Fine Funeral

I'LL HAVE A FINE FUNERAL-- Pierre La Maziere-- Brentano's ($2). What if a clerk, after drudging in J. P. Rockerbilt & Co. for 20 years, seized his chance to embezzle $10,000 and soon ran it into six figures by playing the stock market as he saw his superiors secretly playing it? What if he then confessed his peculation to the bank president, tendering his check for the stolen sum, plus interest, and showing by his bank book that he was an important depositor? Suppose the banker put away the check as a weapon, and forbore arresting the clerk because obviously he was clever and had inside information on the market operations of high officials. What if the banker put this clerk in charge of a Florida boom scheme, which became such a prodigious success that Floridans begged the promoter to become their Senator? What if the banker ordered him to accept, so that, by his one passionate theft, a man with a slave's psychology became an Honorable, eligible for the highest office in the land, certain to have as fine a funeral as that enjoyed by a great rascal to whose pompous obituaries he had once listened in dismay? What if this story were written by a calm, an almost lugubrious satirist, without any ranting; by a master of adroit prose? Might people not exclaim about such a book?

French critics have been exclaiming and declaiming about Author La Maziere. His hero, the Parisian equivalent of a Wall Street protozoan, is made to seem more wistful than the meanest Americano would likely be. An orphan, he suffers an ugly seduction in his youth. His one love affair founders on his poverty before it is launched. His friends are a kindly, resigned fatalist, and a mad painter who drags him to hear opera from the top gallery. His sensitive nature is sickened by the War and after the misery of heroism he experiences peacetime betrayal by crass noncombatants. This wistfulness may irritate some U. S. readers, used to two-fisted, hammer-and-tongs irony. Clerks who cheat and win under our system must brag about it later to ring true. Our politicians are colorful or they are nothing. Not so in France. There political satire can cut to the bone quietly. There honesty and dishonesty are such different things that irony about them can be subtle yet intense.