Books: Non-Fiction

Anglo-Arab

The Story.* “My birth was unpropitious. I came into the world branded and denounced as a vagrant; for I was a younger son of a family so proud of their antiquity that even gout and mortgaged estates were traced many generations back.” This extravagantly injured First Person did not go into the garden and eat worms. He grew up a violent, strongwilled, liberty-loving strapper. He reviled his cruel parents, tortured his tutors and was sent to sea. Just missing the battle of Trafalgar, he was shipped on a training cruise. At Bombay he deserted, nearly destroying a superior officer with fists, feet and a billiard cue. He cast in his lot with a Dutch pirate-merchant, one De Ruyter, a highly cultured, sagacious gentleman of fortune who had fought for George Washington and was now, under Napoleon’s tricolor, pillaging Britain’s Indian trade. De Ruyter looked Arab, so our hero straightway stained his body and shaved his poll, all but the top-lock for houris to pull him into paradise by. He was given an Arab “grab brig” with an ancient Arab quartermaster, a blood-thirsty Dutch sawbones, a bag-bellied French cook, an Arab and Malay crew and numerous cannon. Already proficient with pistol, dirk and cutlass, he acquired dexterity with assorted oriental cutlery, and in four astonishing years (the last of his ‘teens) he spilt and lost blood enough to have satiated a large-sized Hyrcanian tiger. His plunderings read like an inventory of all Eastern bazaars, treasure vaults and shipyards laid end to end. He entered upon an excessively romantic married life with a sloe-eyed Arab orphan, Zela, whom he rescued from a throat-cutting in a Madagascar pirate nest and took on most of his wild voyages. He returned to England when he was just of age. The Significance. The exploits of this man, if invented, would have taxed the combined imaginations of Baron Münchausen, Lord Byron and Scheherazade. His nature was a tumultuous decoction of these three with defiant Ajax, malicious Slovenly Peter, vituperative H. L. Mencken and a violent superman complex superadded. This autobiography of his youth has undoubtedly a rangy skeleton of fact, but it is fleshed, tattooed and caparisoned in the wildly exotic mode of a Byronic travelog. For example, what may have been a couple of native women coming alongside in a canoe in the Sunda Islands, he sets down as a multitude of Moorish mermaids swimming offshore “like a shoal of walruses” and boarding his ship “in all directions.” Off Celebes, a giant swordfish slays a monster blue shark, while seven other huge sharks look on. A lumbering Chinese junk is brought to off the Borneo coast and the ensuing description reads like a sacking of Peking. Aiming to amaze by his deeds in life, he succeeds in amazing by his deeds in literature. “Ordinary events during a voyage do not bear relating,” he says, and rushes on with extraordinary ones—burning a house of joy outside Bombay, riding out a simoon off Borneo, spearing wild boars on He de France, firing pistols into savages’ mouths —in writing that for sheer spectacular vehemence has no equal (unless it is Herman Melville’s) in the language. The book is now republished for the first time since 1890. The Author. Edward John Trelawny was 39 in 1831 when he wrote and published this book. Since returning to England as told in his narrative, he had married disastrously, roamed Europe, met Shelley and Byron, recovered and cremated the former’s body off Leghorn (it was he who snatched Shelley’s heart from the pyre and buried it in Rome), fought beside Byron in Greece (it was he who investigated the dead Byron’s feet and spread the lie about a cloven hoof), married a Greek chieftain’s sister, suffered terrible wounds, corresponded devotedly with Mary Shelley. He later wrote Recollections of the Last Days of Byron and Shelley, an invaluable document. He visited the U. S., swimming Niagara between the rapids and the falls. He bought English estates (marrying once more) and turned country gentleman, social lion, patriarch of the Romantic period. With a constitution “stronger than steel,” he lived until 1881 (reading Blake, studying Darwin), and finally had his ashes laid by Shelley’s. “The man who best loved Shelley,” would have been his chosen epitaph.

Crevecoeur

MORE LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER—St. John de Crève-coeur—Yale University Press ($4). Letters from an American Farmer, published in England in 1782, is a book known to serious students of the period of American history just prior to and during the Revolution. Buried for nearly a century and a half in the cabinets of the Crèvecoeur family, unpublished manuscripts were discovered. Even for casual readers the book has interest and the sort of charm inherent in any narrative that sincerely, accurately and with reasonable adequacy portrays the life of a period, however restricted as to time, regardless of the limitation of its area of action. Moreover, Crèvecoeur had a point of view not frequently presented, that of a loyalist to the crown in revolutionary colonies. No reader will close the book, finally, without a truer mental picture of pioneer days in America. Crèvecoeur was not a historian; he was a chronicler of unrelated episodes. He was an observer whose main interest was not in ideas or causes but in people. His writings before the Revolution contain a picture of the life of the average American community in the middle colonies; his sketches during the conflict picture such communities convulsed by war.

The Author. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, born in Caen, France, in 1735, served under Montcalm, and turned his back on Canada after the fall of Quebec. Surveyor, mapmaker, soldier, negotiator with the Indians, he settled down as a farmer, after his marriage, in the province of New York. He “suffered much for his attachment to his Majesty’s government and friends,” was driven from his farm and became a refugee, protected with others of his kind by Clinton’s army, until 1870, when he returned to France. After the war France sent him to America as consul to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut—a post creditably filled until 1790, when he returned to France on the eve. of its own Revolution, which claimed his remaining years.

Quippant

PETER PANTHEISM—Robert Haven Schauffler—Macmillan ($2). Mr. Schauffler is an unregenerate word-and-phrase addict, or more politely, a poetic philologist. Give him a simple declarative idea and he will repeat it to you in a dozen new guises, tricked out in quotations, skipping in humor, prone in absurdity or radiant with glamour. It takes erudition, it takes nimbleness; but of both Mr. Schauffler has sufficient to jump over the conversational candlestick with our spryest informal essayists. Among the ideas herein prestidigitated are “Ignorance Is Bliss,” “Cupid in Knickerbockers” (on calf love), “Timesquarese” (on alphabetical survival of the fittest) and “Unborn Words.” The last named is— to use its own theory illustratively —deluciatingly quippant.*

In Private Capacity

ADVENTURES IN UNDERSTANDING— David Grayson—Doubleday, Page ($2.50). David Grayson is also known as Publicist Ray Stannard Baker, whilom co-editor of McClure’s and the American Magazine, U. S. press chief at the Peace Conference, lauder of Woodrow Wilson and professional political commentator. As “David Grayson,” he preserves a private personality whose prime characteristic is a genius for wonderment. In some way he has guarded his emotional constitution so that he enjoys life’s human minutiae, which is extraordinary when you consider with what bloodless generalities a publicist has to make friends. Friend of Eugene Field, friend of bees and bootblacks, bovines and businessmen, icemen and janitors, iris and blue jays, “David Grayson” is almost always proof against his own sentimentalities. These essays on innocent recklessness in the making of friends reflect an enthusiasm that is as far from wallowing as from warping. They were written for private satisfaction; they should cause public delight.

VERSE

Aiken’s Muse

PRIAPUS AND THE POOL AND OTHER POEMS—Conrad Aiken— Boni & Liveright ($2). Here are 21 short poems and one longer one, compounded of dreams, half-thoughts and the stinging lash of passion, running in and out of obscurity, now fading into drifting leaves. Some of them, including the major piece, “Priapus and the Pool,” suffer grievously from obscurity. In such the supreme function of poetry seems nearly lost— the function of making thoughts clearer than ever words were meant to make them. The more enjoyable poems are the simpler: the richly oriental “And in the Hanging Gardens”; the ironic “The Wedding” (of Arachne with her prey) ; The vampire in Woman, “Electra” and the brave “Teteléstai”: I am no King, have laid no kingdoms waste, Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs Of weeping women through long watts of trumpets; Say, rather, I am no one or an atom. . . . . . . Well, what then? Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust, The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

FICTION

Oddments

EXPERIMENTS—Norman Douglas— McBride ($2.50). The author of several unusual books of wanderings and two extraordinary novels (South Wind, They Went) has here had collected for him what he describes as “mouldering remains”— several brief stories, one poem, a number of more or less literary essays and several book reviews. What could be deader? Answer: the same sort of collection of any other writer’s literary remainders. Mr. Douglas has a way of saying whatever he thinks and saying it well, which gives an extraordinary relish to even such a melange. The old book reviews one would expect to be deadest. Instead they are among the most entertaining— infinitely better than most of the books themselves. He deals damnation with zest. One review of three books by Victoria Cross, by Florence L. Barclay, by Elinor Glyn, must, even at this late day, cause those ladies to blush in their literary boudoirs. Excerpt: “On p. 46 the pair are beginning to be naughty; on p. 60 Guinevere learns from her sensible sister the proper definition of what stupid people call sin; on p. 99 she discovers that ‘one is not always master of oneself in supreme moments’ (a great step forward); on p. 127 Sir Hugh’s voice gets suspiciously hoarse; on p. 143 ‘I must,’ says he, ‘I will hold you in my arms’; on p. 152 he kisses her lips. Thank God he has got as far as the lips at last; up to this point it was only her hand, gloved or au naturel. And soon enough he gets a good deal further.”

Tour d’Explosion

KRAKATIT — Karel Capek — Macmillan ($2.50). For about the first 50 pages the hero, Prokop, is in intermittent delirium, but his story percolates to the reader’s mind. He is an expert in destructive chemistry—explosives—and he has discovered something unparalleled. A pinch of it is as powerful as 100 pounds of TNT, and its name is Krakatit. These explosive syllables are the motif of the novel. Gradually the author unfolds the theme of its terrible destructive power, of its mysterious habit of exploding unaided on Tuesdays and Fridays at 10:30 p.m. Prokop, the strange destructive genius, follows the will-o-the-wisp memory of a girl he meets in his delirium, follows it in madness and sanity, follows it to the castle of Balltin where he is imprisoned for the sake of Krakatit, follows it through an adventure with the fierce Princess who dwells at Balltin, follows it to an eerie end. Incidentally the book is an adventure story, a fantastic mystery tale; but fundamentally it is a tour de force, the literary representation of the idea of explosion. And the tour de force is so aptly carried out that, although the story is entirely impossible, it remains completely plausible. Only the author of The World We Live In and R. U. R. could have written it.

Rollos

THREE ROUSING CHEERS FOR THE ROLLO BOYS !!!—Corey Ford—Doran ($2). The author of the wholesome, popular “Rover Boys” series may feel quite hurt at what Mr. Ford has gone and done. Mr. Ford’s book is about three boys surnamed Rollo, not Rover, but some people are going to think he meant a parody on the Rovers just the same. These Rollos are not quite the well-behaved, sensible American boys the Rovers were, nor are their first names quite identical—brown-eyed, curly-haired, fun-loving Tom; sturdy Dick of 18 summers; and tall, serious Harry.— But they do all the kinds of things the Rovers did, only all in one book instead of a whole series. They win boat races, dig gold mines, fool cannibals, have picnics, etc. If you read this book you should keep the distinction well in mind, just in fairness to the Rovers, and really it is easy to distinguish. No Rover would ever have done what one Rollo does—puts his arms right around and makes love to Elsie Dinsmore!

Humor

MENDEL MARANTZ—David Freed-m&n—Langdon ($2). “What’s a sweetheart? A dewdrop. What’s a bride? A raindrop. What’s a wife? A shower . . . a soldier . . . lightning . . . a dentist, she works on your nerves. . . . What’s laziness — an invention, it saves work. . . . ”

David Freedman seems to be a writer in whom the Pictorial Review thinks it has found a coming humorist. Definitions like the above pepper the inexhaustible conversation of his character, Mendel Marantz, philosophical loafer. The plot twists swiftly, unexpectedly: Mendel invents a dish, floor, and clothes-washing machine; gets rich, promises his wife a marble mansion, buys the tenement they inhabit instead; she leaves him, comes back to find the tenement transformed to a marble mansion, a resort for rich uptown Jews, who miss the smells, pickles and shirt-sleeves of their ghetto days. Mendel has a homely daughter. . . . Read it, if you have any liking at all for good Jew humor and mild philosophy.

Mild but Able

LODGERS IN LONDON — Adelaide Eden Phillpotts — Little, Brown ($2). The walls of lodging houses, in Bloomsbury or anywhere else, have certain demonstrable properties. They compress and usually depress any human life that comes to rest within them. They absorb the secrets of one chamber and exude them into all the other chambers. Yet the walls are not all that is active in a lodging house. No matter how dull human beings are, they react on one another individually. There will be love, jealousy, suspicion, etc. And it only takes one sprig of pepper to liven up a vegetable soup. Something like that is the thesis of this bit of still life in Bloomsbury. Miss Phillpotts, aged 30, studied sociology in college. Her ability to compose a narrative, to fashion small, heterogeneous and appealing characters, and to eke significance out of very minor situations, is doubtless due in part to her having Novelist Eden Phillpotts for father. It is mild but able.

—ADVENTURES OF A YOUNGER SON—Edward John Trelawny—Oxford University Press (World’s Classics) ($.80).

* Lewis Carroll, famed for “Jabberwocky,” called them “portmanteau” words, two or more meanings or images being packed in together. In the illustration, “delicious-excruciatingly-flippant-quips” becomes two easily pronounceable new words.

* The Rovers are Dick, Tom and Sam.