronzed turkeys leapt at pungent, low-hanging figs . . . bronzed Mammy chanted of great green forests with scarlet birds and swinging animals . . . enchanted cream-colored people looked down from gilded frames within the house. . . . Why were no bronzed people like Mammy pressed into frames? Adrienne knowns nothing of her parents. For many years her love, fear, and respect centre in Mammy, who seems to know everything. This mysterious Mammy is Selina, famed San Francisco blackmailer, half Negro and half Sinclair. On her 17th birthday, Adrienne discovers the story of her parentage; meets the mighty Kajetan who promises her empires, leaves her with nothing. Then she finds a youth with burning finger tips. . . . “Did it matter whose feet pressed out the wine of life so long as it flowed? ‘I’ll go with you,’ she said, ‘but I won’t marry you.'” The remainder of the story is an interesting but disappointing complication of beauty and sordidness. At the end Adrienne thinks she chooses right.

Author Dobie “devoted his daily hours to insurance” until he was 35. Now, at 45, he has written a book most of which is as beautiful as the eyes of Adrienne, clear as the amber of her mother’s eyes, rich as the “wine-dark sea” of her father’s. The John Day Company (TIME, Sept. 20) has begun its publishing career with a brilliant novel.

Malaise in Malay

THE CASUARINA TREE—W. Somerset Maugham—Doran ($2). The title, of course, means nothing, although Author Maugham explainsin a two-page preface that it might mean something. If one takes a pieceof the Casuarina tree in a boat with him, contrary winds and storms will arise to jest with his life; but if one stands in its shadow by the light of the full moon, he will hear the secrets of the future. All of which ties a string around six short stories, wherein English folk drink gin pahits and have emotional disturbances in Borneo and the Malay Peninsula.

In the first story, however, an Englishman fights malaria, long before and long afterward, with whiskey. One day his wife finds him lying drunk in bed, “with nothing on but a sarong.” She cuts his throat with a Malay sword. In another yarn, an Irishman named Gallagher gets sick with violent, devastating hiccups in mid-Indian ocean, dies—supposedly because his fat Malay mistress had uttered a curse upon him. This incident so profoundly moves one Mrs. Hamlyn (contemplating divorce) that she sits down, writes her husband: “Think kindly of me and be happy, happy, happy.” The best part of this story is a quotation from the funeral service: “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower. . . .” The last story, “The Letter,” has a better and grimier plot. A thin, sensitive, charming married woman shoots, kills, a man who, she said, tried to rape her. The court acquits her. Really, she killed him because he had cast her aside in favor of a fat Chinawoman.

Penny-Wise, Child-Foolish

SWEEPINGS—Lester Cohen—Bom & Liveright ($2.50).A new dynasty has been founded in U. S. fiction. Its name is Pardway. The roots strike back to Peter Aram Pardway’s smithy in postRevolutionNew England. The great branches flourish in Chicago where Peter’s grandsons, dry Daniel and black Thane, have amassed fortunes by the opening of the pres-ent century. Today the Pardways are decayed and blown to the earth’s ends; in their author’s figure, the pillars of their temple have crumbled, the roof crashed. Their tragedy is that Daniel, who alone had increase, devoted more attention to the altitude of his pile than to the soundness of his breed.

The Pardway history is thus, essentially, a rushing calculation in cumulative finance, dissolved by human degeneracy. It must be from the fact that its history is so baldly calculable, that the Pardway dynasty, broadly founded though it is for literary purposes, is composed of beings that are not very human. Daniel and Thane Pardway may have been human beings (their author says he drew them from originals) but in this book they are seen as animated cash-registers—Daniel in his big bargain-sale Loop department store; Thane as the bellicose Black Bear of the wheat pit—to the virtual exclusion of the minor traits and actions by which an individual emerges from a type. The degeneracy of Daniel Pardway’s issue—Gene into “a lout among gentleman, a gentleman among louts;” Bert into a floorwalker and window-dresser; Phoebe into a dreamy sadist, via sex-starvation; Freddie into a Princeton fop, proud wastrel and frayed dope fiend—seems mechanical, arbitrary. Like their father, the reader sees little of these children until it is time for them to appear in bars and brothels. Their Presbyterian mother dies young and their worldy-wise Kentucky step-mother is taken up and pushed aside as brusquely by Author Cohen as by aging, bitter, impotent Daniel. A final tour de force, significant perhaps but fraught with almighty coincidence, is the ascendancy of “the alien conqueror,” Abe Ullman, Daniel’s scheming merchandiser, who captures the big store from the children and is in turn captured by a onetime countergirl whom Freddie Pardway seduced. There are power and sweep to Sweepings (the title comes from old Daniel’s pennyscrimping examinations of the store’s daily refuse, in the odd socks, ravelings, scraps and broken tinsel of which he finally recognizes his children). Its rapid motion is even, sure. Yet in all the 447 pages, times are penetrated as seldom as people; the pictures of Chicago’s Board of Trade, her restaurants, clubs, night joints, aristocratic lakefront and booming South Side are superficial, gaudy pictures; turbulent impressionism. Nine-tenths of the book is conversation; rapid, clear, forceful, but no more racy of the certain day than it is revealing of the certain people. There is much color, but it is plastered on in hurried, florid gobs. Author Cohen, to whom high praise is due for a tremendous task well tried, betrays his inexperience chiefly by distrusting his ability to write with care as well as power. All these shortcomings notwithstanding, U. S. fiction has a new dynasty: the Pardways. Author Cohen is a Mosaic young man, cast on a large frame, fleshy but solid, slow-spoken, positive. He stayed at the University of Chicago only a few weeks, “because I saw it was not the place for me. I had to learn things for myself— feel ’em out.” He did some news-gathering, but small jobs, quite simply, did not appeal to him. He sold and wrote advertising as an executive for the Boston Store, then for Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. When Editor Bernarr (“Body Love”) Macfadden started the Daily Graphic, Mr. Cohen promoted the circulation, most successfully, for nearly two years. Then, without any of the usual short-story apprenticeship, he wrote this full length novel, which will be definitely important if it leads to further study of the Pardways, as now planned. Lester Cohen’s father is Dr. Hymen Cohen, author of The Tents of Jacob (1925).

—”This is a sad world, mates, with little pleasure in it.” —Mirandy, Mirandy Exhorts, Fables in Slang, Hearts a la Mode, A Joy Ride Around the World.