Books: Front!*

Front!*

IMPERIAL PALACE—Arnold Bennett— Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Arnold Bennett loves big hotels, has a simple passion for their complicated, smooth-running luxury. As insatiably curious as the Elephant’s Child, he had nosed out everything he could about the “luxury hotel.” Imperial Palace’s 769 pages, besides comprising a fine novel, contain enough information on hotel management to serve as a manual.

The Imperial Palace Hotel (modeled after London’s Savoy) is, for purposes of the story, internationally admitted to be best of its kind in the world. Famed among hotel tycoons but little-known to the public, 47-year-old Evelyn Orcham is Imperial Palace’s director, beloved autocrat. At 4:30 a.m. he is about to set out for the meat market with his buyer, when in come Tycoon Sir Henry Savott, his lovely daughter Gracie, late arrivals from a liner. Gracie admires Evelyn at sight, sets her cap at him, will not be happy till she gets him. In Paris she finally lands him, makes herself his mistress for two tempestuous days. Meanwhile Tycoon Savott has arranged a gigantic international hotel merger, wants Imperial Palace as its keystone, Evelyn as manager of the whole affair. Evelyn is tempted, finally succumbs, will be world’s No. 1hotel man. News of temperamental Grade’s marriage to somebody else upsets him, but only temporarily : she would have been no wife but a career. Luckily he falls in love with his head housekeeper; she will do him proud.

In all his goings & comings you follow Manager Orcham through his microcosmic hotel, its daily & nightly functionings. crises; from the subterranean power plant to the eighth luxurious floor. Anything, from a miscarriage to a murder, can happen there; almost everything does. Author Bennett shows how carefully set a stage the hotel guest sees; shows what hard and clever work goes on behind the scenes. After reading Imperial Palace you will see your next hotel dining room, grill room, lobby with a fresh eye.

The Author. For some months Author Bennett acted as house-detective for the Savoy Hotel, spying on the life of his monstrous love. Fat. sloppy-looking, with prominent teeth, hanging lower lip, a wave of hair, droopy eyes, Arnold Bennett would have been more conspicuous, not so well cast, as a maitre d’hotel.

Novelist, playwright, journalist extraordinary, Enoch Arnold Bennett, 63, is the most versatile, one of the most prolific living English writers. He has published over 50 books, more than a dozen plays. Born poor, he got little schooling, went to London at 21, became a solicitor’s clerk. His first published piece was How a Bill of Costs is Drawn Up; his second appeared in the late great Yellow Book. Says he: ”I write for money.” He makes a good income. Some of his books: Clayhanger (pr. “Clanger”), The Old Wives’ Tale, Mr. Prohack, Riceyman Steps, The Grand Babylon Hotel, Milestones (a play).

Quiddities

MEMORIES AND VAGARIES—Axel Munthe —Dutton ($3).

When a book of gossipy memoirs entitled The Story of San Michele was launched in the U. S. (May, 1929) by Publisher Dutton, the little imported edition (364 copies) slid simply down the ways, struggled unostentatiously against the flood, then sank apparently without a trace. But ten months later it emerged again as a bestseller, led all non-fiction books for eleven months.* So famed grew The Story of San Michele and its author, Dr. Axel Munthe, that shrewd Publisher Dutton wanted to launch another Munthe book. Not having a new one handy he raised from the bottom, where it had been reposing out of print since 1898, Memories and Vagaries.

These 16 stories and sketches, written in romantic turn-of-the-Century style, are based on incidents of Dr. Munthe’s early career as an interne in Paris, a doctor in Naples. Italy is Dr. Munthe’s love, and even his Parisian subjects are Italians in exile: Hurdygurdler Don Gaetano, Tragic Poet Monsieur Alfredo, Model Raffaella. Though his tales are by nature grim, Author Munthe has whimsied them into wistfulness which never quite loses an old-fashioned charm. His humor is of the same mellow vintage. On a vacation at Ischia he struck up a friendship with a donkey. “Each morning came my neighbor, the old donkey, and stuck in her solemn head through the open door, looking steadfastly at me. I always wondered why she stood there so still and did nothing but stare at me, and I could not hit upon any other explanation than that she thought I was nice to look at.”

The Author. Axel Munthe, 72, one-time cynically fashionable doctor, confidant (he sometimes extricated himself from pretty malades imaginaires just in time), raconteur of Paris and Rome, attending physician to the late Queen of Sweden, according to his own account took from the rich with his right hand, gave to the poor with his left, had enough left over to buy his villa in Capri, retire in comfort. There he lives alone, resents tourists, admires the view.

Sexes

THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY—D. H. Lawrence—Knopf ($2.50).

Like many another unusual man, David Herbert Lawrence, even while he was still alive, was famed for the wrong reason. Many a U. S. reader condemns him publicly, reads him privately, as a lewd fellow. Actually a plain dealer, his outspokenness on sex got this passionate preacher a bad name. This posthumous novel, his first to appear since the privately-printed Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is sufficiently outspoken, but contains no Anglo-Saxonisms that would horrify a censor.

The plot is typical of Lawrence: a struggle between prurient prudishness and primitive purity. Yvette is the younger of two daughters of an English parson. Her mother had run away with another man, is no longer mentioned. Yvette’s grandmother has taken her daughter-in-law’s place in the household. “She was one of those physically vulgar, clever old bodies who had got her own way all her life by buttering the weaknesses of her men-folk.” Yvette hates her grandmother, is discontented with her parochial life, the parochial young men who court her. One day she happens on a gypsy camp, meets a gypsy who is different from all the men she knows. She thinks of him constantly, nearly goes to him, but never does. When a nearby reservoir bursts she is sitting by the river; the gypsy rescues her from the flood and carries her to her room in safety. They keep each other alive through the cold night while half the house is swept away. In the morning, when a rescue party comes, the gypsy has gone.

The Author. The late David Herbert Lawrence died at Vence near Nice last March of tuberculosis. Son of a coalminer in central England, he had a hard time all his life. In 1914 he tactlessly married Frieda von Richthofen, sister of the famed German flyer. Three times declared consumptive, unfit for military service, he was nevertheless suspected of pacifism or worse, did not enjoy the War. After the Armistice he left England, wandered the world, lived for a while near Taos, N. Mex. Other books: Sons and Lovers, Aaron’s Rod, Fantasies of the Unconscious, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Butterfly

WHISTLER—James Laver—Cosmopolitan ($5).

The two most famed modern U. S. painters were both expatriates.* James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was born in Lowell, Mass. He studied unsuccessfully at West Point. A job in Washington, in the U. S. Coast & Geodetic Survey, got him interested in etching. He went to Paris to study art, never returned to the U. S. Before he died he was at the top of his profession.

Of the many tales told of Whistler’s egotism, belligerent wit, publicity-seeking dandyism, Biographer Laver reproduces a ruthless cross-section, adds a few to the collection. Though the expatriate Whistler never wholly succeeded in acclimatizing himself in England, though he always regarded the British as Philistines, called them “the Islanders,” Laver gives an instance of how super-English Whistler became on the question of money. He once presented a bill for 2.000 guineas. His client thought the price excessive; the bill was finally settled for £1,000. But to Whistler “the difference between a pound and a guinea was not the difference between twenty shillings and twenty-one, but the difference between being treated as a tradesman and treated as a professional man or an artist. Such a feeling is very English and almost impossible to explain to a foreigner, but Whistler had absorbed it … completely. … A thousand guineas for his work might have sent him away not too dissatisfied, but a thousand pounds seemed to him a deliberate insult.”

Though no one now regards Whistler as a dilettante, it is true that in portrait-painting he was a good beginner, finished about a dozen of the hundreds of portraits he began. Once he took so long over a child-portrait “that whole families sat for it from the eldest to the youngest . . . until the original sitter returned from America, the mother of five children, to find the painting still unfinished.”

Biographer Laver’s picture is lively, sympathetic, allots Painter Whistler a place in the sun which would not have satisfied his subject, but which seems to fit his subject’s shadow.

Speaking of Insects

THE LIFE OF THE ANT—Maurice Maeterlinck—Day ($2).

Said Solomon (rhetorically) to the Sluggard: “Go to the ant!” No sluggard, but a scientific inquirer whose researches have not damped his mystical inquisitiveness, Maurice Maeterlinck has gone to the ant, observed its actions, noted down many a formicine phenomenon in this exciting little book.

Myrmecologists divide ants into eight series, have listed 6,000 species. Says Maeterlinck: all the higher species have a communistic unselfishness inconceivable to Man, a consequent social discipline superior to any human government. Some ants have organized armies, wage offensive wars; some own slaves; some keep herds of “cattle” (plant lice); some cultivate mushrooms. For non-carnivorous ants (the great majority) the greatest pleasure in life seems to be disgorging for others the food they have laboriously ac cumulated: “For her [the ant] regurgitation must be an act as delightful as is for us the degustation of the choicest meats and wines. It seems evident that in this act nature has incorporated pleasures analogous to those of the love of which she is deprived.”

Myrmecology sets Mystic Maeterlinck musing; he thinks the ant may be an example, not only to the sluggard, but to the whole race. “One day we shall learn, as all the creatures that share this earth with us have already learned, to content ourselves with life . . . and we shall find, perhaps, when we know how to live it, that life is enough. … I believe that the ant is far less unhappy than the very happiest of men.”

The Author. Maurice Maeterlinck, 68, Belgian mystic, playwright, scientist, does not live in Belgium because he says Belgium does not approve of artists. In his villa near Nice he lives with his young second wife (he divorced Georgette LeBlanc in 1919). Other books: The Life of the Bee, The Blue Bird, Pellcas et Melisande.

* Sales to date: over 100,000.

* The other: John Singer Sargent.