Peasants*

Cows, Vodka, Acres, Potatoes, Soil, Love, Hate

Ladislas St. Reymont (TIME, Nov. 24) was awarded the 1924 Nobel prize for literature. Publisher Alfred Knopf sighed contentedly, poured forth a generous libation to the partial goddess of chance, bestirred himself to call the attention of the curious public to the fact that he had just, with commendable prevision, published the first of four parts of Ladislas St. Reymont's chief work. "Autumn, volume one of The Peasants," said Publisher Knopf some weeks ago, "would appear to be undoubtedly the greatest Polish novel of the Century." The award of the Nobel Prize goes far to support its publisher's pronunciamento.

The Story is of minor importance. Matthias Boryna was a man of substance, full of years but unbowed by them, strong as an ox, hard as a rock. In 60 odd years as a husbandman, Boryna had buried two wives; but the death of his second left him not averse to yet another union particularly as things were not going well on his land. His favorite cow died. His children, married and single, were ever on the watch for what they could get out of him.

Yagna, a neighbor's daughter, was strong as any man, with a milky complexion and a passionate fondness for adornment. The village tongues wagged and the hearts of the village swains were stirred. Constantly they sent to her "proposers." (When a Polish peasant wishes to propose, he sends two friends with vodka to the lady of his choice. If she drinks to him, they are assumed to be affianced.) Yagna bestowed her heart nowhere, and her shrewd mother had not yet seen fit to bestow her hand.

What more natural than that Boryna, prosperous farmer that he was, should in his turn send proposers to the most charming and one of the most generously dowried maidens of the town? In any case, he did; and Dominikova, the grasping mother, approved the match on condition of a settlement of six acres on the bride. Yagna herself, unenthusiastic but docile, consented.

Fierce protest was raised by the offspring of Boryna, quick to object to the bestowal of property which they regarded as rightly theirs on a girl already the object of envy and the target of scandal. The protest of Antek, son of Boryna, was intensified by the fact that he, too, loved the girl who was now robbing him not only of her body, but of his own substance.

Yagna began to feel ill at ease. Old men croaked dubious warnings as to the ominous consequences of the mating of youth with age. But the wedding went on.

While the wedding-guests danced and laughed, and the vodka flowed like water, Boryna's farm was the scene of piteous, hidden tragedy. Honest Kuba, servant of Boryna, had been induced by the Jew Yanka, his creditor, to poach on the Manor. The forest-keeper had shot him in the leg, and he had not dared tell until the night of the wedding when his agony became unbearable. Drunken Ambrose, examining the wound, told him that amputation at the hospital was his only hope. Kuba, companioned only by a dog, lay in the stable, listening to the sounds of feasting and merriment, to the wedding-guests too busy with laughter and drinking to heed him. Terrified at thought of the hospital, he took matters into his own hands. He ground an ax to a sharp edge, placed his leg on the threshold, chopped twice, severed it at the knee.

At last the wedding feast drew to a close, with a final song. "It was then that Kuba laid his soul at the sacred feet of Lord Jesus . . ."

The Significance. This first part of St. Reymont's epic of the soil is "a panorama of the whole round of peasant life, a brilliant picture of Polish nature ... the tragic sense of the elemental forces which dominate the efforts of the tillers of the soil." The work is truly epic in its scope, a carefully worked, heroic pattern. It is a sweeping view of Poland, ground under the imperial heel of Russia.

The Author. St. Reymont was born in 1868 in what was then Russian Poland. His family was large, poor, patriotic. His mother and her five brothers took part in the Polish insurrection of 1863 against Russia. He, too, is a patriot. He has been telegraph operator, actor, railway clerk, farmer, even spent months in a Paulist monastery. His complete works comprise 28 volumes of novels and short stories.

The Author of Jurgen

STRAWS AND PRAYER-BOOKS--James Branch Cabell--McBride ($2.50). All life, Mr. Cabell points out, is a pleasant fiction. "No child plays with a straw: he brandishes a sword. . . . The young man, exultant, terrified, touches and uncovers, not an expanse of epidermis and small hairs and sweat glands, but the body of a goddess . . . and the aged clasp not a prayer-book but the key to eternal bliss." "Reflection finds the circumstance unfortunate that most of the agreeable actions of life are either forbidden or else deplorably behedged with restrictions."

Donn Byrne, author of Messer Marco Polo, Anatole France, Joseph Hergesheimer Mr. Cabell enjoys at least in part because he sees in them "the artist who labors primarily to divert himself." And that, says Mr. Cabell, is why he and all other artists create beautiful things beautifully.

This book is the Epilog to the Biography of which each of his novels, he insists, is a chapter. The Prolog, it will be recalled, was Beyond Life. Mr. Cabell's adroit pen and urbane intelligence have lost none of their skill in the years intervening between the two volumes.

Decadence

THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT-- Ronald Firbank -- Brentano ($2.00). Until quite recently it has been easy to tell the casual reader from the sophisticated initiate into the secret corners of esoteric literature. All you had to do was to say "Have you read Ronald Firbank?" If he hadn't, you just raised a single disillusioned eyebrow and condescendingly turned the conversation to Harold Bell Wright or H. G. Wells. That day has gone. Prancing Nigger was widely read. The Flower Beneath the Foot has been reprinted for all to read.

Ronald Firbank is an exotic petal floating on the tide of contemporary writing. It is a petal with a precious but somewhat rank odor. Ronald Firbank is a decadent of purest breed. He writes with a touch lighter than the breath of pansies, brushing lightly over a world inhabited wholly by Duchesses and the kind of people Duchesses know. Aside from Duchesses, Mr. Firbank has a predilection for water-closets and the more wayward aspects of sex--all treated with the subtlest of subtlety.

The Flower Beneath the Foot is about His Weariness the Prince, Her Weariness the Queen, Sir Somebody Something (British Ambassador), Queen Thleeanouhee. Notably it deals with the becoming a Saint of St. Laura de Nazi-anzi, who was not "born organically good," and whom we leave beating her hands "until they streamed with blood, against the broken glass ends" upon a convent wall, on the occasion of the Prince's marriage.

Vanitas

Differences Existing Between Authors and Their Creations

Next to cats and politicians, artists are probably the most naively conceited of God's creatures. Painters and musicians tend to keep their vanity within the circle of their acquaintances and biographers. Not so the literary artist. Between his inky fingers the pen becomes a hideous means of inflicting his self-estimates on a public compliantly ready to exchange soiled rectangles of engraved green paper for some three hundred printed pages bearing his reflections on himself and his relationship to a dependent world.

There are excuses for authorial egotism. It is not at all unnatural that one whose livelihood depends on the willingness of the literate to follow him through successive volumes of carefully fashioned falsehood to regard himself as not the least important of his fictional creations. Such, too, is the fascination of speculation respecting the man behind the pen that someone, biographer or scandalmonger or idolater, is rather more than likely to tell the world about him. Why, is the not extraordinary reflection of the novelist, should it not be himself ? Who more qualified, who more enthralled by his theme? So romancer after romancer, turning aside for an instant from the fanciful personalities of his creation, devotes his attention to no less fanciful creation of his own personality.

Casual inspection of recent autobiography reveals the man of letters as not uniformly successful at self-portrayal. Nor are his methods in any respect identical. Now he gives his ardent admirer a condescending peep into his intellectual processes; now he restricts his observations to the externals of his career. Now he strips the veil with blatant shamelessness from his secret places; now he takes pains to substitute for the discreet gauze of silence the impenetrable screen of ruthless denial.

P:Dean of them all is, of course, Mr. George Moore, whose popularly priced Conversations in Ebury Street once more places his self-revelations within the reach of the judicious spender.

P:More unexpectedly, Dr. A. Conan Doyle chooses in his Memories and Adventures* to retell the events of an active life in brisk, episodic wise, shedding less light on the adventures of his soul than on his skill with the harpoon.

P:Michael Arlen, helpfully renouncing the intricate appellation thrust upon him by Near-Eastern ancestry, reminisces in leisurely wise about the more fantastic aspects of his early ramblings in London streets, calling the product The London Venture./-

P:James Branch Cabell, in Straws and Prayer-books,** permits his admirers to share with him a reticent heartache at the depressing reflection that a few centuries hence his name may be emblazoned in literary memory only as "the author of Jurgen"-- his other works known only to the discriminating.

P:Mark Twain, complacently garrulous, chatters from the grave. Pleasantly confident that anything interesting to himself must be equally so to his public, he talks of many things, not excluding cabbages and kings./=

P:Most successful of all auto-creative fiction-mongers is Sherwood Anderson. His Story-Teller's Story is just that. He tells the story of his own life frankly and revealingly, just as honestly and just as skilfully as if he had never existed outside his own fertile imagination. He writes his novels as if they were biography. Now he makes of his own life a novel no whit inferior to those which have won him the right to a hearing. J. A. T.

AUTUMN. BEING THE FIRST PART OF THE PEASANTS -- Ladislas St. Reymont -- Knopf ($2.50).

*TIME, Oct. 20.

/-TIME, Nov. 24.

**TIME, Nov. 24; see also col. 1, this page.

/=Mr. Clemens' Autobiography was reviewed in TIME, Nov. 3.