Books: Children of All Ages*

Children of All Ages*

CHILDREN AND OLDER PEOPLE—Ruth Suckow—Knopf ($2.50).

Pigeon-holers used to put Ruth Suckow into the compartment marked “Dreary Middle West, small-town.” Pigeon-holers were wrong. Authoress Suckow is not one of those documentary writers who cannot see the people for the buildings. She has more than a hint of that knack Katherine Mansfield had, which many a Russian writer has, of holding a simplifying lens up to human nature. In this book of 14 short stories about Children and Older People you have the almost constant feeling that you are seeing people as they are.

Some of her exhibits:

A beautiful little girl, adored only child of her parents, takes the principal part in the church Christmas Eve festival. What a strain! But what applause!

A girl who has given up many a marrying chance to be the town doctor’s mistress watches him gradually tire of her.

A little girl who has managed to insinuate herself into a bigger children’s game is discovered and sent to bed by her parents, dismays them by her despair.

Another little girl, most unpopular at school, starts her climb to popularity by sending herself a valentine.

A small boy whose father has recently died becomes the man of the family by getting a job behind a soda-fountain, shows his mother that he, and no stepfather, will fill his father’s shoes.

The Author. Daughter of a Congregational minister in Hawarden, la. (she was born in 1893). Ruth Suckow was a writing child. After she was graduated from the University of Denver she taught there for a while, then took to beekeeping. For six years she was manager-owner of the Orchard Apiary at Earlville, la., ran it at a profit. Henry Louis Mencken, then co-editor of Smart Set, bought her first stories, which pleased him considerably. Soon she switched the bees from their hives to her bonnet, where they have since buzzed to good effect. Two years ago she married one Ferner Nuhn of Cedar Falls, la. She lives in Manhattan, where she likes the literary atmosphere. Other books: Country People, The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, Iowa Interiors, The Bonney Family, Cora, The Kramer Girls.

Summer Stuff

MARTIN’S SUMMER—Vicki Baum—Cosmopolitan ($2).

BEGINNERS LUCK — Emily Hahn — Brewer, Warren & Putnam ($2).

In the late great Good Old Days publishers would think twice, thrice, about putting out solid wares in the light-minded summer season, would generally offer fripperies and froufrou. Competition has somewhat altered the case, but summer still turns (temporarily) many a serious publisher into a souffle-monger. Here are two concoctions guaranteed digestible in hot weather.

¶ Authoress Vicki Baum, whose dramatizedGrand Hotel has made a hit on Broadway, tells a light-heartedly lubricous tale of an Adonisian swimming instructor and the damage he did at a German summer resort. Martin was a serious-minded young man (he had invented a paper substitute for cinema film) who found himself temporarily out of a job and turned his hobby into a cab-horse. But he was beautiful as the day, and women of all girths and dimensions flocked to his instruction. Martin was kindhearted, with a good digestion and an equable temper; but before the summer was nearly over his patience and self-control were shaky. Of course he fell in love, and of course he had a stormy time of it. Equally of course all turned out for the melodramatic best.

¶ Emily Hahn’s first book, Seductio ad Absurdum, was not only funny but shrewd. Beginners Luck, her second, is more ambitious than a marshmallow. but a marshmallow it is. Blake had been kicked out of an Eastern prep school for being a menace to the community. Gin was a girl who had left home, was now a guide on New Mexican bus tours. Teddy had come from poor but respectable parents to be an artist in the Southwest. They all met in Santa Fe, played together, thought it would be glorious to run away to Mexico. So they did. Just before they reached the border Teddy, the most grownup, turned the car, drove them grimly back to Santa Fe. Emily Hahn writes so well, puts her people through such lifelike paces, you keep wondering when she is going to tell you something worth listening to. But she never does.

Huxley’s 19th

Music AT NIGHT—Aldous Huxley— Fountain Press ($10).*

Once considered a smart young bad boy of English letters, Aldous Huxley is conquering his cleverness, subduing it to a useful tool. Born a highbrow, he has become an uncommonly sensible intellectual realist. There are times in this collection of essays when he reminds you of the late forthright Enoch Arnold Bennett. The voice is similar but the hands are different: for Huxley is on the whole preoccupied with universal, not parochial, themes.

His subjects are Tragedy and the Whole Truth, Art and the Obvious, Meditation on the Moon, Beliefs and Actions, Liberty and the Promised Land, To the Puritan All Things Are Impure, History and the Past, etc. etc. Of tragedy he says: “The fact is that tragedy and what I have called the Whole Truth are not compatible; where one is, the other is not. … Of all the important works of contemporary literature not one is a pure tragedy. There is no contemporary writer of significance who does not prefer to state or imply the Whole Truth.” Huxley believes democracy, equality are against nature. ” ‘To every one that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath,’ is the formulation of a natural law. We can do something to limit the operation of this law . . . but we can no more abolish the law itself than we can abolish the law of gravitation.”

As Huxley has grown less of an intellectual cut-up his pyrotechnical language ha? steadied to a lucid glow. But now & then he will still paint a purple passage: “Moonless, this June night is all the more alive with stars. Its darkness is perfumed with faint gusts from the blossoming lime trees, with the smell of wetted earth and the invisible greenness of the vines. . . . Far away, the passage of a train is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable gentleness, across the warm living body of the night.”

The Author. Only 36, Aldous Leonard Huxley has now published 19 books. His weak eyes failed him at 17, left him practically blind for several years, prevented him from becoming a doctor, for which he is glad. After the War he joined the editorial staff of the London Athenaeum, under Editor John Middleton Murry. whom he later pilloried in Point Counter Point. Good friend and admirer of the late David Herbert Lawrence, Huxley is now editing Lawrence’s letters, is said to be writing his biography. Tall, thin, stooping, energetic, Huxley says: “I rarely take a complete holiday, as I find that my health begins to break down as soon as I stop working.” Other books: Leda, Crome Yellow, Those Barren Leaves, Two or Three Graces, Do What You Will.

Dead Swan

SHORTER POEMS—Robert Bridges—Oxford Press ($3).*

The late Robert Bridges was one of the most scholarly of England’s Poets Laureate. His was never the popularity of the mellifluously noble Alfred Lord Tennyson, of the beauty-beseeching John Masefield, his neighbor on Oxford’s Boar’s Hill, his successor in office. Even Bridges’ greatest work, The Testament of Beauty, is too caviarishly philosophical for general taste. But in this new collection of his shorter poems are to be found at least half a dozen that should be anthologically apt.

Not a sea-poet. Bridges wrote at least one poem on a ship (“A Passer-By”) which the Admiralty might approve. Its .opening lines ring almost Whitmanesque to a U. S. ear:

Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,

Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West. . . .

No proper English poet has failed to write of the nightingale. Bridges’ “Nightingales” can stand with any of them:

Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,

And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom

Ye learn your song:

Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,

Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air

Bloom the year long!

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:

Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,

A throe of the heart,

Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,

No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,

For all our art.

Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men

We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,

As night is withdrawn

From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,

Dream, while the innumerable choir of day

Welcome the dawn.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($1 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

*Published June 11.

*Published July 16.