Fiction: Recent Books: Mar. 15, 1937

NIGHTWOOD—Djuna Barnes—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). Extremely unusual novel, a poetic parable in terms of Lesbian tragedy. Those who are not frightened off by T. S. Eliot’s introduction (“it took me . . . some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole”) probably will be by Author Barnes herself (“I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it”).

LUCIFER IN PINE LAKE—Samuel Rogers —Little, Brown ($2.50). Told with detached and crushingly cumulative irony, the story of a handsome university professor whose selfishness wrecks his marriage, leaves him hoping that an early next war will annihilate himself and everything else; fifth and best book by the $10,000 prize-winning author of Dusk at the Grove.

Non-Fiction

AFTERMATH—Sir James George Frazer —Macmillan ($3). Supplementary volume to The Golden Bough, classic collection of primitive customs, beliefs.

LIFE STORY—Mark Benney—Random House ($2.50). Autobiography of a London harlot’s son who spent half his youth in jail, the rest of it learning night life and the underworld; the whole made horrible by being written in consciously intellectual style.

THE FASCIST : HIS STATE AND HIs MIND —E. B. Ashton—Morrow ($2.50). A sensible attempt to unscramble the political file marked “Fascist,” in which liberal Author Ashton discovers a huge accumulation of names that do not belong there.

HAVE YOU ANYTHING TO DECLARE?— Maurice Baring—Knopf ($2.75). Quotations, neatly plastered with stickers of urbane commentary, from the English novelist’s lifetime literary baggage.

THE STORY OF SECRET SERVICE—Richard Wilmer Rowan—Doubleday, Doran ($3). Fat (720-page), fascinating florilegium of spies, real and apparent, “going up and down the backstairs of history” since Moses’ day; busiest, softest footsteps, says Spy-Catcher Rowan, were England’s.

LIFE OF JESUS — François Mauriac— Longmans, Green ($2.50). Simple, sincere retelling of the Gospel narrative, focused on Christ’s human aspects. Catholic François Mauriac anticipates that his “rash book” will offend many, but is pleased that it has already won over 100,000 readers in France.