Books: New Wine in Old Tanks

BERLIN—Joseph Hergesheimer—Knopf.

On the jacket of his travelog, in which he tells of his recent peregrinations from Berlin to Budapest and back, Author Hergesheimer is pictured standing with a Berlin policeman pointing down the street. From Author Hergesheimer’s expression if, is clear that there is another beer hall a little farther on. Almost exclusively from beer halls, famed restaurants and night clubs, does he survey the contemporary Central European scene. A characteristic vista: “I had dinner, alone, at the Restaurant Atelier, and sat for a long time over a plate of wild strawberries, a superlative Punch cigar, and mild Austrian brandy. I was alone, but at least three charming feminine creatures occupied the continuous lounge across the narrow room, and I watched them with discreet enjoyment and satisfaction. I was, it seemed, at last actually growing old. . . .”

In Berlin the spirit of Germany’s younger generation gave Author Hergesheimer pause. From their severe, rather poverty-stricken lives “the customary optimism, the romantic confidence, of youth, were absent. . . .” Most characteristic humor of the town was “a faintly bitter but undisturbed acceptance, of all, all, the realities of existence.” To make the realities of existence less onerous for some of them Author Hergesheimer did his best. He took supper at the Swedish Pavilion “with a girl I found swimming at the Freibad,” treated her to wild strawberries, lake trout, caviar. He took her home, a 40-minute taxicab ride, left her, grim with amazement at such extravagance, near her door.

Munich he found medieval, gloomy, in spite of its beer. But at Egern on the Tegernsee in the Bavarian Oberland he had a cheerful stopover. Before leaving Munich he bought a Bavarian outfit— leather breeches, laced at the knees, white stockings, green suspenders embroidered with a stag and edelweiss, a Jager hat with a tuft of chamois hair. Stealthily accoutring himself in his hotel room Author Hergesheimer admired himself before his mirror for some time, then changed to dinner clothes, went to the bar and drank two double Martinis. He would have drunk a third but the barkeep demurred.

In Bavaria, where the bitter flavor of modern Berlin and musty Munich dissolved, Author Hergesheimer grew too nostalgic to be comfortable. He was jealous of the strapping, benign folk who lived such peaceful lives. “I would have given up everything I had managed, spiritually and socially, to gather in more than 50 years to be any one of the characteristic men of Tegernsee, strong and erect, my throat filled with music.” He thought he could best fit in as a grocer in Wiessee, “sleep deeply all night in the room above my produce and … in the early morning, polish the apples and arrange fresh greens.”

From such blissful ruminations he traveled on to Vienna where he arrived ”too late.” Frau Sacher, proprietress of the city’s most famed restaurant had died, leaving Author Hergesheimer with only second-rate objectives. He made the most of Vienna’s 38 varieties of coffee, all “superlative,” but concluded that the city was passee. Budapest, with its slightly Oriental flavor he liked better, though he was shocked, on going to hear the gypsy music, to hear “Donna e Mobile” instead. “It was not necessary to travel the far way from Pennsylvania to Hungary to learn that donne were mobile. They were mobile in West Chester.”

Back to Berlin went Author Hergesheimer, a little disgruntled to have found himself in Budapest sitting “a long while over a second tall glass of Pilsener beer with no ambition to go farther, see more. That tendency . . . was, I reflected, the reverse of intelligent. I did not want to write an account of four middle European cities that was scarcely more than a record of caviar and beer.” To escape this eventuality he moved to another beer hall, had another drink.

The Author. Pennsylvania Dutchman Hergesheimer was born in Philadelphia in 1880. shocked his family by going artistic, entering the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts at 17. A small inheritance financed a trip to Venice and Florence where he stayed until his funds and nerves were exhausted. Recovering from the break down he returned to the U. S., took up writing in place of painting. Years of struggle were crowned with the publication of Cavolo Repeana, a recipe for stuffed cabbage published in Good Housekeeping, over his wife’s signature. His first novel, The Lay Anthony, brought more satisfactory literary acclaim. Now, a familiar U. S. Literary Figure he lives in the old stone Dower House at West Chester, Pa., goes to an office in the business section of the town to write his books. Some of them: The Three Black Pennys, Java Head, Cytherea, Balisand, The Party Dress, The Limestone Tree, Sheridan.

Doctor’s Dilemma

THE CLINIC OF DR. AICADRE—Muriel Harris—Harper.

Before the War, the late devious Novelist Henry James, encountering Authoress Harris, went so far as not to deem it inexpedient to encourage her with her writing. His protegee’s subsequent literary career has given him cause to turn proudly in his grave. Long a successful journalist (London Daily News, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian), Authoress Harris won a $5,000 prize with her first novel, The Seventh Gate. Her second novel may popularize a writer who is apparently Katherine Mansfield’s nearest living literary relative. Her book, written in an extraordinarily vivid style, too pointed for extended novel-writing, is a sequence of short story-like sketches. These episodes are telescoped into homogeneity by the accidents of her plot rather than by its design.

To Dr. Aicadre’s asthma clinic at Deux Estaings crowd many sufferers, hypochondriacal and real. The doctor tells them flatly to help themselves—he has little use, though considerable pity, for human beings sick or well. Even Laure, his peasant-girl wife, finds him unapproachable. Only her maman, Madame Teterger, a closefisted harridan who runs the clinic and everybody in it, dares face him. When, over the extravagant construction of a new wing to the clinic, she reads him the riot act, he turns away in scorn, falls off the balcony to the cement ground floor.

With Aicadre crippled Madame Teterger seizes an opportunity to sell the clinic to one of its patients, who turns it into a “cloob.” The Aicadre family moves to the nearby Abbey, where Madame Teterger, as caretaker of the Abbey, earns a miserly living, passes it grudgingly on to the rest. Dr. Aicadre accepts his invalidism with bitter fatalism; the only things that are insupportable are the teasings of Madame Teterger’s idiot son, who hates him. and the starvation rations given to his pet dog Bobbee. One day he breaks out. poisons the dog. Some time later Laure bears him a second baby girl. When the child is found poisoned it is assumed that Aicadre is the murderer.

Tried, convicted Aicadre is taken off. Meanwhile at the “cloob” there is much irrelevant activity. But two sympathetic visitors, Nicholas and Philomela Purssord, of whose doings Authoress Harris makes a little novel in itself, come to Deux Estaings. When Aicadre is released they help break down his inhuman, crippled bitterness. When that breaks down the truth breaks out at last—Aicadre is in fact desperately in love with life, and, after Laure has ordered her tyrannous mother out of the house, with her. Moreover he was not the murderer of their child.

Fishermen’s Pluck

THREE FEVERS — Leo Walmsley — Knopf.

Less like a novel than like a tale told by some not too ancient mariner. New Author Walmsley’s book will enthrall the large audience due to come its way. It speaks of fishermen’s lives at Bramblewick, a tiny hamlet on the English North Sea coast. Heroes of the tale are the Lunns, who keep a weather eye out for any new chance to catch a living that the varying sea affords, keep a jealous friendly eye on the size of their rivals’, the Fosdyck’s, hauls. Villains of the tale are the stormy, treacherous North Sea, and the Bramblewick harbor entrance, a narrow passage between two “scaurs” (reefs) which any heavy sea makes impassable. In this setting, as old as the hills of sea water about which he eloquently writes, Author Walmsley tells a tale like the sea’s next wave, unique and fresh.

A wavelike rhythm underruns the lives of the Lunns, father and two sons. From troughs of idleness or unprofitable fishing caused by storms or glutted markets, they rise suddenly to crests of thrilling sea treasure-hunts with cod lines, lobster pots, salmon nets. The transition from crest to crest is marked by dull periods when the men’s blood runs slow with the tedium of making a living. Then a glimpse of what the Fosdycks are out after, or a chance lobster hooked on a cod line starts the blood boiling up. It boils up first in devil-may-care Marney Lunn, who lives in complete domestic happiness with his wife Amy in a little cottage perched on a cliff over the sea. In its cozy interior the new fever makes its first subtle appearance. Restless, he goes off to the family “work-shop,” tries to infect his father, his brother John with his disease. At first they are doubtful of such folly as to give up cod fishing for lobster potting in the middle of winter, but eventually Marney’s visions of “tons of brass,” and the challenge to outwit, outdare the Fosdycks wins them over.

How three such fevers run their course is the book’s story. Good luck with cod, phenomenal success with lobster potting, lead them to quixotic ventures with a salmon net that almost cost their lives. How the two brothers are benighted at sea, in mist and storm, how their broken gaff is found on the beach, their bodies hunted in vain until their coble, laden with salmon, breaks through the morning fog between the scaurs, is, with all the rest of their adventures, told with a simplicity and salt that has not lost its savor for having been used in older classics of the sea.

The Author. Youngest son of a local artist of Robin Hood’s Bay (Bramblewick), a Yorkshire fishing village, Author Walmsley ran off to sea when young, later became Curator of the Yorkshire Marine Biological Station. He served during the War in the Flying Corps, crashed 14 times. After a trip to the French Sahara as naturalist on a scientific expedition he took to writing adventure stories, a novel of African pygmy life, Toro of the Little People. The ache of War wounds made him drop writing, go home to become an inshore fisherman, try to market his invention of a collapsible indestructible lobster pot. Unsuccessful at that, he wrote Three Fevers, made of more indestructible materials even than his lobster pots.

Books of the Week

THE GOOD SHEPHERD—John Rathbone Oliver—Stokes ($2). A revised reprint of a novel first published in 1917 under the pseudonym John Roland. An inspirational novel of how a U. S. doctor, in the Austrian Tyrol, modifies his own as well as other people’s spots. One of the best medical tales ever written.

A SCIENTIST AMONG THE SOVIETS— Julian Huxley—Harper ($1.75). Test-tubing Communism.

HOME Is THE SAILOR—Ruth Blodgett—Ear court, Brace ($2). A doctor and a nurse steer their romance clear of the Maine coast rocks.

BERLIN — Joseph Hergesheimer — Knopf ($2.50).

KILLER’S CARNIVAL—Temple Field —Farrar & Rinehart ($2). Good 13-murder adventure.

THREE FEVERS—Leo Walmsley— Knopf ($2.50).

MURDER OF THE NINTH BARONET —J. S. Fletcher—Knopf ($2). Bloodier & better Fletcher.

AMOS THE WANDERER—W. B. Maxwell—Dodd, Mead ($2). How Amos, a village-lad, leaves home and father; well-told.

THE CLINIC OF DR. AICADRE— Muriel Harris—Harper ($2).

THE WAY or THE PHOENIX— Stephen McKenna—Dodd, Mead ($2.50). Love into ashes, ashes into love.

OLD MANOA—Glenn Allen—Apple-ton ($2). Kentucky characters at home.

THE LADY OF THE BOAT—Lady Murasaki — Houghton, Mifflin ($3.50). Further peeps behind nth Century Japanese fans and boudoir scenes.

MORE MERRY-GO-ROUND — Liveright ($3). More Washington, D. C. penology.

*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, 135 East 42nd St., New York City.