Chicago

Chicago*

A Charming, Able Resident Reconstructs It

The Story. At the end of this book, two portraits hang in an old city house. Out of one frame, in white muslin and blue sash, looks a beguiling red-headed Civil War nurse as she was just before she sacked an Italian count, married an ardent young mechanic and quit her patroon relatives to live in the young West.

The other canvas, called Bitter Fruit by an old friend of the subject, is the same Ann Cortlandt Smith as a great-grandmother. The ropes of pearls are luminous, the velvets urbane. The dame's expression is that of one who has found life out.

Midway between the two portraits glimmers a mirror over whose forgetful surface have played the intervening years, as reflected in Ann's face and figure--Peter Smith's pioneering in steel; the "partnership" they were to have had in this as man and wife; his reticence and absorption in the business; their first quarrels, his prosperity, their children; the great fire and his phoenix-like rise therefrom.

Ann had placed in Peter's care the wealth she got from her uncle. How incapable of "partnership" he was had been apparent when, in the business panic, she had rushed down to tell him he could use her bonds--and found he had already done so. The disunion had hurt her worse than dishonesty. She had slept in the guest room, gone abroad. In Paris she had nearly, not quite, succumbed to an animated young tenor--who came to tea years later, paunchy, professional, perplexed as to who she was.

Having lost a son, Ann was braced against bereavement when Peter, retired from business and lost without it, passed also. She kept up the old house in a now-unfashionable part of the city, stubbornly opposing her grandchildren's suggestions that she take an apartment, just as Peter had opposed his lawyer about joining the Steel Trust.

The Significance. There is much more to the story of the Smiths, and it is a good story. They and colorful contemporaries live in the book, continuously and visibly. Their author does not psychoanalyze or otherwise distort them. She has employed, with notable poise and richness, the formula of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga against a thoroughly U. S. background, Chicago. Residents of that vigorous commonty will discredit their citizenship by failing to read this excellent chronicle of its childhood. Other nonreaders will miss a sound, satisfying novel.

The Author. Janet A. Fairbank (Mrs. Kellogg Fairbank) has written of New York City (The Cortlandts of Washington Square). Washington is far from unknown to her since her War work and suffrage activities. But Chicago-- where lived her distinguished lawyer-father, Benjamin F. Ayer, where she was born, where she is known for a charming hostess and able politician--is her home and her debtor.

Idyll

THIS OLD MAN--Gertrude Bone-- Macmillan ($2.50). Young David Niven, with notable talent, carves his soul into wood. Old John Button's soul is with his wife of 48 years, with his ancient pony, his thatched cottage, his simple daily round as carrier in a pocket-village of fertile England. Young Elizabeth Niven's soul is nowhere until she bears her son. Then it is abroad, seeking more to give the child than life, which she sees go into the grave of old Mary Button. Young David, translated by his work, is no help to her. It is old John, in the wisdom of bereavement, who leads her whither he has picked his way, beyond life to the Giver thereof. As he cured his pony of shying at puddles by leading him slowly, so he goes with Elizabeth. He first shows her a dead whitethroat.

To take up slack in her idyll, which is a lovely one, Mrs. Bone, wife of Etcher Muirhead Bone, sister-in-law of

Captain Bavid Bone, S. S. Tuscania, stations in the background one Helen Ross, brainy middle-aged virgin, as interlocutor.

Queer Quadrangle

SEIBERT OF THE ISLAND--Gordon Young--Dor an ($2.00). Arresting tilings have been said about this book: that it is a ripping adventure story, a throbbing love tale, a novel of surpassing form written in remarkable English. Stevenson has been mentioned in comparisons; even Conrad. Most of which is rot. It is merely an eventful chronicle, told rather slowly but with a steady eye on characters more self-controlled than colorful. A quixotic South Sea pirate (the hero of Author Young's Hurricane Williams) creates a situation--involving two half-native girls, a gentlemanly vagabond and Williams' amiably sardonic lieutenant-- which alters, and is altered by, barrel-chested, sweating, heavy-handed Adolph Seibert, a German planter of Puloto, who married one of the girls, was loved by neither and got caught in a queer quadrangle when both girls loved the vagabond.

Jap Lothario

THE TALE OF GENJI--Lady Murasaki (translated by Arthur Waley).--Hough- ion Mifflin ($3.00). There were other weapons in Genji's llth Century Japan but none so invincible as the writing-brush. Thus, in a day when cultured Anglo-Saxons were beseeching ladies' favors with the haft of a halberd, this informal son of a Nipponese emperor wrote: "Since first he saw the green leaf of the tender bush, never for a moment has the dew of longing dried upon the traveler's sleeve."

How your handwriting curled and crinkled made a vast difference, indicating your rank and accomplishments. Even how you folded the paper was portentous--with the ingenuity of devotion or a seductively casual grace. None excelled Genji at the art, and as he was extremely handsome and amiable, his otherwise indolent young life consisted chiefly in sleeping by day and traveling secretly by night in all directions from the palace.

Flowers stir fragrantly, thin partitions slide furtively, high passion whispers delicate vows in poetic acrostics, silks shimmer and fall softly to immaculate floors in innumerable ladies' chambers. The one incongruous note is heard when Genji steals home at dawn--the crazy axle-squeak of his bullock-cart.

Lady Murasaki's 11th Century classic might well have waited more hundreds of years for a translator of Mr. Waley's sense and sensibility.

*THE SMITHS--Janet A. Fairbank--Bobbs-Merrill ($2.00).