A German Classic--

A German Classic

He Tells the Story of His Fameward Climb

The Story. Hermann Sudermann, novelist and dramatist, one of the most significant and important figures in recent German literature, turns, in The Book of My Youth, to reminiscence, and sets down, at some length, the exterior and interior events of his life as far as the middle twenties.

Born on a farm in East Prussia, in a back room built on to a brewery, descended from Mennonite peasant stock, he was a delicate child whose bent for reading and things literary developed early. His mother, saving from her " milk money," managed to send him to school, where he proved neither a model boy nor a sissy, developed a passion for the theatre and had several timidly distant affairs of the heart, which never got beyond the dumbly adoring stage. When not yet 15, he, like Keats, became an apothecary's apprentice, but an injured knee forced him to give up the trade and he returned to school, and later went to the University of Koenigsberg. Meanwhile, he had become somewhat of an innocent lady-killer, but an experience with an anonymous married lady of easy virtue brought its not uncommon legacy of revulsion and bitterness. Already he wrote in secret.

At the University he fell easily into the beer-drinking, dueling, heavily jovial life of the student clubs. He was never able to drink more than 18 mugs of beer at a sitting, however. An attempt to conquer Berlin with his pen failed utterly--he went back to his father's farm--a failure--known everywhere as " the student who had wasted his time.'

Berlin again--utter poverty--furious labor, this time on a novel--failure once more--an attempt as a tutor -- as an actor -- as a tutor again, and this time an interval of peace, of what was almost luxury, as the protege of a rich banker. Then a deliberate return to the slums--the impulse to write--to probe into odd corners of life too strong to be denied. At last the edge of the precipice--no reasonable future in sight--abruptly followed by what proved salvation--the offered editorship of a new political weekly. The book ends there. " I was to be a politician and journalist until I had learned the Art of Writing to its limits. But then I was going back to writing, to writing novels or even plays."

The Significance. The Book of My Youth is a vivid and sincere picture of the arduous and unflinching struggle toward maturity of a powerful and independent personality. For the most part it may be fairly said to lack the charm and grace with which Anatole France, for instance, recounts his early years--the manner is solid rather than suave--much of the description, were it written of a fictitious character, would lack the fortuitous interest it attains from its concern with Sudermann himself.

The book can by no means be called dull--its portraiture of German life in town and country during the late sixties and seventies is faithful and exact--its description of a section of that international Grub Street on which nearly every writer of prominence in our day has earned difficult bread, while singularly lacking in bitterness is unflinchingly real.

The Author. Hermann Sudermann shares with Gerhart Hauptmann the perhaps dubious honor of being considered a contemporary classic by his own nation in his own time. He is chiefly famous as a novelist and dramatist and his reputation in both fields is international. Among his best known novels are Frau Sorge (Dame Care), Der Katzensteg (The Cats' Bridge) and Es War (It Was). His plays include Ehre (Honor), Es lebe das Leben (Long Live Life!) and Heimath, the last of which, under the name of Magda, is particularly familiar to English and American playgoers. Much of his work is available in English translations.

Mass Production

Good Reading Never Was Cheaper

Three hundred and fifty books for $16.90. Shakespeare, Dickens, Moliere, Byron, Tom Paine, Havelock Ellis--philosophy, history, literature, poetry--How to Live 100 Years, Rhyming Dictionary, Care of the Baby, How to Be an Orator. Step up, gennelmen'n laydeeez 'n take your pick! Any individual book for only fi' cents, a nickel, the twentieth part of a dollar! Ringmaster of and barker for this three-ring circus of literature: Mr. E. Haldeman-Julius of Girard, Kans.

Mr. Haldeman-Julius is an American of the Americans. He believes in quantity production, dominant advertising, bargain-sales, small individual profit but big turnover and all the rest of it. He has adapted the methods of Ford to the business of publishing.

His "University in Print"--350 small books, bound in heavy card cover stock, to sell at present for 5 cents the volume--is truly remarkable. The typography is not like that of the Oxford Press, but it is legible. The paper is fair. And the books themselves, in general, are unimpeachable, for they include many of the best known classics. On most of them, of course, the author's copyright has expired, so Mr. Haldeman-Julius does not have to bother about paying royalties. At this very moment he has three million of these books in stock.

Besides which, he publishes various scientific books, Haldeman- Julius Weekly, Life and Letters (a literary and educational magazine) and is about to bring out Know Thyself, a monthly " devoted to investigations of sex, health, psychoanalysis, psychology and science."

Nor is Mr. Haldeman-Julius unique in his field. The recently organized Kingsport Press, of Kingsport, Tenn., has established there a huge printing plant, with pulp and paper mill attached, to have a capacity of 250,000 copies a day. The Press's first order is an edition of 155,000 copies of the New Testament. After that it will turn to secular authors and produce a series including Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Fenimore Cooper--256 page books, printed on standard paper, bound in cloth covers and sold at a price as low as costs will allow.

The significance of all which industry to the average reader is-- what? This, briefly: Good reading never was cheaper, except for those who besiege the weary book clerk with cries of " I want a new book-- is this 'un really new?"

Zona Gale

One Moment She is Pollyanna, the Glad Girl; Another, Grandma Bett

In her latest novel, Faint Perfume, Zona Gale has slipped back slightly into the sentimental vein that characterized her earlier work--things like Friendship Village and Neighborhood Stories. There is fine writing in this last book; but it counts little when she allows herself to end it with a curiously mystical love story. Birth and Miss Lulu Bett were finely conceived stories, faithful in detail and written with a photographic accuracy that still preserved a certain measure of beauty. To meet Miss Gale is to realize the two distinct sides of her character. As a person, she is thoroughly charming in both moods. As an artist, she is annoyingly inconsistent.

Born in Portage, Wis., she has lived there most of her life, except while she was at the University of Wisconsin and in Manhattan working on The Evening World. As a newspaper woman, she was successful at writing the " sob-sister" variety of feature article. She was eager, ambitious, sympathetic. She had the ability to dramatize the optimistic side of events. She is the type that champions pacifisms avidly and has principles about kindness to animals. She worked night and day in New York until she had succeeded in gaining the attention of various editors for her poems and short stories. She then returned to Wisconsin, where she remains. Occasionally she arrives suddenly in town, sees her friends, produces a play (there are two, it is rumored, waiting in the Broadway offing now), indulges in a round of gaieties, then turns again to the native state and her charming mother.

Miss Gale is slight, delicate, pretty, shy but firm. She dresses inconspicuously. She is quiet in her gestures and her voice is soft. Yet she is exceedingly determined. She will derive great pleasure from such an emotional experience as helping a crippled boy to write, and finding in him something which is, presumably, quite beyond his actual talents. Yet she has a dry, detached manner of viewing life. At one moment she speaks with the accents of " Pollyanna,' the next with those of her own " Grandma Bett." She has taught herself to believe that life is sweet and beautiful; but she knows better than that. A writer of distinction, she has yet reached no stable ground. She is an artist only in part. Perhaps she is too much the woman to be the uncompromising craftsman. J. F.

Good Books

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

THESE UNITED STATES--Edited by Ernest Gruening--Boni & Liveright ($3.00). Twenty-seven Americans each consider the state with which by birth or residence he is best acquainted. The result shows how far --oh, how very far!--our present intellectuals have departed from the naive spread-eagleism that so shocked the sensibilities of Dickens and Mrs. Trollope. Poor eagle--he scarcely has a pinfeather left by the time that H. L. Mencken, William Allen White, Sherwood Anderson and their kind are through with him. The United States appears as a terrified lion in a den of extremely lusty and critical Daniels. Kansas is a Puritan survival, prosperous but joyless --Maryland, a dull- mediocrity--Michigan, Fordized and cheap--Southern California, a Gopher Prairie de luxe--in general, no good could ever be expected to come out of Nazareth. Too much of which produces in the reader, be he never so melancholic himself, an unconscious desire to wrap himself in the Stars and Stripes and burn candles to George M. Cohan.

BLACK ARMOUR--Elinor Wylie-- Doran ($1.50). A book of poems which combine the purest and most authentic lyric gift with an intelllectual acuteness as sharp and brilliant as the edges of a diamond. Seldom if ever in modern poetry has such high accomplishment been so amazingly sustained as in the 39 poems that compose this volume. Magic, gorgeousness, color, music, intellect, fancy--Mrs. Wylie has them all, and each in a degree sufficient to furnish out a dozen other poets with that one quality alone. The only adequate re-view of Black Armour possible would be to quote the contents entire.

DANGER--Ernest Poole--Macmillan ($2.00). Maud Brewer could not forget the war, and was not willing to let anyone else forget it. She was one of those people who are unwilling to let others be happy in their own way. The war had given her her one moment of greatness; its after-math found her pitiful, useless but dangerous--as dangerous to the normal lives around her as a machine-gun spraying a peaceful street. In the end the normal, the peaceful, the human, defeated her--but only after she had wrecked the life of her idolized brother and well-nigh destroyed his wife and his best friend as well. A searching study of some of the mental poisons that endanger individual men and women in particular and the peace of the world in general.

-- BOOK OF MY YOUTH--Hermann Sudermann--Harper ($2.25).