New Books

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

THE GOLDEN BED--Wallace Irwin-- Putnam ($2.00) . When Flora Lee Peake lay down to sleep, in blanched linen cool and lavendered, four rosewood bedposts carved in the images of four great swans watched her dreaming face, and over her lay a coverlet of antique French lace pricked with a legend that one did not translate aloud. With Admah Holtz, things were otherwise. His white-trash father drank himself to death, day by day, in the cabin kitchen where Ma Holtz made peppermint-drops for her son to hawk in the streets. Sometimes the girls in Miss Martincastle's school patronized him, Flora Lee once among them. Having seen, Admah never forgot her. Her arrogant and perfumed phantom lived in his memory while he put the peppermints behind a counter, bought a candy store, a chain of them, became Candy Holtz, leading citizen. The Peakes went down the front stairs while he climbed up the back. The old mansion was put up at auction; he bought the bed and coverlet and sent them to Flora Lee, with his compliments. She married him for his money and went systematically about softening him, as tainted honey rots the oak that chambers it. He lost his wealth, she deserted him, then both followed their blood until he was a river front soak, and she, one gusty night, crept back back to die in the old house on Innes street under the coverlet whose motto was: "The dog for faithfulness, the pheasant for luxury, the swan for lust."

There is a happy ending, deftly provided, that does not matter. What does matter is a novel that presents almost perfectly a tragic, if common, social phenomenon--a novel with guts and sinew under its smooth skin of literary urbanity.

THE TATTOOED COUNTESS--Carl Van Vechten--Knopf ($2.00). Fleshy and fleshly, but not without wisdom, is the Countess Nattatorrini after 20 years of middle-aged self-indulgence. Sneaking a cigarette in the women's toilet-room of an Iowa-bound Pullman car (anno 1897), she reflects upon her frothy life as the widow of an Italian noble, upon opera, jewels, acquaintances raffinees no end, upon a hulking lover she kept all unfortunately. In Maple Valley, she is welcomed for having been baptized there. Ella Poore was her Main Street name and since she left there have sprung up a new depot, waterworks, brick paving. The Countess is euchred, kettle-drummed, lap-suppered, picnicked, violently bored in every small-town way. Then up turns Gareth Johns, curly-headed, 17, and articulate. She enfolds him in her ample eroticism, he in his hunger for the horizon. Off they go together to the everlasting hurt of Lennie Colman, Gareth's tragic schoolmarm. Village Parcae squawk the devil's chorus.

One feels kindly toward the author for having written The Tiger in the House Peter Whiffle and The Blind Bow Boy. But this Countess tale levies a supertax on one's patience, so full is it of bad writing mingled with good, of cheap, pink-necktied flatulence cluttered over real understanding.