Books: German Ulysses–

German Ulysses*

ALEXAXDERPLATZ, BERLIN — Alfred Doblin; translated by Eugene Jolas— Viking ($5).

The birth of books is never quite legitimate, and often their parentage is hopelessly confused. Few carry their lineage so plainly in their lineaments as Alexanderplatz, Berlin, first Big Book obviously fathered by Maestro James Joyce’s potent, muchdiscussed, comparatively little-read Ulysses. Author Doblin makes no acknowledgment to Maestro Joyce; none is necessary.

Like Ulysses, Alexander platz is a many-charactered merry-go-round with one unheroic central figure bobbing through the realistic din. Not less topical than Ulysses, Alexander platz is more sordid, more sentimental. Herr Doblin’s Dublin is Berlin: his hero one Franz Biberkopf, denizen of the city’s lesser deeps. Just released from Tegel Prison after serving four years for killing his harlot-mistress, Biberkopf in tends to go straight, shake off the crooked company he kept before. He sells news papers, manages respectability for a while. Then he runs into his evil genius, one Reinhold, a strange, unhappy criminal type, who sips lemonade but gulps women. A month with one is always enough to slake Reinhold’s thirst; then he has a terrible time getting rid of her. Biberkopf helps him by taking over his castoffs; for a time they are great cronies. One night Reinhold persuades Biberkopf to come out on a job. The simple fellow does not realize what is afoot; be fore he knows it finds himself standing watch over a burglary. On the way back their car is followed by another. Partly to throw their pursuers off the track, partly to get rid of Biberkopf, Reinhold slugs him, heaves him into the street. The car runs over him, does not kill him; but he loses his right arm. Old friends rescue him, take him to a hospital, stand by till he is on his feet again. The old friends are naturally crooks but they are loyal, sympathize with his plight, respect his determination. They get him another girl, little Mieze, fresh from the streets. Biberkopf becomes her pimp. They live in comparative comfort, surprise themselves by falling in love with each other. Then Reinhold comes on the scene again.

At first suspicious because Biberkopf apparently bears him no grudge for the loss of his arm, then contemptuous, Reinhold meets Mieze, plans to take her away from Biberkopf to complete his humiliation. When Mieze will have none of him, Reinhold murders her. Biberkopf is suspected of the murder; he hides, disguises himself, but the police catch him. Bewilderment at his bad luck has addled his wits; he is taken, not to jail this time, but to an asylum. There Death throws him but cannot quite keep him down. When Franz Biberkopf emerges from the shadow of death, and the threat of jail, he is older, wiser than most.

The Significance— James Joyce, whether or not he intended to be, has been an authors’ author. His cultivation of the “stream-of-consciousness” method, use of a wide-angled lens in picturing his landscapes, resulted in writing too hard for the general reader. Other authors have taken from Maestro Joyce a hint here & there, or have aped him slavishly for the precious few. Herr Doblin is the first to copy him on a large scale and for a wide audience. Perhaps only through such filters as Alexander platz will Joyce’s strong waters be made potable to the public.

Occasionally Doblin’s pages read like a parody of Joyce: “At twenty-three minutes, seventeen seconds after eight, another man steps up to the bar, the milling-bar, the swilling-bar, a fellow—one, two. three, four, five, six, seven, all good children go to heaven—who might it be? You say it’s the King of England? No, it’s not the King of England, driving in grand style, to the opening of Parliament, as a symbol of the English nation’s sense of independence. It’s not he. Then who is it? Is it a delegate of the nations who signed the Kellogg Pact in Paris, surrounded by 50 photographers, the proper inkwell could not be brought in because of its enormous size, they had to content themselves with a Sevres set? No, it’s only— in comes slouching, gray woolen socks a-dangle—our Reinhold, that quite insignificant figure, a mouse-gray lad in mouse-gray.” But Doblin has other more Car-lylean tricks up his sleeve. “And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you’ll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not till next Thursday.”

The Author, Alfred Doblin, middle-aged Berlin physician, has set Germany talking with his big book. Europe has overheard: translations are appearing in Holland, France, Italy, Denmark. England. Alexander platz, Berlin is being cinematized, dramatized, recorded for radio. Author Doblin has written other (untranslated) books; Author Lion Feuchtwanger (Power, The Ugly Duchess, Success), for one, says he has felt his influence.

Translator Eugene Jolas, poet, critic, onetime editor of the late transition (leftwing Paris literary sheet), has done a good job with a racy, colloquial, Americanized version.

Old Lady

ALL PASSION SPENT—V. Sackville-West —Doubleday Doran ($2.50).* Lady Slane has just been widowed: her husband, onetime Prime Minister of England, Viceroy of India, has left her little money, much prestige, six aging children whom she hardly knows and does not care for very much. Her children have an even dimmer idea of their mother’s real nature. When the family conclave meets to decide her future, she shocks them all by deciding for herself. For 30 years Lady Slane has dreamed of living alone in a little house in Hampstead ; she has even had her eye on the house. Against her children’s protests she retires thither, having made most unbusinesslike arrangements with the owner, eccentric Mr. Bucktrout. She lives there happily with her old French maid, seeing almost nobody until even more eccentric old Fitz-George, a millionaire miser and famed col lector, renews an acquaintance lapsed for 50 years. Then FitzGeorge dies, electrifies Lady Slane ‘s family and the nation by leaving her all his immense fortune, his priceless collection. When Lady Slane in turn hands over her unwelcome bequest to charity and a museum her children are furious but her own equanimity is restored. When one of her great-grandchildren comes to see her, to thank her for what she has done. Lady Slane is perfectly hap py, dies at just the right moment. The Author. Victoria Mary (“Vita”) Sackville-West writes with such urbanity and aloofness, with what seems like such an inward eye of aged solitude, it is hard to realize that she is only 39. Like her diplomatist husband. Harold Xicolson. she is of the quiet and well-mannered school, in the best tradition of English life & letters, a member of the gently brilliant Bloomsbury group that includes her good friends Virginia Woolf. Lytton Strachey, E. M. 1-orster. John Maynard Keynes. Knole Castle, her birthplace and the home of her ancestors, is one of the most celebrated houses in England, has 365 rooms, more years than (hat. When she is in England. Authoress Sackville-West lives with her husband and two sons at “Seven-oaks,” near Knole Castle, but she is a lady of other worlds as well, likes traveling with her husband in Ecuador, Persia, any out-of-the-way place. She has also written: Twelve Days, The Land (Hawthornden Prize Poem). Seducers in Ecuador, King’s Daughter, The Edwarditins, Knole and the Sackvillcs.

Middle Age

THE OPENING OF A DOOR—George Davis—Harper ($2.50).

To every prize-winner there is a proxinie accessit (he came very near). Jn this case the prize-winner (of Harper’s $10.000 contest : TIME, Aug. 3 i » was Robert Raynold’s lirothers in the Vest; proxinie accessit was Author Davis’ The Opening oj a Door. When you have read them both you may ponder the discrimination of judges: if you are wise, you will throw no stones. The Opening of a Door is an ex-i raordinarily good first novel, but any committee might be pardoned for deciding that its subject, manner, authorship had too Julian-Greenish a tinge to make the widest appeal.

Author Davis’ tale is of what happened to the MacDougall family when Grandfather died. All the MacDougall children were grown up, most of them were middleaged; they had all seen their best days. Old Mrs. MacDougall was crippled, senescent; at the funeral she did not realize her husband was dead, and afterwards, when they told her, she kept forgetting. Her children as you meet them first seem i depressingly small, middle-class Middle Western lot, but as you get to know them i tetter they grow to life size—not to heroic or tragic or grotesque proportions. Because Author Davis tries to tell what ,ldous Huxley calls the Whole Truth About his people there is no hero in his hook, no villain. Uncle Lincoln is a rhetorical sot and a nasty old man when drunk: but with his mother he is a different character. His wife Josie. a sinister strong woman, might easily become a heroine in less clever hands than Author Davis’. Theodora is the adventuress of the family, with two firm feet to fall on, but she turns weak as water before her outlandish Syrian lover. Best scene: farewell of Bertha Geiger. half-cracked old family servant, to her mistress who does not remember her.

Author George Davis. 25. Chicagoan. after a couple of years in Detroit’s City College worked in a Chicago steel plant, in Marshall Field’s bookshop, then joined the U. S. expatriate colony in France. Friend of Authors Jean Cocteau, Norman

Douglas, his style has excited critics to extravagant praise. The Opening of A Door is his first book.

Under the Skin

THE COLOXEL’S DAUGHTER—Richard Aldington—Donbleday, Doran ($2.50).

When a writer is suffering with sore head, either from inverted patriotism or from some more personal reason, he may write the kind of vindictive book that shocks the public into attention. Richard Aldington has done just that in The Colonel’s Daughter. Banned by Smith’s (big distributors) in England, banned by Ireland, but reviewed even by conservative London Punch with cold respect, The Colonel’s Daughter should delight U. S. Anglophobes. for this British-written book about Britain is of the kind to make even Britishers wince.

Georgie was the horse-faced only daughter of a retired English army officer. Her father was a stupid incompetent with furtively amorous tendencies; her mother a horsewoman without the money to be horsey. Georgie was brought up to be ignorantly innocent, to hope that the right man would come along some day. But the War had left England a million men short, and Georgie was not attractive enough to win out in the manhunt. She tried to be in love with Purfleet, an intellectual light-weight who was cautiously attracted by her massive virginity, but as soon as marriage was in the wind Purfleet showed a clean pair of heels. Georgie’s big chance came when Geoffrey, a stupid but eligible young planter, spent his leave with her family. Georgie was the first white girl Geoffrey had seen in some time, and that nearly turned the trick, but unfortunately for her he began to look around, found Margy more to his liking.

Georgie’s last adolescent shock was when her father died and she found among his papers contraceptive devices that were Greek to her, pornographic postcards that were not. When Geoffrey wrote her a brotherly letter of farewell Georgie’s big nose got redder; she settled down hopelessly to be a village old maid.

Author Aldington has done his job up brown: by the time he gets through with his characters there is not a single one you can stomach. Georgie is pathetic but repulsive; Purfleet is a cad; Geoffrey a fool; all the rest run the gamut of knavery and oafishness. In a supererogatory epilog Aldington underlines his tale: England is on the downgrade, nothing can help her. the War killed off the best, delivered the rest into the strangling clutch of “human weeds.”

The Author was shell-shocked in the War, in which he served as an infantry officer, British Expeditionary Force. He was a poet before that. Married in 1913 to “H.D.” (Hilda Doolittle), U. S. born imagist poet, he no longer lives with her. Demobilization found him penniless, jobless, touchy. A reviewing job on the London Times Literary Supplement was soon too much for his nerves; translation has given him his bread & butter. An Englishman born & bred. Aldington has left what he thinks is a sinking ship, lives in the south of France. Other books: War & Love, Images of Desire, Death of a Hero, Roads to Glory (TIME, Jan. 19).

* 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 ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City. * Published Aug. 27.