Books: Mencken’s Huneker

ESSAYS—James G. Huneker; Introduction by H. L. Mencken—Scribner’s ($3-50).

On Feb. 9, 1921, died James Gibbons Huneker. Prohibition, as Editor Henry Louis Mencken not irrelevantly announces in the introduction, “was one year and twenty-one days old.”

Critic Huneker’s day was already dead. The shades of Europe’s mauve decade had become old-fashioned memories; Huneker’s men of the hour were but ghosts. It is significant that not a single subject of these selected essays was a U. S. citizen. “Essentially and inescapably civilized” is what Editor Mencken calls Critic Huneker, by way of congratulating him on being, in effect, European.

Critic Huneker’s principal interests may not have been in the U. S., but his breezily enthusiastic criticism was undeniably native. Often blundering, always bold, he was a warm-hearted chronicler of adventure in the arts. Healthy exaggeration came naturally to him, made his sweeping statements sweep cleaner: “[Shaw] is as emotional as his own typewriter, and this defect, which he parades as did the fox in the fable, has stood in the way of his writing a great play. He despises love, and therefore cannot appeal deeply to mankind.” Wagner’s Parsijal is dismissed as “that bizarre compound of rickety Buddhism and bric-a-brac Christianity.” When Maupassant, mewed in his asylum, waited for death, “he became a mere machine, and perhaps the only pleasure he experienced was the hallucination of bands of black butterflies that seemed to sweep across his room.” Oscar Wilde “was a born newspaper man.” Critic Huneker was never content merely to criticize a man’s works— he discussed the man himself, gossiped, told tales out of school.

Critic Huneker was born in Philadelphia (1860), studied art in Paris, traveled widely, returned to the U. S. Traveled or settled, he produced gargantuan quantities of newspaper criticism of all the arts. Everywhere he drank beer and talked. Says Editor Mencken: “I have heard them all, but he was the best.” Critic Huneker is generally credited with having been “the chief man in the movement of the ’90s on this side of the ocean.” Among his books: Chopin: The Man and His Music; Ivory Apes and Peacocks; Steeplejack; Painted Veils.

Souffle

BABES IN THE WOOD—Michael Arlen— Doubleday, Dor an ($2.50).

Dikran Kouyoumdjian is the hero of the first story in this book. Dikran Kouyoumdjian is Author Michael Arlen’s real name. But he warns us that all the characters in these stories are fictitious—he, too; his defense being that “historians have familiarized us with the truth that the past is a proper field for the imagination.”

These are typical Arlen tales: A young would-be man-about-town finds himself the protector, against his inclinations, of a fascinating girl’s honor. A fascinating girl fascinates three young men who are all agog to be fascinated. A fascinating older woman fascinates an older man and then leaves him, fascinatingly, for his good. A fascinating but somewhat irregular lady of doubtful age fascinates a young man, re-fascinates one of her old beaux, who steps in to rescue the fascinated young man—and so on.

Author Kouyoumdjian is an adept at making a souffle: an ephemeral dish concocted of almost equal parts of wistfulness, manners and the lure of the flesh (attractively draped). Author Kouyoumdjian’s stock has fallen of late, but the present issue should not have a bearish effect—nor a very bullish, either.

Born an Armenian in a Bulgarian village, Dikran Kouyoumdjian was educated in England, published his first book, The London Venture, at 18. Author Kouyoumdjian became the rage of the boudoir in 1924, with The Green Hat. Last year he married the beautiful Grecian Countess Atalanta Mercati. Other books: Young Men in Love, These Charming People, Lily Christine.

Witch

HARRIET HUME, A London Fantasy— Rebecca West — Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Harriet Hume, a fragile, elfish pianist with uncommon perception, has just taken as a lover the extremely presentable Arnold Condorex, who is at the threshold of a promising political career. “He had the intense black gaze and the dark pluminess of brows, beetling much for so young a man, that are the very thing, as one has seen in a hundred prints, for thinking about politics in a park under thunderclouds. . . .” So deeply does Harriet love him that she finds to her horror she can read his mind: as they are walking happily in the garden, he is thinking not about her. but how he can advance his career with other women. They part, he to his politics, she to her piano. But at crises in his life they meet again, and every time she sees into his heart, under the increasing blandness of his worldly success, and sees how fatally he has compromised with himself. Finally, a ruined, broken old man, he comes back to her; even death cannot break their strange tie.

Rebecca West is a witch. She knows more about men than a man feels a woman has any right to talk about; but she is too agreeable a writer to make the satire in this eerie fantasy very fierce. Harriet Hume is written in an elaborately artificial moonlight style. “‘Exquisite! A waltz! And an indifferent one! My heart will presently melt.’ ”

Rebecca West’s real name is Cicily Isabel Fairfield. Once an actress, she played the part of Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, liked it, took the name. She is noted in England, and beginning to be noticed in the U. S., as the feminine enfant terrible of present-day letters. Famed as an extraordinarily readable and independent critic, she has written other novels, but Harriet Hume is her best.

The Way of Cabell

THE WAY OF ECBEN—James Branch Cabell—McBride ($2.50).

His more violent critics claim that Author Cabell’s embroidered style serves to conceal a vacuum. They will therefore not be much interested to learn that in his latest book he announces what would seem to be his retirement: “. . . The Way of Ecben has appeared to its writer a thesis wholly fit to commemorate my graduation from, and my eternal leave-taking of, the younger generation, alike in life and in letters.” One may expect nothing, he reasons, from a man of 50. The cryptogams of The Way of Ecben tell the same old Cabell story of man’s vain pursuit of gay illusions. King Alfgar dreams of a witch. He sacrifices his kingdom to wander up and down the land in search of her, in which occupation he grows old. In the end he marries the witch, is rejuvenated, dies. To his publisher Robert M. McBride. Mr. Cabell dedicates “this brief and somewhat tragic tale, to commemorate our long and rather comical association.”

Three Senses

MIDSTREAM: MY LATER LIFE—Helen Keller—Doubleday, Doran ($3).

If a sophomore in a U. S. women’s college were to write the story of her life the world would pay some little attention—women’s colleges and the world’s attention being what they are. Yet 25 years ago Sophomore Helen Keller achieved world fame with her Story of My Life.

One learns to talk by imitating the sound of speech. The deaf learn by imitating the sight of speech. Both deaf and blind, blue-eyed, brown-haired Helen Keller learned to talk by imitating what speech felt like, beneath her fingers. Aided by her devoted, lifelong teacher and guardian, Mrs. Macy* (nee Anne Mansfield Sullivan), the prodigious Keller has been a U. S. phenomenon since the age of seven, has won without benefit of favoritism a college degree cum laude (Radcliffe), has cinemacted, lectured, written books, corresponded in French, German and English with her international friends—the blind, deaf, sick, poor, grieving. Over radio-station WEAF she now “hears” music by lightfingering a wooden sounding-board. Professor Pierre Villey, blind himself, called her a “dupe of words,” characterized her esthetic “seeing-hearing” (by touch-vibration) as “a matter of autosuggestion rather than perception.” William James, U. S. philosopher, admired her less philosophically, thus: “The sum of it is that you are a blessing, and I’ll kill anyone who says you are not.” Blessing or dupe, Miss Keller, now 49. describes these commentators and other ladies and gentlemen in her haphazard notes of the past quarter-century.

Uneventfully she met great news-names—Burbank, Burroughs, Debs, Tagore, Roosevelt, Montessori. More eventful were the following rapprochements:

A young male secretary proposed marriage with an ardor little diminished by the need to phrase it manually or in braille type. He later caused Miss Keller to reflect: “Love makes us blind.”

Basso Feodor Chaliapin boomed a Russian folksong at her with an arm around her so that she could feel his “vibrations.”

Miss Keller, regretting her useless ears more than her useless eyes, informed Thomas Edison (himself deaf): “If I were a great inventor like you, Mr. Edison, I would invent an instrument that would enable every deaf person to hear.” “Oh you would, would you?” said he. “Well. I think it would be a waste of time. People say so little that is worth listening to.”

Poet Maurice Maeterlinck (The Blue-bird), gracefully wrote her: “My greetings and love to the girl who has found the Bluebird.”

The best Keller anecdotes concern Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), her close friend. Clemens and Humorist Finley Peter Dunne were discussing Miss Keller when Dunne exclaimed: “God, how dull it must be for her. every day the same and every night the same as the day!” Said Clemens: “You’re damned wrong there; blindness is an exciting business, I tell you; if you don’t believe it, get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed and your house is on fire and try to find the door.”

Miss Keller likes Playwright Eugene Brieux and his “brood of heresies,” calls Bernard Shaw the “gadfly of the absurdities of our time,” met in Senator La Follette “a lonely figure climbing the mountain of privileges,” condemns Henry Ford’s philosophy as alluringly Utopian, too mechanistic, finds John Davison Rockefeller Jr. a man who “has made of his millions a weapon to shake ignorance out of its citadel.”

Andrew Carnegie once threatened to take Miss Keller over his knees and spank her soundly for being the fervent Socialist and birth-controller she still is. He then settled an annuity on her for life and told her that all pessimists had poisoned tongues and should be sent to Siberia. “Mr. Andrew Carnegie” continues Helen Keller “was an optimist. I thought I was one dyed-in-the-wool until I met him.”

The Significance. The U. S. has been called a, country without one original philosophy. But a spirit of no mean origi-nality manifests itself in the three follow-ing life attitudes: 1) New England Puritanism; 2) Negroid Epicureanism, now spreading from rural South to urban North; 3) academic pragmatism (William James, John Dewey) which learns a Western pioneer’s and Eastern businessman’s view of future and past. In this group belong the Carnegies and Kellers. Optimism affected Businessman Carnegie.

Optimism effected Helen Keller. With blind eyes she envisioned practical consequences tomorrow of what was wisest to do today. Through only a month of this practical optimism, she learned language at the age of seven. Miss Keller’s career has also a social significance. The mind of no other deaf-blind has been reached so successfully, by such a variety of people. No longer are deaf-blinds classed with idiots in the statutes of any progressive State. No longer are deaf-blinds permitted to withdraw from society into their aching shells. To the Forest Hills, L. I. door of Helen Keller, the world now makes pilgrimage.

*Wife of Critic John Albert Macy, from whom she is separated.