Critic Sherman

As it must to all men, Death came to Stuart Pratt Sherman, 44, sometime professor of English literature, since 1924 editor of Books, the literary supplement of the New York Herald-Tribune. With Mrs. Sherman, he was canoeing off Manistee, Mich., and failed to swim ashore with her when capsized. Apparent cause: heart attack. Literary critics axe few in the U. S. Cultivation of the critical attitude against a background of letters, and its regular exercise for the promotion of better writing and the edification of the public, is practiced professionally by a scanty corporal's guard. Critic Sherman was eminently of this group, despite the fact that much of his work was laden with a heavy ego. He lacked the quiet clarity of Dr. Henry Seidel Canby of the Saturday Review. He was an lowan, with the midlander's tendency to lunge into emotional appreciations. Sparkle was not in him, as it is in that erudite, free-lancing Irishman, Ernest Boyd. His opinions savored strongly of the pundit, even after he dropped the P. from his signature and wrote more as a journalist than as a professor at the University of Illinois. And this was a ponderous pundit, not an explosive, like "the diabolical little boy with a bean-shooter," H. L. Mencken. But the ponderousness was the weight of great sincerity; in controversy it would give place to trenchant power as when a big-boned man rolls up his sleeves to fight. His subtlety and strength were in expressing the homelier virtues and pleasures of mankind. He had a feeling for tools, horses, unmistakably American landscapes, Whitmanesque humanities. He would write a word like "roots" or "bones" as though it were thrusting out of his nature to the very depth of his discussion. He was an unabashed moralist, some said Puritan, but seldom to the neglect of art's due. Now there are left, besides the Messers. Canby, Boyd and Mencken, Critics Carl and Mark Van Doren, Burton Rascoe, Louis Untermeyer (poetry), Ludwig Lewisohn, Joseph Wood Krutch. There is unique, felicitous Dr. William Lyons Phelps. There are notable book conmentators and appreciators; John Farrar (The Bookman), Mary Colum, Isabel Patterson, Grant Overton, Harry Hansen (vice gusty Lawrence Stallings on the N. Y. World), George Sterling (San Francisco), William Allen White, Heywood Broun, Allan Nevins. And there are many creative writers whose discussion of one another's work stands for much that is good in U. S. criticism--William McFee, Christopher Morley, Thomas Beer, Louis Bromfield, Elmer Davis, John Erskine, Dorothy Canfield.

Hill Woman

THE TIME OF MAN--Elizabeth Madox Roberts -- Viking Press ($2.50). It is felt at once that this book was a long time in the writing; that, now it is here, it constitutes a distinguished contribution to the abiding literature of this continent. It must have grown, as it grows upon the reader, like a vine of bittersweet or wild grape covering a stone wall. It is similarly eloquent of Nature, similarly unobtrusive, hardy and humbly fair to behold. It is the story of a Kentucky hill child, Ellen Chesser, groping instinctively through a scrawny, vagabond adolescence, with no attention from her roaming, horse-swapping, white-trash parents. The father settles as a tenant-helper on tobacco farms and Ellen's maidenhood is more stable. Her lanky, hungry little frame rounds out and her nature, though always puzzled, sensitive and secretive, is opened by friends, security and small domestic possessions--a heifer, a bed. She suffers through an inconclusive courtship by a yokel with a good heart but no "spunk"; welcomes marriage with a muscular, free-spoken nomad of the hill-farms, Jasper Kent, whose children she bears and beside whom, as their narrow fortunes rise and fall, she lives on, always the self-reliant child of the roads at heart, trusting only her own being as the total of reality it is given man to know in his time. The writing is fibrous yet delicate--again like a vine. The author, a mature maiden lady, is little known, save for a volume of children's poems (Under the Tree) called "graceful," "clear," "candid" by Critic Louis Untermeyer.

"Half God, Half Beast"

BELLARION -- Rafael Sabatini -- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Mr. Sabatini's new hero is but a few hours out of the convent where he has grown from a nursling to huge-thewed manhood, when he finds himself racing through the footways of Casale with angry pikemen after him. He pauses by a studded door like the Sire de Maletroit's door in Stevenson and is vastly relieved to find it unlocked. Within is a tawny-headed damsel who, after she has concealed the handsome fugitive, quite alters his plan to study Greek at the University of Pavia. No lady of Renaissance Italy so fair and mettlesome as this Valeria but was meshed in intrigue from her dainty toes to her pearl-sewn caul. And no stalwart like lucky Bellarion but would have rejoiced as he to exchange a philosophical career for swordplay in her service. This swordplay, these daggers by night and poisoned wine-goblets; a Milanese tyrant blood-hounding men for sport; a hundred delicate situations saved by Macchiavelian wit or pretty compliments; and Bellarion, "half god, half beast," rising to power and at last claiming the lady--these are swiftest, richest Sabatini, than whom no sword-and-cloak man is more deservingly remembered, in the public's orisons.

Spain's Favorite

THE LORD OF LABRAZ--Pio Baroja --Knopf ($2.50). The Spanish hail Senor Baroja as their most popular living talespinner. He writes a little like Dickens, a little like Stevenson, always like a Spaniard--that is, with bold light, harsh shading. His story here is quite simple--a blind nobleman in a priest-ridden hill town quixotically shoulders his brother's misdeeds, earning only calumny and spite from the populace, renouncing society and going to wander, Lear-like, over the bleak table-lands with a wronged barmaid for his Cordelia, a Basque beggar for Poor Tom. It is fiction with strong bones.

Again, Benefield

SHORT TURNS--Barry Benefield-- Century ($2). These 14 short and simple annals of the inarticulate have a uniform characteristic, that each climax shows a human being with all his forces gathered in unaccustomed intensity to perform what seems the finest possible act under inexorable circumstances. A house of harlots buries one of its number, masking the dead girl's true profession from her mother; the mother perceives, but plays out her role. An Arkansas stonecutter, cuckold, is reluctantly driven to revenge by public opinion; his joy is great when he finds that the couple he has strangled in the dark are strangers. A Louisiana farmer, despairing of love from his mail-order wife, puts his mouth over the muzzle of his shotgun. A fading saleswoman sees a bearded lover watching daily from a neighboring window for her arisings; discovers the face to be a carved Christ's; resigns herself once more to loving the celluloid doll in her store-window demonstration of a patent crib. There are moments when the author's sensitive comprehension threatens to quaver and mawk, but these moments are rare and in them quiet ecstasy is equally imminent. Some may say that the frustrated or guilty woman appears rather more frequently in Benefield stories than seems natural; that he is thus limited, perhaps hipped. But not even Hawthorne touched this subject with purer compassion; and a man must do what he can do best. Furthermore, there is that enveloping quality about Author Benefield's troubled situations that reaches far beyond the particular persons and scenes to include all men's troubles, of all kinds. Finally, there is gentle, whimsical accuracy of detail, in few words--how little mules trot; an Italian undertaker "ostentatiously piddling through his ornate futilities"; an executive's comfort in his row of pearl-topped desk buttons; a kitty named John the Baptist.

The Significance, People upon whom Barry Benefield laid strong hold last autumn with his little-heralded* novel, The Chicken-Wagon Family, will be glad for the introduction to this volume, written by that primate of short-story critics, Mr. Edward J. O'Brien. It is like hearing that your favorite choir soloist has been engaged by the Metropolitan Opera. Says Mr. O'Brien, who reads bales of fiction per annum in professional detachment: "I suppose that those who are dumb have never had their feelings and experience interpreted so clearly before as ... by Barry Benefield." He gives thanks that these "short turns" have been brought together out of various magazines, for he ranks them, with the work of Sherwood Anderson, Manuel Komroff and Ernest Hemingway, as "the most distinguished" of the past decade in U.S. tale-spinning.

Family Biology

CONSERVATION OF THE FAMILY-- Paul Popenoe--Williams & Wilkins ($3). How widespread and militant are the "enemies" of the family is conjectural. And how effectively their convictions (or lack of them) might be refuted by a treatise soundly but exclusively sociobiological, is also a question. Nevertheless, Biologist Popenoe's sound book, the first in its field, is far more than an academic disputation. It is advanced with the prime intention of promoting study of the family, per se, through the biologist's lens. Consequently it is packed with orderly, unsensational, valuable facts--the cell- scientist's facts on human polygamy, premarital incontinence, celibacy, size of family, optimum ages of motherhood, abortion, divorce, cousins marrying, etc., etc. There is strong meat in it for thoughtful persons, but it is recommended only to readers capable of supplying their own aesthetic and philosophical salt and pepper. Biologists are Communists. They work with the species, disregard the sport. Their imperative is the stuff that embryos, not dreams, are made of. For "individuality" they are content with the potential differentiations of the chromosomes. Such biologist talk as the following will strike home its full weight only upon the percipient mind: "The ability to form the deepest and finest bond with one of the opposite sex is a highly specialized and delicate ability."

*Modest Barry Benefield, author, was then his publisher's publicity-man.