Mixed Motives*

Seven Autopsies on a Battlefield of Mangled Reputations

On his first encounter with the buckwheat cake Arnold Bennett is supposed to have remarked: "I say, it isn't half so rotten as it looks!" This is the impression which Mr. Bradford sets out to give of these seven--as he admits--"paley damaged" and very miscellaneous souls. He makes no attempt to acquit them of their faults, but by showing the light in which they saw themselves, the damage seems more the result of circumstance than of intent.

There is only one thing, says the author, on which the souls could have agreed: " That an insignificant, impertinent, treacherous biographer should dare to group them under such an infamous title."

BENEDICT ARNOLD. An intrepid and an able soldier. (" Perhaps it was vanity that made him so, but war can put up with a lot of vanity of that description.") Likewise he was an intrepid and an able spender. His merit unrewarded, his vanity injured, his purse empty, he deliberately turned traitor.

THOMAS PAINE. "Oh what fun it is to be a rebel," says Mr. Bradford. Paine "was a commonplace rebel, entirely practical." Not educated, not a deep thinker, lacking humor, but a master of burning words with a splendid ardor for democratic ideals. Mr. Bradford sums up the case for Paine and his detractors: "Here is a man who upset the world and you say he did not brush his clothes."

AARON BURR. " He was a man who came into the world to amuse himself." He loved people and people loved him--especially women. A spendthrift--something between a Chesterfield and Falstaff. He lost the presidency of the United States by a hair's breadth, he lost the governorship of New York, he lost, he lost, he lost--finally even the use of his limbs. But he enjoyed it all, because life was his game.

JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE. Here was a Mr. Facing-Against-Both-Ways. "He opposed all parties, all movements and pretty much all men." Washington, both Adamses, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Clay--in time he stood against them all. A withering eye, a "ghostly, blighting . . . long, lean forefinger," an acid tongue, an irritable nature--for 30 years in the House of Representatives, "he was a furious negative."

JOHN BROWN. Like Burr, a man of many schemes, most of them failures; unlike Burr, intent on one end--believing that he had a divine mission. Kindly to animals, kindly to his family, but dominating both and willing to sacrifice them for his purpose, he stirred up a revolt apparently not knowing exactly how he was to succeed, and died on the scaffold believing he was serving his cause.

PHINEAS TAYLOR BARNUM. He did not love money, but he worshipped success. Frank, vulgar, honest, honestly a humbugger, a lover of laughter, and almost unacquainted with wit. In his own phrase: "Without printer's ink, I should have been no bigger than Tom Thumb."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BUTLER. He chose his friends poorly, and their peculations smirched his name. He was in favor and out of favor with equal facility--in favor by his mastery of words, and out of favor because of the transactions which attached to his name.

The Significance. Damaged reputations concern men. Damaged souls concern the gods. But it is pleasant at times to play god, and, with Mr. Bradford, set out to examine what souls accompany damaged reputations. These seven essays are not little biographies--they are character sketches. Historical data are dismissed as a rule in a few short paragraphs. In this respect Bradford is like Strachey, but he has not Strachey's reticent humor--and yet is fairer, showing each man as he saw himself.

The Author. Although best known on account of the unique position among biographers which he has won by his series of "portraits" (Confederate Portraits, Portraits of Women, American Portraits, etc.), Gamaliel Bradford has also published volumes of essays and poems. When a young man he entered Harvard College, but was compelled by ill health to leave almost immediately. He is now 60 years old, and lives at Wellesley Hills, Mass.

Translators

Perhaps They Will Be Rewarded in Heaven Translators, good ones, let us hope, will occupy Box Office seats in the literary Elysium. They are certainly seldom well rewarded on earth.

Bad and incompetent translators, on the other hand, should also receive their fit portion in another and juster existence. They are the very boll-weevils of the writing world, and, as shades, should be forced to listen to an infinite succession of bed-time stories, broadcasted from Central Gehenna Station, through all eternity.

But good translators! How many of us, in reading an English version of a foreign book, give more than casual thought to the translator thereof?

And yet, translating is a highly laborious and difficult task--how difficult any one who has ever labored over Caesar's celebrated bridge, sans trot, should remember. And good translating calls for extreme intelligence and delicacy, for the " feel" of two languages and a certain love of both and of the book itself. The love, indeed, is essential, for excellent translating is, in most cases, well nigh a labor of love. The prices paid for it are pitifully small, considering the qualities demanded.

The wonder really is, not that we should have such a number of bad translations, but that we should have any good ones at all. And yet, we have. The past few months have seen the American publication of two translations of the first rank from the French--Scott-Moncrieff's translation of Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust, and Ben Ray Redman's translation of Jean Giraudoux's Suzanne and the Pacific.

A few translators--we are speaking of those who make translation their main occupation, not of such occasional translators as Shelley, say, or Scott--have attained a genuine celebrity upon translation alone. Gilbert Murray, of course, is almost unique among those who are rather transcribers, in a way, than actual, line-for-line translators. Alexander Teixera de Mattos is justly remembered, on the one hand, for his translations of Maeterlinck, on the other for his versions of Arsene Lupin. Louise Garnett's translations of Dostoieffski have brought her deserved and discriminating praise. But, in general, the translator is reduced to the scraps that fall from the critical table. "The translation seems adequate," cautiously, from a reviewer whom it might take three months and a private tutor to read the original--that sort of thing.

As we say, translators may and should be rewarded in heaven. It is up to the reading public, though, to see that they receive some sort of appreciation on earth. S. V. B.

Heywood Broun

He Likes Baseball, Likes Poker: His Tastes are Average

Heywood Broun is as much a phenomenon in American letters as any other man of whom I can at this moment think. Sport writer, feature writer, dramatic critic, columnist, essayist, novelist--he does all of these things, if not artistically, certainly successfully. His column in The New York World is followed avidly. His first novel, The Boy Grew Older, was received with some critical praise. One book of essays from the pen achieved a healthy sale. In my opinion, he is great only as a journalist; but as a journalist he is indubitably great.

What is his quality? What is this element of greatness? To meet Mr. Broun is to understand, partly at least, his gift as a writer. Large, shambling, often ill at ease, kindly, yet with that curious detachment which marks those who are much absorbed in their own thought, he invariably impresses one by his childlike eagerness. This is the fundamental characteristic of a great reporter, I judge. The world, as it appears to him each morning, is a new world. Events come to him as great God-given phenomena at which he gazes not with the eyes of a visionary but with the naivete of the fourteen-year-old child which represents the reading public. Add to this naivete of Mr. Broun's a curiously gentle sympathy for mankind, and a thorough disrespect for snobbery, and you have the man. His opinion of a play is likely to be very near that of the average theatregoer. His tastes are those of the average man. He likes baseball. He likes poker. His new novel is to be a novel of baseball. He is calling it, I think, The Sun Field. It will describe the love of a highly intellectual lady for a highly physical gentleman of the diamond. That we shall be able to recognize most of the persons of the book, I am sure.

Broun was born in Brooklyn. He was a student at Harvard. He has served most of his life on newspapers. His wife is Miss Ruth Hale. His child is well known to the public through Broun's own writings as " H 3rd."

To write a sketch of Heywood Broun without mentioning his clothes would be unique. His clothes are just that--unique. Altogether, he is thoroughly American, the best example I know of the sublimation most of the characteristics which are best in that most individual of products--the newspaper reporter. J. F.

Good Books

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

THE CLUE OF THE NEW PIN--Edgar Wallace--Small, Maynard ($1.90). Jesse Trasmere, an eccentric millionaire who made his money in China, is murdered in a vault which has no exit whatever except one door, locked from the inside. The only key of that door lies on the table near his body. The sole apparent clue to the murder is a new pin found on the floor of the vault. Suspicion falls upon various characters in turn--a beautiful actress--a former partner of Trasmere's now turned dope-fiend--Trasmere's valet--and so on. The explanation, when it comes, is ingeniously simple and highly unexpected.

SUNWISE TURN--Madge Jenison--E. P. Dutton ($2.00). Some seven years or so ago two women with little capital and no experience in bookselling whatsoever, with nothing but a devotion to good books and a desire for a bookshop of a species that they had never found before, started an original bookstore in New York City--a bookstore called the Sunwise Turn. At present, the Sunwise Turn is one of the most successful as well as one of the most individual smaller bookstores in America. This is the story of how it has become so--of its struggles, failures and successes--intelligent bookselling, intelligently and humorously described. The book is amusing and interesting enough in itself for any ordinary reader--to anyone who has ever dabbled or intended to dabble in the difficult trade of selling books, it is crammed with the most valuable sort of information.

DESOLATE SPLENDOR--Michael Sadleir--Putnam ($2.00). Here is all the mechanism of a mid-Victorian thriller, set forth in a suavely rococo style, at times a trifle suggestive of Bulwer-Lytton--a Ouida plot elaborated with deliberate ornateness. The wicked Earl paints his eyelids. The innocent ward of a charming ex-roue, Charles Plethern, is nearly entrapped into an infamous bargain by Plethern's monstrous mother. The last, by the way, is an admirable character--a sleek, powerful woman who collects Rops etchings and erotic playing-cards and lives in a tower shudderously spoken of as the Devil's Candle. But, in spite of evil machinations, virtue triumphs at last.

The book is well worth reading for its style and its experimental value as an attempted revival of the romance of another day.

* DAMAGED SOULS--Gamaliel Bradford--Houghton Mifflin ($3.00).