New Books

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

THE DARK CLOUD--Thomas Boyd-- Scribners ($2.00). Because the skipper used to lick him, Hugh Turner ran away from his ship at Quebec, got down to Detroit by river. He met a man named Durham who was a gambler and decent and who in his spare moments punched tickets on the Under- ground Railway, the Negroes' accommodation train. They made out pretty well together, keeping away from Federal officers, until one day a Southern gentleman shot Durham in a card game. After that Hugh shipped on the Bald Eagle with Captain Hargusson and went up and down the Mississippi. That is about all. Mark Twain, conjurer, used to tell about the Mississippi; and every page or two, he would come out from behind his screen and have a cigar with the reader--or a drink, maybe. Mr. Boyd does not use tobacco, in a literary way. His style is as impersonal as the river, and as grave. But, on that unlaughing surface, a boat is reflected, slipping down the river under a moon like a golden poker chip; people on board eating, drinking, fighting, making love--ladies in lace pantaloons--bad men with aces in their cuffs--all dead, long ago.

KEEPING THE PEACE -- Gouverneur Morris -- Scribners ($2.00). Edward Eaton's maternal parent was known in her family as "dear Mother." She was a sweet, soft and pious woman, whose sweetness drove one son to follow the sea, whose softness bred moral degeneracy in another, whose piety did its best to force Edward, an artist of sorts, into the clergy. This jauntily unpleasant book is an attack upon a type of woman to which the term Victorian has often been applied, always inaccurately, since lust, ignorance and bigotry are not the peculiar property of any particular period.

PALLIETER -- Felix Timmermans -- Harper ($2.00). Bursting with healthy blood and full-blown appetites, Pallieter, simple, lighthearted Flemish farmer, wallows joyously in Life-- snuffing its smells, slobbering over its flavors, smacking his thighs over its rich sensations. He swims naked at dawn in his river, cries over the beauties of sunsets and spring flowers, rides a huge mare bareback through a thunderstorm, rolls exulting in new snow on Christmas morning, devours gigantic meals, gulps down gallons of wine and other drinkables. The story--what there is of it--covers that year of Pallieter's life when he found Marieke, a rosy Rubens virgin, married her straightaway, had by her a lusty set of triplets, departed with her into the wide world "as the birds do and the wind." Suspense and tragedy are wholly absent from the book.

Author' Timmermans just shouts aloud, in an excess of good spirits, that life at Mother Nature's breast is a glutton's feast for body, mind and soul. It is grand philosophy, stirring tonic for city-pale people. Author Timmermans is Belgian, his gusto unfeigned. The illustrator, Anton Pieck, contributes fetching garnitures, one per page.

Michael Arlen

He Is the Harold Bell Wright of Sophisticates

Occasionally an author really shoots across the sky with all the brilliance and success of a comet. Such an author, it seems to me, is Michael Arlen (Dikran Kuyunijian--American spelling). You may like his books--or they may annoy you. At least they are arresting; they have caused a sensation in England and are rapidly becoming the thing to talk of in America.

Rapidly, we are coming into a wave of the purely artificial. Wasn't this inevitable after the muddy baths of realism and naturalism into which we were plunged of late? It is the crisp phrase, the daring image, the subtly concealed idea that demands our atten-tion--and Arlen, with none of the prurient phrases of Van Vechten nor the difficult nuances of Huxley, is like to become the Harold Bell Wright of the hypersophisticated.

Arlen's life is semidetached, like his characters in These Charming People and The Green Hat. He has a gesture of romance, even in the accident of birth. Is it not strange that so many foreigners bring to the English lan- guage a style that, while thoroughly English, has a touch of color in world-grouping that makes it richer than much purely native writing? Arlen was born on the Danube and moved to England when he was quite young. He went to school fitfully, was educated partly in Switzerland, came back to London and was exceedingly gay. He danced, dined, traveled and indulged in some quiet writing. That he takes his writing lightly is not true. He has been known to destroy a novel that he did not believe to be up to his standard. Only think of that--destroying a novel!

I have never met Mr. Arlen; but he is arriving presently (in November, I think) in America. I shall meet him with pleasure and expect to be destroyed immediately by an epigram!

J.F.