FICTION

Shiloh

The Story.* Out of the tempestuous waters of Leghorn Harbor and in upon the pitching deck of the U. S. clipper, Witch of the West, towards the evening of the 8th of July, 1822, is tossed a frail figure of perfections angelic rather than human. Its youthful, milk-white features are serene in apparent death. David Butternut, young and gigantic able seaman, trembles at the sight. Only a few hours before he has knocked dead a man who, though an arrant scoundrel, bore just such a seraphic countenance. Now remorseful and half afraid lest this be his victim's ghost, David kneels, chafes the seeming corpse's slender, blue-veined wrists, and quite disregarding the tempest, whispers long, soulful entreaties that the visitor return to life. At length the angel's eyes, of divinest cerulean blue, open, and in accents of which the elegance is matched only by their incongruousness in the midst of a hurricane, a cultivated voice expresses heartfelt appreciation for timely succor under discommoding circumstances.

By the coincidences of the place and the date, of the books in the rescued youth's velveteen coat pockets, and by characteristic sentiments on liberty, death, diet and various conventions including matrimony which he soon voices, it comes evident that our hero is Poet Shelley, until now supposed to have been drowned, recovered and cremated on the Leghorn beach. This identity is masked, however, for the fiction's sake, under a name Lord Byron used to call his lonely-hearted friend, Shiloh.

Not many days are required to restore Shiloh to his best blithe spirits and make of him an astonishingly tough and adept jack-tar. He is but little concerned for his bereft Mary, back in Italy, becoming passionately interested in David's account of a lovely maiden in distress in wilderness America. David's locket shows Silver Cross, twin sister of the man slain by David, to be of utmost virginal beauty. Ever the champion of such females, Shiloh sets off across the Appalachians afoot with good-hearted David, improvising odes to Nature, caroling Greek choruses, skimming the rugged terrain with strides of flamelike lightness and celerity.

They float down the Ohio on a raft with a Captain and a Professor. They penetrate fertile Kentucky, pause in boisterous St. Louis, journey through the Southwest with grave discomfort from Indians and thirst, at last reaching Silver in San Diego, Calif. There Shiloh, who has successfully resisted five wilderness nymphs, all ravishingly endowed and more than amiable, sends David in his stead to woo the lovely object of their odyssey, himself reclining on a Pacific headland to ponder his necessity for a persistently elusive ideal.

The Significance. This romantic extravaganza is, of course, couched in meticulously beautiful language. As a book to read it would, however, be more enjoyable if one knew more often just where to have it. There are stretches of subtlest burlesque, where whiskey-swilling mountaineers and gory redskins discourse like Oxford dons while Shiloh, in his high-flown worship of the spirit of Liberty, postures with amusing extravagance. But this humor loses its edge when brought into abrupt contact with similar scenes seriously intended to be affecting. The poetry and sweep of primitive America are breathtaking until chapter after chapter piles up in which each rock, flower, cloud and zephyr, each meal, word and gesture of the poet-hero, is decorated with its precisely weighed set of adjectives and adverbs, all arranged in sensitive perfection but tending soon to surfeit.

The Author is scarcely of the present, so devoted is she to the pursuit of artistic niceties in the crystalline world of her imagination, where the current date is from 1700 to 1850 A. D. Out of this world have come two volumes of verses, Nets to Catch the Wind and Black Armor, and two poetic novels, Jennifer Lorn and The Venetian Glass Nephew. The outer person who walks tall, imperious, wide-eyed and high-strung among mortals, is the daughter of President Roosevelt's onetime Solicitor General, the late Henry Martyn Hoyt; the second wife of Poet-Colyumist William Rose Benet of The Saturday Review.

Falcon

WHITE FALCON--Harold Lamb-- McBride ($2). In the odorous back room of a Lenox Avenue delicatessen store, presided over by one Moe Mintz, caroused and sang some 25 hairy-skinned, roving-eyed stalwarts in evening dress, and 40 other bravos, also swarthy and deep-voiced, uniformed in rakish, many-hued military costumes. At length their leader arose, produced sheets of galley proof and read from midnight until nearly dawn. Eyes bright with reminiscence of long marches over wintry steppes, fierce battles with Turk and hillsman, daring brutalities, savage sports and brotherly fealty beneath the little stars of Russia, the emigres listened raptly. Cheers, murmured applause, snatches of wild song punctuated the narrative. Came an Irish patrolman to quell disturbance, to depart five dollars richer. Thus, recently, in Manhattan, did exiled Cossacks of the Kuban, Don and Astrakhan brotherhoods-- once terrors of the Tsar's foemen, now U. S. taximen, waiters, designers, dish-scrubbers--receive this adventure tale. They bought 40 copies. Author Lamb's simple, stern recital is of the historic raid on Urgench, by the salt Sea of Aral, by Don Cossacks pledged to Tsar Boris Godunov (16th Century). The title is what one slim superhero was called by his proud fellows.

HUMOR

Sop to Wolf

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARTHA HEPPLETHWAITE--Frank Sullivan-- --Boni & Liveright ($2). Colyumist F. P. A. of the New York World's "Conning Tower" once went on a vacation. Who should come bouncing in to take his place but a little Irishman from the World's city room, Reporter Frank Sullivan, in emergencies a funnyman. World-readers jumped for joy. The famed "Conning Tower" soon became positively laughable. And so it goes. When F. P. A. came back, World-readers practiced jumping until his next vacation. In the meantime, and even now, Reporter Sullivan writes pieces for p.1 of section II in the World, pieces about his secretary, Miss Hepplethwaite, famed for her tinkling garters and acrobatic shorthand; about rescuing people from drowning; about suspender buttons, Friday the 13th, Christmas cards, the mashing situation and many another matter over which most people skim thoughtlessly. Of these pieces, a great many, perhaps too many, are here republished, in an effort to keep the wolf at Reporter Sullivan's door wagging his tail, a mood in which Reporter Sullivan eminently deserves to have all his wolves.

10" x 4"

SWEET AND Low--Liggett Reynolds--Simon & Schuster ($1.25). Factually describing nonsense is about as profitable as counting noses at Times Square. The big thing is, do you laugh or don't you? Funnyman Reynolds (nom-de-machine, of course) has done the big thing. At his book you do laugh, and you don't. Sometimes you weep over the staccato chiaroscuro (or whatever you prefer to call it) of suburban life on Long Island, as lived by the hero, Coleman, and his voluptuous Abigail, at least that is one of her names. The most notable feature of Sweet and Low is that its spendthrift publishers, still the Gallagher and Sheehan of publishing, used up an odd lot of endpapers to give the volume rare old hip-pocket or muff dimensions, 10 in. x 4 in.

VERSE

Collected Stephens

COLLECTED POEMS--James Stephens--Macmillan ($3). Elfin Poet Stephens, perfect poet for children and women, though he sometimes thinks about attempting man's work, has never before had his songs collected. To signalize the event his publishers have left his preface just as he wrote it, with quaint misspellings which add personal flavor to an otherwise dull tract upon the subtle advantages of lyric over epic or prosaic language --advantages better seen embodied than talked about. But for wry Irish oddities like "subtil," "aristocrate," "foundamental," "accellerate," the preface were better omitted. The poems are the thing. Here is the small singer longing for the solitude of goats upon their quiet hillside; he would hunt for "something lying on the ground, in the bottom of my mind." Here he is telling peasant courtships, with a stumbling lilt and a fling--1 of the head for mopers and unkind girls. Here he is breathing mysteriously of natural things, making over the great world in small images: The wind stood up and gave a shout He whistled on his fingers. And Kicked the withered leaves about And thumped the branches with his hand. . . .

If pity is great in a poet, and it is, small Poet Stephens is of the greatest. Having seen Him as often as the next Gael, he pities God.

Kemp

THE SEA AND THE DUNES--Harry Kemp--Brentano's ($2). To masculine Poet Harry Hibbard Kemp, neo-Whitmanian, who, bred in Kansas, has gone around the world on 25-c- and studied "tramping" for years, the sea and its gulls, its tidal slime, fog, dunes and shiny-footed waves, is a source of life in strong, recurrent phases. The first two dozen pieces of this volume evidently reflect a summer spent on Cape Cod with or near a loved woman, whose presence is more felt than seen. Besides these spans, which are briny and refreshing as a dory full of mackerel, are some painful subjective pieces, some not too happy reflections in the classical manner and several lyric miniatures of priceless rarity, "The Toadstool's Defense," "I Heard the Marvellous Music of the Birds" and "Rain Children," which opens with the lines: With all its little silver feet

The rain is running down the street. . .

NON-FICTION

Dark America

THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN LIFE-- Jerome Dowd--Century ($5). Never shouting, never crusading, Professor Dowd has written perhaps the ablest volume on the Negro question yet published. His own extensive sociological researches he supplements with quotations from many a source, including Mark Twain, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, Negro poets, psychology professors. First, Professor Dowd explains whence the Negro came, what he does today and how he does it. In the North the Negro is essentially a city dweller, inhabiting segregated districts--Harlem in New York City, the "Black Belt" (old South Side) in Chicago. Since the '80s and '90s, his industrial significance has slipped a bit; the Italians beat him out of the bootblacking business; the Scandinavians made more alert janitors; both the French and the Italians put more tasty frills into catering; labor unions dogged his way in the skilled industries. In many Northern cities there is among Negroes a greater percentage of women at work than men. Professor Dowd's chapter on the Negro in Manhattan is one of the best in the book. The colony of some 200,000 Negroes in Harlem seems to be the best regulated and most content in the U. S. Here longshoremen* heave cargoes by day and frolic by night. Says the author: "It is a far cry from the katydids and crickets of the rural South to the nocturnal jazz of Harlem. A wag once remarked that, 'the Jews own New York, the Irish run it and the Negroes enjoy it.' " In the South the Negro is at his best in the rural districts, at his worst in the cities. As the tenant of a small farm or as the worker in a cotton or tobacco field, he is content and productive; but in the cities indolence and vice seem to be stimulated. Politics, lynching and the relations between low whites and Negro women are three of the most vexing problems. Professor Dowd analyzes various schemes for the solution of the Negro problem--civil equality, amalgamation, colonization, segregation, creation of a Black Belt Free State--and finds them all insufficient or impossible. He concludes that there is no solution, that there has always been friction where Negroes and Caucasians have lived side by side. The Negro's chance of survival is not as good, biologically or economically, as the Caucasian's. However, both the Negro and the friction will remain for centuries. The friction can be lessened, but not obliterated, by education of the Negro and by a less prejudiced attitude on the part of the Caucasians. Significance. In 600 pages, the volume is both readable and encyclopaedic. Professor Dowd has much to say and no reason for saying it except to inform. Unprejudiced in tone, easy in style, the book will last. The Author. As a youth in South Carolina, he chopped cotton with Negroes, played with their children, sold them houses and land. He has sat beside them in classrooms and later had them sit as pupils in his own classes. Trained at the University of Chicago, he is now a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. For 25 years he has made a thorough study of the Negro problem. No "nigger-lover," no "nigger-hater," Professor Dowd understands darkest America.

From Sun to Society

THE NEW UNIVERSE -- Baker Brownell--Van Nostrand ($4). Mr. Brownell, professor of Contemporary Thought at Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.), has attempted single-handed a task lately performed by 16 of his neighbors at the University of Chicago.* No rivalry was intended; in fact, many of the Chicagoans aided Mr. Brownell with his work, of which the subtitle is, "From the Sun, through the formation of the Earth, through the evolution of man, to the social order of today." Where the Chicagoans tried to state facts tersely, Mr. Brownell has been discursive, philosophical, even poetic, sometimes at the cost of lucidity, more often with stimulating effect. Thoughtful, he has provided the reader with a graph of the chapters' relative difficulty, warning them to pore carefully over Einsteinian Relativity and "The Spiritual Approach to the World." As "a tune for the new universe, a poem, more or less, on things in general," the book is epical and alive. As a source of information for beginners it is a trifle advanced. (Notices of books of special interest or significance to students of NATIONAL AFFAIRS and FOREIGN NEWS will be found under those headings in TIME.)

*THE ORPHAN ANGEI,--Elinor Wylie-- Knopf ($3.50),

* This is the most popular vocation of Manhattan Negroes.

* THE NATURE or THE WORLD AND OF MAN--16 Members of the Faculty of the University of Chicago--University of Chicago Press ($4). THE PRXTON PRESS Co., CLEVELAND