A Shelf of Recent Books

BURTON RASCOE

THE autobiography of Constantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art (Little, Brown), is one of moving simplicity. The now world famous director of the Moscow Art Theatre, the son of a rich manufacturer, was given exceptional educational and cultural advantages before he began his career as an actor and actor-director. The story of his boyhood and youth in Russia, with its intimate pictures of Russian family life is told with a charm rarely to be found outside of works of creative imagination written by literary artists of the first rank. The book gives a history of the Moscow Art Theatre; and it is rich in personal glimpses of the playwrights whose work was put on by the Moscow players. Chekhov, always joking and laughing, moves in and out of the scene until he becomes a familiar figure. The spirit of the Moscow Art Theatre is best revealed,

I think, by the incident Stanislavsky recounts when the whole company, with their wives and children, went to visit Chekhov when he was ill in the south of Russia and put on one of his plays for him there. Chaliapin, Dantchenko, Maeterlinck, Isadora Duncan, Gordon Craig and numerous other figures in various lines of artistic and cultural endeavour appear in these pages; but more interesting than what he has to say about others is what the idealistic, humble, gentle man of cultivated taste and refined sensibilities, Stanislavsky, has to say about himself and his pursuit of truth and beauty.

P. G. Wodehouse's Golf Without Tears (Doran) is a merry book about golf bugs. On the thinnest and most obvious of plots he has strung a series of ludicrous situations related in his merriest manner. Even if a reader loathed golf, he would be put into a healthy and happy mood by this book. Wodehouse's style is jaunty, conversational, good-humoured; his attitude toward life is always exuberant and gay, but never so bouncingly full of spirits as to be offensive.

HOUDINI'S A Magician Among the Spirits (Harper) is the most valuable and most interesting expose of spirit mediums and their tricks that has ever got into print. Houdini says, after explaining the methods whereby "psychic phenomena" are produced, that Sir Conan Doyle and many of the eminent scientists who believe in spiritualism are victims of the willto-believe, the dupes of men with a will-to-deceive. He reserves judgment in the matter of life after death and merely sets down that after many years of investigation he had found no evidence of communication between living persons and departed spirits. Having dismissed the mediums as charlatans, he finds his own expertness in trickery accounted for by J. Hewat McKenzie, president of the British College of Psychic Science, by his (Houdini's) possession of psychic powers, which he denies. The tricks by which he mystified McKenzie, Houdini writes, obey natural laws, and besides, McKenzie did not see what he thought he saw. The book is an extraordinary commentary on human credulity.

THOMAS BEER'S Sandoval (Knopf) is an exquisite romantic bit, presenting the life and manners of New York during the Reconstruction period, when Boss Tweed ruled and vulgarity flourished, most ' particularly among the dubious newrich. Beer is a writer with feeling for style and for literary good taste. He is one of the fewr of the younger writers engaged in promoting the tradition of gentility in American fiction. That tradition is not to be confused with its counterfeit so much in evidence in our literature before the vogue of realism and naturalism taught American readers that good literature is not modeled along the general lines of a celluloid Valentine.

SINCE the time James Branch Cabell swapped the sentiment of The Soul of Melicent for the irony of The Cream of the Jest and Maurice Hewlett turned from the times and peoples of his own imagination and took to transliterating the Norse sagas, there has been no better romanesque historical novel in English, I believe, than Isabel Paterson's The Singing Season (Liveright). The scene is the mercantile city of Cordova in Spain; the time, the late Middle-Ages; the hero, a forerunner of the great figures of the Renaissance; the plot, the conflict between the old ideas and the new. The hero is cast in truly heroic mould. Except that he is a man of action rather than a man of thought, a merchant prince, not an artist, the hero, Sigismund, reminds me of Leonardo in Merejeskowski's Leonardo da Vinci: he is a character who commands profound admiration and respect—a man without illusions about human nature, animated by ideas ahead of his times, playing a lone game of industrial power against a crumbling feudalism, a free man in his own right by virtue of intelligent self-interest, a clear vision, courage, shrewdness and charm. There is a love story involving Sigismund's daughter and the young priest who has charge of the souls of Sigismund's establishment, though the young priest is not aware that love rules his heart in his sincere preoccupation with the incorrigible little beauty's conduct. This love story so delightfully and sympathetically related, with tenderness and wit, might have sufficed for a novel by itself; but Mrs. Patersor has been as prodigal of dramatic incident in her beautiful novel as she has been careful of her prose style. It is a novel of genuine distinction, as far above the common run of cloak-and-sword romances as the novels of Dumas are above the novels of Sabatini. There is not a character in the book which is not envisioned with fine insight and portrayed with deft and telling touches. Mrs. Paterson has cleverness and humour and that necessary clairvoyance which sets the creative writer above the fiction carpenter. Her novel, it must be conceded, is one of the outstanding and striking works of fiction for the year.