Pre-War Model

RETURN TO YESTERDAY--Ford Madox Ford--Liveright ($4).

To look at Author Ford Madox Ford you might think he was one of those adenoidal Englishmen on whose mentality the sun never rises. After reading him you would have to admit yourself mistaken. Though not always graceful he is an agile writer, an anecdotalist of parts and humor, of quite un-British charm. Return to Yesterday is not just another old codger's autobiography. To read it is like being monologued by an expert. Author Ford, though gossipy, is also old-fashioned in his reticences, apologizes for not being even more so. "I have tried to keep myself out of this work as much as I could--but try as hard as one may after self-effacement the great 'I', like cheerfulness will come creeping in."

Ford got off to a good start in the literary world by being born into the midst of the pre-Raphaelite group. Ne Hueffer, he carried his German name all through the War (he served as officer in the British Army), changed it to Ford in 1919. As a very young man he began to make the acquaintance of literary notables. Henry James he admired rather than liked. "He had great virility, energy, persistence, dignity and an astonishing keenness of observation. And upon the whole he was the most masterful man I have ever met."

Of his great & good friend Joseph Conrad, with whom he worked ten years, collaborated on three books (Romance, The Inheritors, The Nature of a Crime) and parts of many others, Ford says: "You could always tell when he really admired work. It would manifest itself in two ways. You would be reading at one end of the room and he at the other. It would be a new book he was reading--or perhaps a Flaubert, a Turgenev or a Maupassant. He would begin to groan and roll about on the couch where he was extended. After a time he would say: 'What is the use? I ask you what is the use of writing? When this fellow can write like this. There's no room for us.' He would go on groaning. Then he would, after a time, spring up, holding his book. 'Listen to this!' he would exclaim in sheer joy, laughing with it as if with his whole body. 'By God,' he would cry out, 'there was never anything like this.' "

When Ford does intrude himself into his story he is apt to surprise you. Apparently he has a penchant for duels, has fought two, tried to fight two more (the latest only last year, with "a French man of letters who had said injurious things about Henry James"). He claims to be the inventor of the famed spinach joke, gives his original version: "An absent-minded man took a lady in to dinner. Soles were handed around and he took one with his fingers. Seeing the lady look surprised he said: 'Oh, I thought it was spinach.' "

The War figures not at all in Return to Yesterday, comes no nearer than an occasional fleeting allusion. Yesterday, to Author Ford, is further back than that. Besides, he got a lot of the War out of his system in Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, The Last Post.

Inquiring Angell

THE UNSEEN ASSASSINS--Norman Angell--Harper ($3).

Norman Angell has blown the gaff on war many times, still makes a good job of it. His questions, though rhetorical, are well put, full of soundness and quiet fury. Like Bertrand Russell he appeals with lucid reasonableness to your better nature. The Unseen Assassins is doubtless not his last book on the subject.

Man knows better, says Angell, than to act as he does. "We do not desire to create social or economic evils, to impose injustice and bring about war, but we apply policies in which those results are inherent because we fail to see the implications of the policies. Those unperceived implications are the Unseen Assassins of our peace and welfare." Not governments but public opinion is responsible for war. "Again and again" this last ten years we have seen governments desiring to do one thing, knowing that it is the best thing to do, and prevented by popular feeling from doing it." The plain citizen does not want anarchy in the State but insists on its continuance in international affairs. "He is unaware that he is applying the method of anarchy in the international field because his education has failed to familiarize him with the fact that society must have a mechanism." Obvious answer: more education. Stout believer in democracy, Angell wants government not by, but with the aid of experts.

The Author, Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (1910) made his reputation and later damaged it. Somehow people got the idea that the book pretended to prove the impossibility of war. Says Angell: "Nothing that I could do seemed to weaken the vitality of that astonishing legend. I have written literally hundreds of denials; have been guilty of the vulgarity of offering a considerable sum of money to certain critics if they could find in any one of my books anywhere a single line to the effect that war was impossible. But all apparently to no purpose what ever."

Author Angell has long and frequently been a U. S. visitor. In his youth he ranched, prospected, newshawked in the West, returned to Europe as correspond ent for U. S. newspapers. Fortnight ago he landed in Manhattan for one of his U. S. lecture tours. Small, worried looking, with sunken eyes, Norman Angell has grown grey (he is 57) propagandizing for peace. In off-hours he likes to sail in small boats. He is the inventor of The Money Game (TIME, Oct. 14, 1929), a series of card games supposed to teach the elements of banking and currency. Other books: Patriotism Under Three Flags, If Britain Is to Live, Must Britain Travel the Moscow Road?, The Story of Money.

Manhattan Castaways

Swiss FAMILY MANHATTAN -- Christopher Morley--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

With a low percentage of bad puns, sternly denying himself more than an occasional nibble at his favorite whimsy-pastry, in Swiss Family Manhattan Christopher Morley has written a satire that is so mild-mannered, so good-natured there is no sting in it.

Beginning in the style of Johann Wyss's classic boy's story, Author Morley's yarn purports to be written by a serious-minded, middle-aged little Swiss who leaves his filing clerk's job with the League of Nations to take his wife and two sons on a pleasure cruise in an airliner. Over the Atlantic the airship runs into a frightful storm. Just in time the Robinsons abandon the crippled ship, are whipped away into the night on an air-raft. They come safely to rest on the mooring mast of the Empire State Building, still unfinished, which at first they take to be some kind of gigantic tree. Father Robinson makes several exploratory trips down into the seething jungle below, gradually comes to the conclusion the place is civilized. He loses his family. is annexed by a masterful flapper who makes him into a popular lecturer and a U. S. enthusiast. When he finds his family again, they are running a speakeasy. The story ends in Morleyesque vein with the Robinsons happily settled on Long Island, operating a League of Nations filling station.

Few of the city's most genial visitors lave given such a glowing description of Manhattan subways as Father Robinson: 'With the even rhythm of great pistons n a pumping system, trains of cars slid to and fro. From distant conduits they sucked in their human packing, shot the swaying masses to central arteries, discharged them through clattering turnstiles which enumerated the herd and propelled any who sought to delay with a genial postern whack." Even his criticisms are a left-handed compliment: "[The Americans] fall into mass hysterias on small provocation; they continually suppose themselves on the verge either of calamity or salvation; everything is exaggerated to a panacea or a menace, so much so that I could not tell, reading the advertising, which was believed the greater peril to the republic: Russian communism or sore gums. In short, the Americans are essentially unbusinesslike, artists and imaginers in soul. So much the better for them, I like them for it; but it would never do to tell them so."

Waldorf's Astor

JOHN JACOB ASTOR--Kenneth W. Porter--Harvard University Press (two vols.: $10).*

In two volumes, 1.353 carefully documented pages, Researcher Porter has stored all the available facts about the first & greatest of the Astor dynasty. Born the son of a butcher in the little German village of Waldorf, John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) became "first business man in America to attain colossal wealth." Author Porter considers him preeminent in his period, says: "Indeed it is doubtful whether in the art of buying and selling he has ever been approached, much less surpassed."

Porter names eight lines of business in which Astor engaged; the two most usually connected with his name are Manhattan real estate and the American Fur Company. Astor was one of the first to bank on Manhattan's rapid growth. In 20 years he invested well over $700,000 in Manhattan property. "The funds employed came almost entirely from the profits of Astor's China trade, which, in its turn, had been based principally upon his success as a dealer in furs, and also as a general merchant."

Astor took risks with his money but he never deliberately wasted any. He prophesied the failure of a recently-opened hotel because the management put such large lumps of sugar in the sugar bowl. Poet Fitz-Greene Halleck who served as his confidential secretary for many years had once said to him: "Mr. Astor, of what use is all this money to you? I would be content to live upon a couple of hundreds a-year for the rest of my life, if I was only sure of it." Astor's will left him an annuity of $200. When the German Society, knowing they were down for $20,000 in the Astor will, tried to persuade the old man, now aged and retired from business, to give them the money before he died, he struck a bargain, gave them $20,000 in bonds that were at a discount of 25%. "With a face radiant with pleasure, leaning on his staff, he tottered into the back office, chuckling as he went, to tell William that he had made 'five thousand dollars that morning.' "

John Jacob Astor is the first of a series, to be called "The Harvard Studies in Business History," which will be issued by the Harvard University Press. Says Editor Norman Scott Brien Gras, professor at Harvard's School of Business Administration: "Sometimes the theme of the studies will be individual business men, sometimes it will be an individual business firm. But the emphasis will logically be upon the policy and management of private enterprise."

Murder, Fletcherized

MURDER IN THE SQUIRE'S PEW--J. S. Fletcher--Knopf ($2).

Joseph Smith Fletcher, methodical English author of methodical English murder stories, well deserves to be considered an Old Hand. His gradual fame spread long ago to the U. S., was fanned when curious newshawks discovered that the late President Wilson, stalwart Fletcherite, was wont to read him into the small hours in the Presidential bed. No extremist, no strainer after gruesome effects or heart-clutching surprises, Author Fletcher tells quietly a plain and fairly plausible tale, introduces no supermen, no omniscient gods of the crime world. If you are tired of Sherlock Holmeses and their attendant Watsons you may find Author Fletcher's detectives a pleasant change.

Murder in the Squire's Pew tells more of robbery and intrigue than of murder; you feel Author Fletcher granted a corpse only out of deference to his readers' taste. When a well-to-do English clergyman discovered that his church had been robbed of some priceless 15th Century church vessels he was naturally upset; when the detectives he sent for found a dead man in the squire's pew he was struck all of a heap. The murderer was tracked and some of the treasure recaptured in a few days, but before the whole truth came out Canon Effingham had a great many Disturbingly new experiences in a short time.

Other Fletcher murders: The Borgia Cabinet, The Yorkshire Moorland Murder, The Dressing Room Murder, The Murder at W rides Park, Murder in Four Degrees.

* New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

*Published Dec. 15.

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