Books and Other Hors d'Oeuvres

A Somewhat Personal Reaction to the Season's Books and Authors

ERNEST BOYD

WHEN fewer books were published, life was obviously less complicated than it is to-day, when few of us have either the time to read a fraction of what comes out, and fewer still have the courage to admit that they have not even glanced at the particular volume that is exciting momentary enthusiasm.

I long since reached the conclusion that it would be wiser for me to develop a personal point of view in such matters rather than attempt desperately to scramble after the procession of what "everybody" is reading. A great help in this connection is, not the unfavorable, but the favorable comments that books arouse. If a person who obviously likes a book impresses me with its probable mediocrity, I am more convinced that I shall not like it than I should be were that person hostile. I have heard no word of adverse comment on Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (Harcourt). It is now in its fourth printing and "Leora is one of the sweetest characters in all fiction." What more could you want, especially if you liked Babbitt and Main Street, for persons as dissimilar as H. L. Mencken and Dr. Stuart P. Sherman agree that Arrowsmith is better than either?

WELL, all that I want is everything different,—to wit, a different story on a different theme and one in which I am interested. The noble lives of doctors—of some doctors—inspire in me the same respect that I have for the Fire Department. But, as I do not want to read a novel with a fireman hero, I am also uninterested in the medical hero. Moreover, the best authorities assure me that the dramatic interest of Arrowsmith lies in the struggle of the devoted scientist, thinking only of his faith and mission, against the routine, the political graft, the social temptations, the commercial seductions, and the human inertia which, in medicine, as in other professions, usually overcome or undermine the majority of those who start out with ideals. In order to make all this technically sound, Mr. Lewis has been assisted by Dr. Paul de Kruif, a clever fellow and a congenial companion, but desperately learned in his profession, of which I know nothing. Wedges of his learning have been incorporated into Mr. Sinclair's narrative, and I am told by an eminent layman, with an endless appetite for medical jargon and mysteries, that even he finds it hard going. Mr. Sinclair is too skilled an advertising man not to make some showing in the adaptation of knowledge supplied by an expert to the requirements of ignoramuses like myself. But, alas, I do not trust our brilliant ads, lovely as the prose is in which they arc couched.

I prefer, at a pinch, to read Prisoners (BobbsMerrill), the first novel of Molnar's to appear in English. It disposes, of course, of the notion that Molnar is an intellectual giant, whom one must abandon to the profound excogitations of the Younger Intellectuals. The more I see and read of Molnar the more certain I am that he has no esoteric function, but supplies a good entertainment for those who wish to be entertained. In Prisoners what is called a "fluffy cashier"—you know the kind—steals money, out of love for a young lawyer, and thereby precipitates a scries of crises which come along rapidly, without a moment of psychologising or explanation of states of inner consciousness. Yet, the concatenation of circumstances is such that the whole story evolves swiftly and beautifully.

On the other hand, if states of consciousness arc desired by your soaring ambition, you may immerse yourself in Herbert Gorman's Gold by Gold (Liveright). The Boston Watch and Ward Society, perhaps taking its cue from a critic who declared this book more obscene than James Joyce's Ulysses, has caused it to be booklegged in that city. Here it is on sale unimpeded and will reward those in search of an American parallel to the "interior monologue" and other methods employed by Joyce. The hero is a poet who shrinks from the harsh impacts of commercial American civilization and drifts into one of New York's intellectual slums. It is a book you may safely borrow from your younger daughter without shocking her sense of the proprieties.

READERS of The Green Hat will recall the London editor in it named Horton whose diminutive office is described by Michael Arlcn. An affecting scene was part of the beloved Michael's triumphant progress through this country to which I may refer in this connection. I had not seen Michael Arlcn since the days when, as Dikran Kouyoumdj ian, he began to write on Armenia, Shelmerdene and other unrelated topics in The New Age, of which "Horton," otherwise A. R. Orage, was editor. So, at his suggestion, I collected Mr. Orage, who is living in New York preaching the gospel of Gurdjieff and "the harmonious development of man", having in the interval retired from the New Age to the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau, and we lunched in memory of old times. Those were times, by the way, when Mr. Arlcn and the Turcophil English novelist, Marmaduke Pickthall debated fine points of etiquette concerning the massacring of Armenians. I notice that Pickthall's famous novel, Said the Fisherman, is announced in Alfred A. Knopf's "Blue Jade Library," which has started off with a volume of Stendhal and Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques, which the ladies profess to find agreeably risque.

Marmaduke Pickthall was a contributor to The New Age under Orage, whose brilliance as an editor cannot be exaggerated. Katherine Mansfield, who died, as you will remember, at the Fontainebleau Institute, was one of his greatest discoveries, which included a remarkable list of contributors from Arnold Bennett to W. L. George. Paul Solver was one of the group, and he, too, has described The New Age and its editor in Schooling (Boni); for this polyglot translator of Capek has turned to fiction, after turning the poetry and fiction of almost every country in Europe into English. He has drawn a sardonic picture of the life led in those weird English schools which describe themselves as designed "for the sons of gentlemen," and which are tenth-rate imitations of the great English public schools. There is a not too gentle portrait of Ezra Pound, but otherwise Schooling is lacking in interest for American readers unfamiliar with the conditions.

SCOTT Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Scribner) has "arrived," but without any of those adventitious aids to immortality which were acceptable in his early work, but which could not be prolonged indefinitely. There is more maturity here and none of the "smartness" which he himself came to deplore; the author has grown up and his friends—and also, I imagine, his admirers—have cheered up at the immense stride he has taken. In a letter from Rome he tells me that he is "$99,000.00 short of the $100,000.00" which he went into exile in order to save. The Great Gatsby looks as if it might do something towards bringing about that consummation, so creditable to the ambition of the author. I hope that, by the time he gets home, the supply of Mr. Buckner's padlocks will have run out. Meanwhile, one can get the book, and it is "real stuff."

Every reader of George Moore's Hail and Farewell should acquire a copy of Tales of Old Ireland and Myself (Holt), by Sir William Orpen, R. A. If you read "Billy" Orpen's superb Onlooker in France (Holt), you will know the sort of flavor he can give to his memories of men, women and .... drinks, for, sad as it may seem, Sir William's devotion to the "pubs" and bars of his home town, Dublin, is as essential a part of him as the fine, characteristic pictures and sketches with which the book is illustrated. Or pen's Dublin is Moore's Dublin, but with the "low" life thrown in, and much contemptuous mockery of the intelligentsia. He tells how, when he was an art student there, a nude model was procured for the first time. There was breathless excitement outside the locked door behind which Signorina Esposito prepared to expose her naked body, but when the champing students were allowed in, it did not seem to them— certainly not to Orpen—that the authorities were intent upon glorifying the Irish girl. They all set to work; and after a while, the model was invited to rest. During the intermission, however, the lady, on being asked if she spoke English, replied in the worst Dublin accent ever heard: "Oh, indeed I can. Me father tried to teach me Italian, but I couldn't take the trouble to learn the b— language."

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Orpen prefers the bare legs of the western peasant girls flashing under their red petticoats to Angelina Esposito, whose body was "marred by countless spots, as if she had been in an altercation with a wasp's nest." And he preferred to the tea and cakes of the literati "the long low room in Rahill's pub at Blanchardstown, lit by one oil lamp," sitting "with the boys on a barrel of porter," talking of "strange things, things that make you wonder a lot," then shambling "out into the black night, stumbling and wondering still more." His recollections include most of the people whom Moore has immortalized and others of his own choice: Synge and Lady Gregory and Moore and Oliver Gogarty and Sir Hugh Lane, and Sarah Purser, who will ever be remembered as the author of the epigram, "Some men kiss and tell; George Moore tells but doesn't kiss." I can sec her curious house as Orpen describes it, in the middle of town, yet with pasture lands within its garden walls. If Orpen had not been first and foremost a great painter, he might have written the book on Dublin which one gets only fragmentarily in Hail and Farewell and Ulysses. This book has its niche between George Moore and James Joyce in the chronicle of Dublin.

You can see a sketch of the artist with his brother having "a, pint at Davey Byrne's," a pub which James Huneker apparently found by instinct, for its joys were sung by him in New Cosmopolis and souvenirs of Anna Pavlova are in the text and in the sketch on the notepaper of Jammet's Restaurant, "where the food is double as good as in any other place in the city." "What memories the place calls up—Oliver Gogarty, Sinclair, Professor Tyrell, Anna Pavlova, Kummel frappe, and an endless stream of whisky and soda," with lovely ladies, during Horseshow Week, from "Leicester Square, or even one or two from Montmartre." Sir William Orpen, R. A. once more shows himself a boon companion and a man of wit and taste. I vow that this is not mere Dublin patriotism!