Reviews of the New Books

The Month Discloses a Number of Pleasing Novels

BURTON RASCOE

BEATRICE KEAN SEYMOUR IS a name which is now being bandied about a great deal in those writing circles, where plot and subject are not so much the kernels of conversation as literary "effects" and "devices". This only means, of course, that the materials Mrs. Seymour deals with are just as much the first attraction in her work to writers as it is to the general reading public; and it is an index of the high quality of her literary craftsmanship.

Her new novel, The Hopeful Journey (Seltzer) is a compact study of three generations of women, which is to say that it is a compact study of the evolutionary change through three generations in the attitude assumed by men and women toward love and marriage. Mrs. Seymour has made of these three situations a splendid and unified novel, concise and intelligent, and peopled with very credible human beings.

CTEPHEN MCKENNA has accustomed his audience to look to him for snap and sparkle and sophisticated fictional entertainment. He does not disappoint in Vindication (Little, Brown), and if in this novel he has contrived a plot which is theatrical, we must admit that it is what in Times Square is termed pretty good theater. Freddy is one of those irresistible Don Juans whose attraction to women is something that is hard to put your finger on, but which nevertheless demonstrably exists. He is the sort of subduer of hearts whose heart women love to subdue, hence his conquests are numerous if impermanent. Gloria tags him for hers, and then decides to keep him as a vexed and discomfited Tantalus and marry Sir Norman Cartright instead, thus to give stilts to her social altitude. Freddy is not the man to be circumvented and so he contrives very devilishly that Gloria shall marry him, even if at the first skirmish that was not precisely his intention. A sweet, simple and naively adoring girl mends Sir Norman's broken heart with remarkably efficacious therapy. This is something of a blow to Gloria's vanity, and, for thinking of what her life with Sir Norman might have been like, she is remiss in her conjugal devotion to Freddy. To even matters, Freddy sets about seducing Sir Norman's wife in cold-blooded revenge. When Gloria discovers that the job doesn't begin to test Freddy's talents, so easy is it, she reasons that there must be in her husband many gifts worth cultivating; and so, when Sir Norman comes to shoot Freddy for the double wrong Freddy has done him, Gloria steps between the two men, and it is decided that Freddy and Gloria will show more respect for the Commandment about coveting anything that is thy neighbor's.

GARRULITIES of an Octogenarian Editor, by Henry Holt, (Houghton, Mifflin) is a wholly delightful book of rambling reminiscences by a veteran New York publisher, whose contacts included such men as Dickens, the Adamses, Mark Twain, and many notables in diplomatic and artistic circles. The first chapter in the book has to do with the factors contributing to Mr. Holt's long and vigorous life; but it omits what is probably the most important factor—Mr. Holt's innate, impish sense of humor.

N The Sands of Oro (Doubleday, Page), one of Miss Beatrice Grimshaw's most ravishing heroines lands in Papua to marry Charlie Holliday; but just as she eps off the boat, her heart beats in the wild agitation of love at first sight when she beholds the calm-handsome countenance of Mark Plummer. She marries Charlie, nevertheless; and when she is withdrawn into the wild interior as the colonial magistrate's wife, she has time to think of Mark's fine eyes. Exceptingher husband, the first white man she sees in many months is Mark, who has been sent to remove Holliday, under government orders, for malfeasance in office, having to do with illegal trading. Mark offers Holliday an opportunity to join in a treasure hunt on an unexplored island, and a good tale of adventure begins.

THERE are certain passages in Donald Ogden Stewart's Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind (Doran) which make me wish that Stewart had taken enough time and trouble over the book to see that it came off better as a whole. Those passages are where the tone is one of irony untouched by the misplaced curative zeal of satire and unbroken by the jarring tinkle of a cap-and-bells sort of forced comicality. The tone of irony is very difficult to sustain through a book, but rather than fail at sustaining it after once adopting it, it were better to limit the compass of its expression, or drop it altogether. Henry Adams entertained his first doubt concerning the Darwinian theory of evolutionary progress when he beheld Grant as the first citizen and first soldier of a republic which began with Washington. And Stewart wishes in this book to express a doubt that God's highest achievement in the long progress from arboreal to co-operative dwellings is the President of the First National Bank. Stewart makes his doubt amusing, but he shows, here and there, that he might have also made it wise and beautiful.

CYRIL HUME'S The Wife of the Centaur (Doran) has the faults and the virtues of a talented, passionate, and observing young man, who writes his first novel at twenty-three—just when the storm and stress of adolescence have begun to abate, but while the fevers of experience and honest doubts are still there to plague one without any mitigating humor. Sociologically speaking, The Wife of the Centaur shows what lives our college boys and girls are leading in the college generation which succeeded the comparatively innocent one of This Side of Paradise, though it is to be hoped that the whole generation will not follow the Centaur's decision that at twentythree one has already lived, and that after that age is reached, one should withdraw to one's study to correlate and synthesize these lived impressions and experiences into the enduring pages of literary art.

MY University Days (Boni&Liveright), by Maxim Gorky, is the third volume of an autobiography, two earlier portions of which Gorky has already given us in My Childhood and In the World. This book reveals the conflict of a quixotic idealist, brought up on romantic stories of heroic love and splendid deeds, with the most sordid and materialistic environment imaginable. Gorky's resolute asceticism, in a world of often bestial carnality and spiritual despair, would seem incredible if he had not the honesty to confess that he was pulled in two directions by fear and fascination, and thus kept apart as a spectator from the life in Czarist Russia he knew as a youth. There is a description of a Black Mass celebrated by depraved and verminous wretches, which is more terrible than the description of the Black Mass in Huysman's A Rebours. Gorky, I think, is more interesting as a personality than as a writer; his short stories are second or third rate; and his life story is worth more than all the rest he has written.