Nathanities

MONKS ARE MONKS--George Jean Nathan--Knopf ($2.50). Author Nathan's latest book is no novel. In it a critic, a poet, a playwright, a fictioneer and "two geniuses" [Mencken & Nathan in false whiskers] successfully repulse the advances of one Lorinda Hope who "was not a bad young woman; it was just that she had an apartment of her own." The story is completely overshadowed by their maneuvers. Their talk embraces: incompetency of U. S. criticism, monogamy v. polygamy, decline of detective stories, postures of college radicals, difficulty of censoring silent cinema, cosmopolitan U. S. interior decoration, Manhattan's dead gentility, U. S. bibulous and Prohibited. U. S. "boobisms," name-changing, sentimentality Bernard Shaw's chief charm, U. S. lack of romantic or musical appreciation, social rise of the Southern Negro, exercise unnecessary, emasculation of U. S. actors by Anglicizing, a six-page list of the sex-business in one season's plays, the U. S. "itch for bogus purple," the old U. S. saloons not clubs, an assault on publishers including A. A. Knopf, dancing not art but exhibitionism. A typical Nathanity: "And if too many people familiarly call Jimmy Walker by his first name, too many, it seems to me, do the same thing with Jesus Christ."