Pervading Sadness

Pervading Sadness

CHILDREN AND FOOLS--Thomas Mann --Knopf ($2.50).

Thomas Mann is less known in this country for Death in Venice, a collection of long short stories, than for his two-volume "naturalistic" Buddenbrooks, and The Magic Mountain, another lengthy fictionized philosophy. One is therefore the more surprised that he produces Children and Fools, a collection of actual short stories. And pleasantly surprised, because the briefer format is better adapted to carry the even tenor of sad beauty that pervades all of Mann's writings, and is unbearably sustained in his long novels.

Written intermittently between the years of 1897 and 1926, the present collection displays the steady development of talent.

The author's genius is undeniable in the earliest story, "Little Herr Friede-mann," the stark, pathetic account of a hunchback, whose reasoned contentment is shattered by his sudden love for a flashing Valkyrish woman. Her cruel scorn for his declared love drives him to drowning himself ludicrously--head in the river, feet on the bank.

More subtle is the latest story, "Dis-order and Early Sorrow" (1926) in which nothing happens so melodramatic as suicide, in fact nothing at all, except convulsive disappointment in a child's soul. Professor Cornelius looks on complacently at the party his two older children are giving to a post-War medley of friends. He notices one of them, an actor, carries with him not only the sadness of his tragic roles, but on his cheekbones a touch of carmine that was obviously of cosmetic origin. And the professor wonders vaguely why the young man "did not cling either to one thing or the other--either to his melancholy or to his rouge." Another more affable young guest, one Hergesell, squired a buxom blonde beauty, but left her a few moments to dance playfully with lovely wistful Lorie. Aged five, Lorie was the professor's favorite child who had been allowed to stay up for a bit of the party. Content that the child should be made so happy, the old history professor wandered off for his evening walk, wondering if his enduring tenderness for Lorie was an evil contradiction of his sound intellectual belief that nothing was eternal but the past, that is to say, death. Pondering on these things, wondering too if justice consisted of more than sympathy, the professor trudged through the fog, down by the river, and home again by the rustic bridge. At the gate a servant awaited him eagerly to say that Lorie had cried buckets and was "all broke up," because she had had to go to bed, leaving Hergesell at the party with his blonde. The professor rushes to his darling, comforts her in vain. He alone understood that the blonde had every right to dance on with Hergesell, while Lorie had quite rightly been permitted to dance only once, and that once only in sport. "Lorie's grief was incurable and without rights and should have hidden itself. But as it was a grief without understanding, it was also a grief without inhibition, and this produced a great pain . . . the paternal heart of the professor was lacerated by this misery, by the humiliating terrors of this passion, without rights and without cure." But the "night of a child establishes so broad and deep an abyss between one day and the next" that in the morning Lorie's grief was quite forgotten.

Couradge

BUT--GENTLEMEN MARRY BRUNETTES --Anita Loos--Boni & Liveright ($2.00). Well, it seems that nothing makes a publisher become so sentimental in a financial way as the day he can call an authoress a best seller. I mean, a writer of the well-read books. I mean, he will give anything for more of my thoughts, because they seem to have intreeged the interest of people that pay for literature. And since I seem to be thinking all the time anyway, I might just as well not be doing it for nothing, and write it down. And anyway a married girl who is wealthy enough to have the home life carried on by the servants ought to have a career, to.

Well, my career in the cinema went right over people's heads and became a financial failure. So I decided to become literary instead, and spent a lot of time in the ris-kay literary invirament of the Algonquin. So my gentleman friend said that I seem to be full of nothing so much as cute ideas, and the ones that are the most amuseing to the reading public are about my un-mental friend Dorothy. Because I use Psychology and understand that there are some people in the world who cannot help it if thier instincks are unnatural. I mean, Dorothy gives presents to gentlemen.

So he said to write all about her unrefined past, and how she traveled with a Carnaval Company until a polo player of the wealthy classes gave her a check and sent her to New York to get into the follies with a letter to his broker. And she did, but not through the broker. Because it seems that most of the girls in the Follies would be passed up by practically every broker in New York before Mr. Ziegfield has glorified them. And Dorothy says that about all Mr. Ziegfield does to glorify them is to get them to give up starch in lingeray.

Well, Dorothy has practically the wrong ideas about everything, and no ideals, for she does nothing but fall madly in love with the kind of gentlemen who were born without money and have not made any since. Like the saxaphone player, for instants, that she married, without giving herself the opertunity to get sick of him first.

So Dorothy says why would a book about a girl like she be so wonderful? And it seems that Ralph Barton's portraits aren't so good either without the Inspiration he seems to get out of me in them. But there's a long intraduction full of practically nothing but me. And anyway 40,000 people bought the book before it was even out, and so it seems that there is nothing to really be discouradged about as usual.

Sometimes

THE GENERAL'S RING--Selma Lagerlof --Doubleday Doran ($2.00). Genius is sometimes dependable. Selma Lagerlof, ripe with the years and their laurels, can still spin a worthy tale of peasant simplicities and spectral horrors. Dreary and revengeful, General Lowenskold's ghost hovered near the priceless ring that had been stolen from his tomb. The unhappy thief suffered--his barns burned down, his wife was drowned--but he dared not confess looting a grave, mortal offense. In time, the jewel of ill wake passed with its spectral guardian through unwitting, but nevertheless harassed, owners to the very descendants of Lowenskold. Far from treating his heirs more kindly, the ghostly grandsire bedevilled the son of the house with a wasting disease. But for a lovelorn governess the jewel would never have been found, glinting in the woolen tassel of a castaway cap. She lays the ghost, and saves the son, but all, alas, for his other sweetheart.