Books: Virile Tang

THE BUCK IN THE SNOW—Edna St. Vincent Millay—Harpers ($2).

For ten years smart young women have been trying to rival with their versification Edna St. Vincent Millay. But she eludes them all with her impertinent patter—”a few figs from thistles”—and, in more serious vein, with her virile poetry culminating in the lyric drama which sang itself to Deems Taylor’s opera The King’s Henchman, produced sensationally at the Metropolitan.

The new collection includes a little of the patter, more of the lyric wisdom, and several of her compact sonnets. The patter is less flippant:

Being young and green, I said in love’s despite:

Never in the world will I to living wight

Give over, air my mind

To anyone,

Hang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind

To be shredded and faded. . . .

Oh, me, invaded

And sacked by wind and the sun!

The wisdom is sad:

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers

The buck in the snow.

How strange a thing,—a mile away by now, it may be,

Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass

Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow

Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

Cynics of the baptismal font to the contrary, Edna St. Vincent Millay did not affect her lilting name, but she retains it in preference to her husband’s, Eugen Jan Boissevain. A wealthy importer, he was previously married to the famed suffragist, Inez Mulholland. Miss Millay is proud of owning “the smallest house and garden in Manhattan” (Greenwich Village), though Thomas Hardy couples her with skyscrapers, “recessional buildings,” as the two greatest things in America. She is coupled, further, with Edgar Allan Poe, as the only American poets to have attained translation into the Spanish.

Goggling Fish

ALL KNEELING — Anne Parrish — Harpers ($2.50).

As early as she could remember, Christabel Caine was conscious of her beauty, conscious of her power to make people serve her and adore her. When she writes a book of poetry that achieves success, new horizons open up before her. Leaving a flock of dear old doting Quaker aunts, she departs for New York to be Bohemian.

There a group of youthful artists learns to applaud her studied phrases, but they lose their charm “all kneeling,” and her “yen” for adulation turns to other fields. She prefers “a pink-and-yellow apple” to “all the jewels in the Rue de la Paix,” but marries a rich man and surrounds herself with the luxuries she pretends to despise. Too soon, she learns that her husband thinks more of his golf and his naps than of the blue, blue sky. “What peace it would be,” she writes in her journal, “to let my body enter the sea, and sink, down, down, past goggling fish with drifting films of tails, past ribbons of ruffled seaweed, purple and brown,” but she would be brave, she would go on.

Christabel is one of those whose intelligence has raised her out of the realm of feeling. Her mind informs her of the emotion that should be hers at the moment. Only then does she proceed to experience it. When held at last, in the arms of the man who has resisted her longest, she thinks “I am dying of bliss . . . I am not disappointed. No, No! I’m not, I’m not.” There is a certain bigness in a thoroughly resolute, deliberate hypocrite. Petty Christabel is not that. She actually believes in her own sweetness, sympathy, and understanding.

In laying bare the artist’s mechanical simulation of emotion, the author has given a penetrating study of an inadequate subject. Gifted ironist, Anne Parrish (of The Perennial Bachelor) has allowed her irony to become too clever to be convincing.

New & Young

STRANGE FUGITIVE—Morley Callaghan —Scribners ($2.50).

“Harry Trotter, who had a good job as foreman in Pape’s lumberyard, was determined everybody should understand he loved his wife. . . . Coming home from the yard at half past five o’clock Harry smelled a stew cooking as he climbed the stair of the duplex house, a dish he liked, and Vera cooked it with small round new potatoes, oodles of onions, peppers, spices.

” ‘Stew, eh, Vera,’ he said, going into the kitchen. She kissed him closing her eyes slowly. When she kissed him like that, closing her eyes, he felt that he had not known her very long and watched her moving around the kitchen. He sat down on a kitchen chair. She bent over the sink. . . .”

That is the work of an author, new and young,—Morley Callaghan of Canada. The house of Chas. Scribners Sons, alert for potential Ernest Hemingways, has given him a robust sendoff, published several of his short stories and the above-quoted novel.

Mr. Callaghan writes accurate, tightly packed and swiftly nailed dialogue. He tells his plot like a crack reporter. He tries to solve problems of motive by having his leading character, Harry Trotter, take strange and solitary walks into the night. For no good reason, Trotter leaves his wife, drifts into the bootlegging business. In his relations with gangsters and with other women, his mind takes jumps to his wife—her mannerisms, her legs. Finally, as he decides to go back to her. he is shot in a gang feud.

Mention

VARIETY or THINGS—Max Beerbohm— Knopf ($3).

Yet more civilized effervescence from the incomparable caricaturist.

DOSTOEVSKY—THE MAN AND His WORK —J. Meier-Graefe—Harcourt Brace ($6).

Scholarly analysis of genius that throve on excess of suffering.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY, THE WOMAN WHO CHANGED THE MIND OF A NATION—R. C. Dorr—Stokes ($5).

Life-story of the straightlaced, humorless, heroic woman who made woman’s suffrage inevitable.

Persons

WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA (1928-29)— A. N. Marquis Co. ($8.50).

The Story. In a land where there are no dukes, no duchesses, tycoons abound. Out of prairie shacks along muddy roads, out of shambles along bumpy city streets, out of brownstone palaces,* out of the acid atmosphere of laboratories and the indefinable air of classrooms, the tycoons have come. Now they are united and reunited in one big, perhaps happy family (28,805 strong) between the covers of a fat red book. It is a story of success.

The Authors. They tell the story themselves, but first they must be asked to do so by Albert Nelson Marquis, editor and publisher of Who’s Who. They use a formula laid down by Mr. Marquis, giving their occupation, age, birthplace, parents, wives and children (if any), clubs, published works, religion, etc. Some of them, notably John Pierpont Morgan and Charles Augustus Lindbergh, omit their religion. Others weasel their occupations; William Tatem Tilden Jr. was listed as “author” in the 1926-27 edition and now (1928-29) is simply a “tennis player.”

New names in the new volume are Helen Wills, Mayor James J. Walker of New York, Walter Percy Chrysler, Colleen Moore, Football Coaches Robert Carl Zuppke and Glenn Scobey Warner, Charles Augustus Lindbergh and Clarence Duncan Chamberlin—others totaling 3,931.

Notable omissions are Thornton Niven Wilder, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge,†Charles Lanier Lawrance (designer of the motor which carried Lindbergh, and president of the great Wright Aeronautical Corp.), James Joseph Tunney and practically all figures of professional sports, John Gilbert, Clara Bow and many another cinemaddict’s favorite. Jackie Coogan, 14, however, gets in, as does Harold Lloyd.

There are three Snooks in Who’s Who: Homer Clyde Snook, electrophysicist; John S. Snook, onetime Congressman from Ohio; John Wilson Snook, warden of the U. S. penitentiary at Atlanta. They are related, but not brothers.

The story begins with Charles Dettie Aaron, Detroit doctor, and ends with Flora G. Zygman, Polish pianist.

The Significance. “The names in Who’s Who in America are selected not as the best but as an attempt to choose the best known men and women of the country in all lines of useful and reputable achievements,” says Editor Marquis. Yet, where is the crack reporter, whose business it is to know persons, who has even heard of more than one-fifth of the persons in Who’s Who? The answer is that many obscure professors, physicians, clergymen, officials, who seldom make headlines, fall under the classifications of “useful and reputable,” while Babe Ruth and Clara Bow apparently do not.

*Where some persons are popularly and erroneously supposed to have been born with silver spoons in their mouths.

†Her husband has an average-length biography. Charles Evans Hughes and Elihu Root have two of the longest.