Anarch Monarch

ROMANCE OF A DICTATOR -- George Slocombe--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Out of his twelve-year experience as a star newspaper correspondent, during which he has covered every major assignment in Europe, attended every Peace on Reparations conference, red-bearded Britisher Slocombe has distilled a modern political romance that will intoxicate readers accustomed to drinking Dumas with their mother's milk. The book is a thinly disguised, none too complimentary adumbration of Dictator Mussolini.

Though soon to become Dictator of Thalia, Hannibal, when Journalist Slocombe first encounters him in Switzerland, is an anarchist of the deepest dye. Though politically a heman, personally he has traits barely infantile. When a girl at his Swiss boarding house repulses his torrid advances, in a pet he plants a dummy bomb under his bed to terrify the boarders, decamps for England. From anarchist lair to lair he jumps. In Paris he meets Luciana, who recognizes the star of fortune burning over his beetling brow. She becomes his mistress, mothers him and his destiny with incomparable tact.

During the War Hannibal and Luciana suddenly appear in Thalia. Hannibal starts a newspaper and, against all anarchistic precedent, begins to harang Thalians to join the Allies. While grinding his teeth at Communists, Socialists, Pacifists, he grinds his own axe as well. His paper is subsidized by the Allies. His fame and popularity grow to such proportions that, after the War, when he marches on the capitol, Mirasol, he is immediately proclaimed Dictator by the helpless King. For a time, with Luciana helping, he is kingpin. But he needs king-pin-money from U. S. Financier Stedford to keep going. At first Stedford, who has a passion for Luciana, grants the loans. But when Hannibal makes up to Elena, the King's youngest daughter, finally marries her, Stedford subsidizes Conspirator Gandolfo and Hannibal is exiled. A fugitive with Elena, he is attacked by an anarchist, but his wife saves his life with hers. After years of lonely wanderings he returns to Luciana, who takes him in hand, teaches his star to rise again.

In the life of Benito Mussolini there is in fact no Stedford, no Luciana and no Elena. Not a "Stedford" but Wall Street's greatest banks have supplied the Fascist Regime with loans. So many women have brightened the Dictator's leisure that to pick out one and call her "Luciana" is mere English understatement. Finally the Dictator, who was a proud, prolific father long before his rise to power, has most certainly never aspired to marry a daughter of King Vittorio Emanuele III.

City Jungle-Book

THE CITY JUNGLE--Felix Salten-- Simon & Schuster ($2).

Above the European city's sleepless roar that throbs across the city's zoo, rises every night a roar of animal voices, voices from Africa and Asia, from the polar ice, the plains of Tanganyika, the primeval forests of Borneo. Lions groan and tigers moan. Elephants trumpet like thunder. Wolves howl, hyenas laugh, monkeys screech. But all cry the same thing: "How long must we remain captive? What have we done that we should suffer so horribly? Why are we here? Why?" Sleepy humans do not answer, do not even hear.

In what some readers will consider the slightly mawkish accents of gratuitous pity Author Salten tells delicate stories of the zoo's inhabitants. To the orangutans Lily and Bobby (their names in the jungle were Yppa & Zato) is born their first child, a male whom they name Tikki. Lily begins to find captivity bearable, but Bobby wants to hold the baby too. When he gets hold of him he will not let him go, plays with him until he begins to starve for mother's milk. Only after Bobby has been drugged with bananas loaded with veronal can Tikki be taken from him. When he awakens Bobby realizes his drugged in dignity; no more bananas, no more of any of Man's food for him. Slowly, reproach fully he starves to death.

Other animals have other miseries: Hella, the lioness, whose second prison-born, litter is taken from her when the cubs reach circus age; Mino, the little red fox, who periodically runs, chasing insanity, in narrowing circles around his cement cage. But there are human sufferers as well. A young man who makes friends with the girl who takes care of Peter, the bicycle-riding chimpanzee, is so horrified by the animals' sufferings that he plans to sacrifice himself in atonement. One night he steals into the elephant's cage, deliberately begins to lead away the elephant's pet, a little white goat. In the morning the curator finds the boy's body wedged high between the bars; the great elephant swaying to & fro beside his softly bleating goat.

The Author. His father cowed by business disaster, himself bullied as a school child. Author Salten learned young to pity both men and animals. Born in Ofenpest, Austria, in 1869, he had to make a living out of family charity until his writing began to pay. Thereafter, besides practicing journalism in Vienna, he has written some 20 books. Bambi, his first book published in America, telling the life story of a buck in the Wienerwald, was a great success. Others: The Hound of Florence, Fifteen Rabbits, Samson & Delilah.

Posthumoresques

STROKE OF LUCK; DREAM OF DESTINY -- Arnold Bennett -- Doubleday, Dor an ($2.50).

Two novels, one short, one unfinished, make up late Author Bennett's book. The two heroines, who outclass the heroes, are actresses. Both plots are rather theatrically professional, in Author Bennett's later, lighter style. Handled with ambidextrous ease, these somewhat inconsequential stories will barely satisfy serious-minded Bennett fans, but his reputation can stand the strain.

Stroke of Luck tells of Etta Wickham-stead who, to escape poverty, took to the stage. As Ruth Ruthven she had an accidental success in a vampire's part. Producers tried to make her repeat in other plays; but, no flapper, Etta always flops. Her poverty returns, consigns her to rooms in Chelsea where she lives with her cousin, Stocky. Etta is straitlaced, but Stocky is voluptuously convex. One day Etta, returning from an employment agency unemployed, snatches a boy out of the path of Mr. Leverton's car. Flowers follow, and Mr. Leverton follows the flowers. Just when Etta has succeeded in arousing Mr. Leverton's interest (he is a wealthy theatrical man), Stocky barges into the room. Mr. Leverton has interests other than professional, cannot take his eyes off Stocky's luscious shape. Though both girls are then & there employed, there follows an uncivil war between them for Mr. Leverton. Everything seems to be militating against Etta until Mr. Leverton discovers that she understands him. He asks her help in finishing a play. Wedding bells ensue.

Dream of Destiny, the unfinished novel, invades territory near that amply inhabited by late great Novelist Henry James. When, at a fashionable garden party. Roland Smith meets Star-Actress Phoebe Friar, he realizes that she is the girl of whom he has lately dreamed-- married to him, lying in a hospital, dying, dead. But there is nothing mortuary about Phoebe and the two strike up a friendship gradually deepening into love. At the height of her theatrical success. Phoebe suddenly falls ill. Roland is distressed; terrified when details of her illness remind him of his dream. . . .

Checkered Czech

THIRTY YEARS IN THE GOLDEN NORTH --Jan Welzl--Macmillan ($2.50).

Wrecked off the U. S. Pacific Coast in 1924, on a return voyage from San Francisco to New Siberia, Trader Welzl, lacking identification papers, was deported to his homeland Czechoslovakia. He had never heard of the place. Long before the War he had left Moravia to wander far & wide. Returned there a Czech, he lectured, dictated reminiscences (made literate by others), collected money enough to return to his polar home.

After youthful wanderings his odyssey started at Irkutsk where he was employed as a locksmith on the Trans-Siberian Railway. A chance meeting with two political prisoners who had escaped across northern Siberia made up Author Welzl's mind. That spring he bought a horse and cart, made tracks for the Arctic Ocean alone. Too uneducated to follow maps he followed his nose, and the rivers flowing north.

Two winters Traveler Welzl hibernated on the way. At one settlement coquettish women made advances by biting their larger fleas in two, swallowing one half, tossing the other half at him. At last he reached the Arctic tundra, exchanged his horse and cart for reindeers and sledge. Reaching the Bear Islands he stayed there with Eskimos until a whaler came by, took off to the waters north of Novaya Zemlya, "where the ocean flowed like a huge river among the icebergs."

On the return from the whaling trip Traveler Welzl was disembarked, at his own request, on the barren island of New Siberia. He discovered a cave abandoned by Eskimos, dug himself in before the polar storms broke. The winter night descended, the cold stiffened the tossing waves flat. High winter tides exploded the whole ocean's frozen surface into the air, with thunderclaps, bellows, sea-qiiaking crashes. At those sounds many a polar settler has burst out of his cave, run yelling along the shore waving his arms, insane. Traveler Welzl never stirred outside his cave, where the temperature touched 86DEG below. Though lonely and cold the life was Eskimo Pie to him.

With spring's arrival he unearthed himself, discovered other cave-dwellers in the frozen land. Fast learning the local lore he quarried himself another home and, besides providing for his own wants, worked up a profitable business on the side. Not a tree grows on those islands; but the summer influx of gold-miners and coal-miners must have wood. Trader Welzl wangled wood from whaling boats, finally imported provisions from Alaska. Soon he was rich enough to buy a $100,000 share in a trading boat. Tales of his adventures in New Siberia and elsewhere, an account of the Eskimos' extraordinary way of life, his own election, under the jaw-cracking title Moojok-Ojaak, as Chief of New Siberia, wind up his undreamed of, not incredible, romance of fact.

Of Thee I Sing (Cont'd)

THE DIARY OF AN EX-PRESIDENT-- John P. Wintergreen--Minton, Batch ($1.75).

Public interest, already awakened by the staging of President Wintergreen's political activities in the Pulitzer Prize-winning success, Of Thee I Sing, will be further aroused by the publication of the ex-President's Diary. Edited by Author Morrie Ryskind, collaborator with George S. Kaufman in the play, it is the product of that scholar's diligent research: only after six months' digging (in the new subway on Manhattan's Eighth Avenue) did he finally succeed in unearthing it. It covers roughly the first four months of ex-President Wintergreen's administration. In its confidential pages the ex-President makes a clean breast of his official hair shirt.

"Awoke this morning, fully clothed" is the keynote struck early in his diary's pages by Mr. Wintergreen, whose inauguration marked what newspapers called "the beginning of a new era in Prohibition." During the daytime the ills of office and the Ways & Means Committee had a sobering effect. But at nights he forgot his troubles with the British Ambassador, assisted by whiskeys' & soda (bicarbonate). Administration affairs were just beginning to straighten out when Jim Doolittle, the President's brother-in-law, who married his sister Tess under compulsion, was arrested for 'legging in Montana. That scandal was the prelude to worse troubles. In its effort to balance the Budget, the Senate taxed landlords 50% of any rent they charged, 150% of what they got. What with Wall Street investigations, the Depression got so thick that Julius, the Secretary of Commerce, disappeared. Sole memento of him was the White House parrot who kept saying "The Depression is over! The Depression is over!" In the uncanny way the little polly repeated Julius' slogan, and with that beak of his, Mr. Wintergreen was almost tempted to believe in reincarna tion.

At last the suffering populace could stand it no longer, began to advance on the White House. Blockaded-- the Presi dent and his family lived on tinned beef and dried apricots until, at the crucial moment, Julius, the missing Secretary, re appeared. He brought with him Man- That-Jumps-Like-a-Flea, an Osage Indian who was to save them all. The complaint of the raging mob outside was that Throttlebottom, the Vice President, had not a Constitutional amount of Indian blood. A transfusion appeased the mob and the day was saved. Ex-President Wintergreen concludes: "I had done my duty by America and ... I'd be damned if I'd do it again."

*As played by William Gaxton, who made the Dart a parody of Mayor Walker.

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