Pirates and Flappers*

Animadversions on the Deplorable State of Today

The Story. Old Peter B. Kayne, "pirate emeritus," had piled up a colossal fortune and started his son Rufus where he left off. Thereupon, having got religion and put his rather flushed past as far as possible behind him, he was devoting his senility to the satisfying contemplation of the works he had wrought and to feeding the squirrels in Central Park.

Rufus Kayne, bearing his father's millions lightly, was fond of his wife whenever it occurred to him, and was, in short, an eminently reliable and extremely solvent Babbitt.

The children of Rufus are three--Diana, the eldest, is cold, fascinating, a little cynical, dangles her feet over innumerable precipices, and has always managed to pull them back in time; Claudia, the second daughter, is an instance of war-marriage in haste and equally hasty repentance; the youngest is Sheila, of the jazz age.

The Kaynes are early victims of their generation. Rufus becomes involved in a tangle of bad appearances, bad investments, blackmail, disgrace, resulting in his financial ruin.

Sheila, after a narrow escape from the drug habit, has an even narrower one from a so-called "Butterfly Club " conducted by a sticky Hindu pseudo yogi.

Claudia, after being dramatically rescued from her faithless English spouse, falls in love with her rescuer and is busily engaged in studying the somewhat involved international and interstate divorce laws when the rescuer goes blind and betakes himself to a school for disabled soldiers.

Diana is brought back to normalcy by the spectacle of the tragedy of Sheila. Finally she acquires a complete new soul by the convenient expedient of falling in love with Lloyd Haitian d, a somewhat insistently high-minded young lawyer, through whose disapproving eyes the author watches most of the iniquitous pageant of hip-flasks and jazz.

The end leaves everybody pretty badly off and presumptively the better for it. The catalog of the Kayne misadventures concludes when old Peter, while his house is being sold over his head, succumbs to apoplexy so violently as to rip away a tapestry revealing the words: Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it. Among other things, that is Mr. Train's text.

The Significance. It is a dark world that Mr. Train sees. He is not content with regarding the age as one of irreverence in the very young or stagnation in the very old. He grants freely that the young are irreverent and the old are stagnant. But he goes further. He sees this as an age of decadance, of sham, of sensuality, of materialism.

The field of his Jeremiad is broad. It is something of a technical feat that Mr. Train has managed to juggle three generations, three different plots, and any number of different social criticisms simultaneously.

The Critics. The book has been generally estimated as its author's best novel. Certainly it is his most pretentious. Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls it a "new Vanity Fair" in the course of an extravagant eulogy.

The Author. Arthur Train is a small man, keenly alive to the world about him. He is married, has three daughters and one son. His home is in New York. He is a Harvard graduate, a lawyer, and has passed some tune as Assistant District Attorney of New York. Among his earlier works are The World and Thomas Kelley, The Goldfish, True Stories of Crime, The Earthquake (war book), Tutt and Mr. Tutt (short stories). He is a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post.

Some books to have read: Many Marriages (Anderson); Black Oxen (Atherton); Things That Have Interested Me (Bennett); The Enchanted April (Elizabeth); Faint Perfume (Gale); The Middle of the Road (Gibbs).

Book Collecting

The Older and Dirtier, the More Expensive

There are several reasons for collecting old books. One--in some respects the most intriguing--is that they are worth a lot of money. Unhappily there is also to be considered the related fact that they cost a lot unless one is gifted with "flair"--the knack of picking them out of dusty attics or from the clutches of imbecile second-hand dealers. And one usually is not gifted with "flair."

By the simple expedient of calling up a book-seller de luxe, telling him to select you a library, signing a check crowded with zeros, purchasing a fireproof safe lined with shelves, you may acquire Shakespeare folios, pages torn from Gutenberg Bibles, Kelmscott Chaucers, and illuminated manuscripts by the truck load. This is the most practical way of becoming a collector instantaneously.

The only other way is to do your own collecting. And your only purpose in so doing must be that you like having the books. It may be that you are a scholar, and take a naive delight in contemplation of the comma that was misprinted in the first edition and corrected out of all subsequent ones. Or you may sentimentally rejoice in the reflection that the first owners of the volume in your hands wore knee-breeches and powdered wigs, and were contemporaries of its author. In other words, you may not want the 20th century to shove its typographical nose into your reading of a 16th or 17th century volume.

If you know that that copy of Chapman's Homer was the one which Keats first looked into before writing the sonnet called On Looking Into Chapman's Homer, or that that dark smudge on the otherwise immaculate volume yonder once formed part of Milton's Sunday breakfast, the whole business takes on new aspects.

The collection of books has at least this advantage over any other kind-- stamps for example: even if you lose interest in the collection, as such, there is always one last resort--you can read the books. Stamps make very dry reading, and you can't go on indefinitely licking them.

Recent books by the following authors are now current: Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Atherton, Jacinto Benavente, Arnold Bennett, A. E., Elizabeth, Zona Gale, Philip Gibbs, Zane Grey, H. Rider Haggard, Vachel Lindsay, George Jean Nathan, E. P. Oppenheim, George Santayana, and Arthur Train.

Eddie Guest

Ford's Favorite, He Sings and Sells Tears and Red, Red Love

What American poet so great, so heralded, so powerful that he can move huge audiences of very strong men to tears? What poet is it who is met at railroad trains by the town band? To whom politicians bow? Whose ditties sailors carry in their packets? Whom baseball players revere ? Before whom prizefighters are as little children? "We have no Homer, minstrelling through the land," you reply. Ah, but we have our Eddie Guest, and he cannot be denied.

This balladist of the Middle West, whose books sell millions of copies, is as representative of the great sentimentality of America, as the Ford car is of our thrift. He writes of tears and heartaches, of virtue rewarded, and of red, red blooded love. He represents beauty to the multitude, and to the multitude beauty is too often artificial flowers, but how important to them! Mr. Guest's poems will be forgotten tomorrow; but as ballads of the times they cannot be neglected. His collected poems, under the revealing title The Passing Throng, will be published this season. All along Main Street men who never even heard of Robert Frost will be reading Edgar A. Guest.

It is curious that so American a bard as Mr. Guest, singer of motherhood, should have been born in England. Such is the case; and he was born, moreover, in Birmingham. At the age of ten, however, he was transplanted to Detroit, a town somewhat similar in atmosphere to Birmingham. There he almost immediately went to work for the Detroit Free Press, with which paper he has been associated ever since. A romantic career, surely, for his rise has been from menial jobs to the height of fame--in journalism at least.

Eddie Guest in his office is a delight. Short, stocky, vital, with none of the manners of the British Isles, and plenty of the breeziness of the Middle West, he shows you his books with pride and talks of his work with high seriousness. I just managed to catch hold of his coattails and detain him for a few moments. This respite was doubtless between the writing of a syndicate poem and the sending out of a radio broadcast. He then took me for a ride in the Ford car which was presented to him by the great manufacturer himself. Riding with Eddie Guest in Detroit is almost like walking down Fifth Avenue with Douglas Fairbanks.

Good Books

The following estimates of books most in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT--Grant Overton--Doran ($2.00). There is a curious sort of magic in this book. It tells about the adventures of a poor girl stranded in New York alone, her struggles and her loves. Always more is told than a mere series of episodes. There is an inner reality that makes the narrative extraordinarily gripping. It is a hard book to set down and a hard one to get out of your mind.

THE INTERPRETERS--A. E.--Macmillan ($1.65). A. E. (George Russell), brilliant Irish poet-journalist-philosopher, unites mystic philosophy and practical politics. The Interpreters is a platonic dialogue between a poet, an anarchist, a labor leader, an historian, a despot. The theme of their discussion, broadly, is the relation of "the politics of time to the politics of eternity."

TRODDEN GOLD--Howard Vincent O'Brien--Little, Brown ($2.00). Mr. O'Brien has an unaccountable grudge against money. On almost every page he takes a nasty crack at it. The story is of two girls, one of whom married a man who quickly became rich. The other married a chemist to whom Science was all and Mammon a despicable deity. A penetrating study of the problem of money and why not to want it.

A BEACHCOMBER IN THE ORIENT--Harry L. Foster--Dodd, Mead ($3.00). The Beachcomber's wanderings take him through Borneo, Siam, French Indo-China, Japan, the Malay States, the Philippines, under freight cars, and among types seldom met at first-hand in the pages of books. The volume is illustrated.

PICTURE FRAMES--Thyra Samter Winslow--Knopf ($2.50). This is a volume of short stories told with a complete command of detail. The best is called A Cycle of Manhattan. It tells how and by what gradual stages the Rosenheimers became the A. Lincoln Rosses, migrating from rooms over a Macdougal Street stable to Riverside Drive, Park Avenue, the East Sixties, and finally back again to the Macdougal Street rooms.

A HANDBOOK OF COOKERY FOR A SMALL HOUSE--Jessie Conrad (With a preface by Joseph Conrad)--Doubleday ($1.75). Joseph Conrad offers himself "modestly and gratefully as a Living Example" of his wife's art. Her style, lacking the richer beauties of his, has a toothsome directness. The following excerpt is characteristic: "The best plan is to soak the head in a bowl of cold water and a little salt all night, previously removing the brains." The quotation is from a fanciful essay entitled "Calf's Head."

* His Children's Children -- Arthur Train--Scribner's ($2.00).