Answer: Shaw

THE ADVENTURES OF THE BLACK GIRL ix HER SEARCH FOR GOD--Bernard Shaw-- Dodd, Mead ($1.50).

There is not a fool can call me friend, And I may dine at journey's end With Landor and with Donne.

--W. B. Yeats

Irish Poet William Butler Yeats, conscious of his own worth, seats himself modestly midway at the long table of his peers. Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw, who for years has twinklingly told the world that he is a greater man than Shakespeare, has now written a fable that will further shock the righteous. In it he puts himself on a level with Voltaire. Christ and Mohammed; he is a hero and the God of the Old Testament is a bogey-villain. In spite of his destructive wit which many even nowadays call blasphemous. Iconoclast Shaw is a kindly soul; like the light-hearted pessimist, his good nature keeps breaking through. Choleric colonels might take their apoplectic death from reading The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, and the Cambridge (England) public library has barred it, but readers of good-will should find old Author Shaw on their side.

Coal-black, naked, a young African Negress converted to Christianity by a female missionary sets out through the jungle to look for God. She meets the God of Genesis, the God of Job, Ecclesiastes. Micah, Pavlov, a Roman soldier, Christ, St. Peter and a procession of churches, a caravan of intellectuals, Mohammed, an imagemaker, Voltaire, and finally Shaw. Naive but nobody's fool, the black girl questions everyone she meets but finds no satisfactory answers. The Gods of Genesis and Job enrage her and she attacks them with her knobkerry (that and a Bible are her only impedimenta). Christ she finds "a good-natured fellow who smiled whenever he could," but with a low opinion of women. Mohammed's equally masculine attitude disgusts her; she leaves them together, saying: "I shall not find God where men are talking about women." When she comes on Voltaire cultivating his garden she is persuaded that that is the best way of looking for God, and joins him. One day she finds a tall Irishman digging away too. Voltaire suggests they would make a fine pair, so she and Shaw marry, go on digging, raise a brood of coffee-colored children.

In his inevitable preface (which he prints this time as a final chapter) Shaw explains that he had intended this book to be a play, found himself writing a story instead. (No play on such a subject could be performed in England, where the Lord Chamberlain refused a permit to the innocuous Green Pastures because it represented the Deity on the stage.) The Bible, says Shaw, is a mess; the extent of the messiness is just beginning to be shown up by modern translations. He calls the Book of Revelation "a curious record of the visions of a drug addict." All religious leaders, he thinks, are misunderstood by their followers right from the start. Christianity "is an amazing muddle, which has held out not only because the views of Jesus were above the heads of all but the best minds, but because his appearance was followed by the relapse in civilization which we call the Dark Ages, from which we are only just emerging sufficiently to begin to pick up the thread of Christ's most advanced thought and rescue it from the mess the apostles and their successors made of it."

Able Woodcutter John Farleigh (known to connoisseurs as the illustrator of the Shakespeare Head edition of Chapman's Homer) does a good best (see cut) to keep his end up to the Shavian text.

With South Moon Under, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God is the March choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Haunted House

BELINDA GROVE--Helen Ashton-- Double day, Dor an ($2.50).

When the house was built in 1815 it was a mansion, somewhat pretentious, well out of London. It was bought by Lord Alciston, gambling friend of the Prince Regent, and named "Belinda Grove" after the quean who was his current mistress. Three years later Lord Alciston supplied the house with the ghost that haunted it for the rest of its life. In a put-up duel after a put-up job at cards he killed a naval officer, hustled the corpse out of sight into the cesspool. Belinda Grove changed hands, began its long degeneration.

Next owners, respectable, middleclass, had a silly daughter whom Lord Alciston's bastard nearly succeeded in seducing. The shock sent her off her head. She ended up as a dropsical old spinster with religious mania. When she died the place had to be fumigated; then a lady novelist took it. Meanwhile London was surrounding Belinda Grove with less & less desirable neighbors. The house became a private asylum, then studio-flats for impoverished artists, then a house of openly ill repute, with a clairvoyant as its most innocent tenant. When a hospital settled next door and part of the house was used as a doctor's dispensary, another murder (this time by poison) was committed there. After housing an unsuccessful cinema studio Belinda Grove was given over to rats and tramps, one of whom set it on fire. When it was finally demolished the skeleton of the murdered naval officer was discovered in the old cesspool, his ghost laid at last.

Forgotten Man

INDIVIDUALISM, An American Way of Life--Horace M. Kallen--Liveright ($2).

Not Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 but the late W. G. Sumner in 1883 first coined the "forgotten man."*(TIME, Nov. 7). Subject of Pundit Kallen's disturbing researches is another, less classifiable U. S. forgotten man--the individual. Kallen finds that the U. S. individual, old-style, always in danger of extinction, has now become few & far between. He thinks that in a rebirth of individualism--and not the "rugged individualism" mouthed by U. S. politicians--lies the only U. S. hope.

In an ordered historical argument, whose headings tot up to a respectable "Individualist Manifesto," Kallen contends that present U. S. leaders "neither face nor understand" the present situation. Industrialism, depersonalizing human relations, "has aborted 'Americanism' as an ideal and has thwarted workers as individuals." Constitution-worship, Fascism, Communism spring not from hope but from fear. Since societies exist only by the consent of their members, a withdrawal of consent (as in the case of Prohibition) nullifies society's laws and purposes. The history of the U. S., thinks Kallen, "is the history of an unremitting warfare in behalf of Individualism as a self-conscious way of life, with some successes and many frustrations"; "Democracy has not failed, because Democracy has not yet had a free chance to make good."

Kallen does not believe that "overproduction" is the reason for the world's Depression. " 'Overproduction' is not a fact. Honest overproduction is a creation of a supply in excess of all needs. That has never yet happened. The needs of men have multiplied absolutely and relatively with the expansion of industry. There is not a single honest commodity, whether a necessity of life, a comfort or a luxury, of which enough is produced to supply the living need. But need and purchasing power have not kept pace with each other. . . . The crux of the situation . . . lies in the fact that things are produced to be sold at a profit to people who want them but do not receive enough wages to pay for them." Kallen backs no panaceas, names no dark horses, urges U. S. Individualists to devise a social plan for the industrial world.

The Author-Great & good friend of John Dewey, socially-minded U. S. philosopher, and fellow-Pragmatist, Horace Meyer Kallen was born a German Jew, is now a free-thinking U. S. Individual. In many a searching talk Dewey and Kallen mulled over the ideas of Individualism. Originally planned as a collaboration, the book was finally written by Kallen alone. Students at Manhattan's New School for. Social Research, where Kallen lectures on psychology and philosophy, know him as an ironic but earnest speaker, are familiar with his soft, silky tones, his face like that of a large tabby cat with hurt feelings. Radical among philosophers, a philosopher among radicals, Kallen has taught unhappily at Princeton, less unhappily at the University of Wisconsin. Some of his books: Why Religion, Culture & Democ racy in the United States, Frontiers of Hope, Indecency and the Seven Arts.

Little Brushes

OTHER WOMEN--Katharine Brush-- Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

Authors, like most other citizens, like to settle down if they can find a town or countryside where they feel at home. Katharine Brush has found (at least temporarily) her spiritual resting place: she calls it ''Kenwood, Ohio." Her Red-Headed Woman was one of Kenwood's scandalous characters; six of these twelve Other Women live there too. Some of them:

Marilee Mark (real name: Mary Marek), once a Kenwood girl, now a racketeer's moll, brings a check to her dying mother. The check is accepted but not Marilee.

Amy Williamson, Kenwood's No. i dressmaker, discusses scandalous Manhattan vacationings with a customer, with whose husband she steadily, scandalously vacations.

Miss Annie Baxter, no innocuous gossip, does a rushing day's business, culminating in one of her usual anonymous letters; then flounces to prayer meeting.

Exciters of the Month

(Listed in Order of Merit')

GETAWAY -- Leslie Charteris -- Crime Club ($2). "The Saint" crosses swords with an old enemy, mocks the authority of three countries, miraculously escapes to go his smiling way.

THE MYSTERY OF MR. CROSS--Clifton Robbins--Appleton ($2). Murder flaunted in Investigator Harrison's face spurs deduction to break up an international crime ring.

DEATH OF A STAR--G. D. H. & M. Cole --Crime Club ($2). To find the murderer from a bodyless head was hard, but when the body was fitted to it the trail became more tangled.

GENIUS IN MURDER--E. R. Punshon-- Houghton, Mifflin ($2). Scotland Yard finds the victim in his own tomb, the missing pearls on a dewy bush, the culprit bleeding on his own bed.

THE MYSTERY OF VAUCLUSE -- J. H. Wallis--Dutton ($2). The monastic peace of the adult college was shattered by the murder of its founder-leader. It took more than one investigator to find out who could be so base.

MURDER AT CYPRESS HALL--0. Stacy-- Dutton ($2). A smalltime murderer runs afoul of a bootlegging sheriff in the old South.

THE DEVIL'S PASSPORT--Gordon Young --Century ($2). Hard Man Everhard oils his guns, smashes a Paris gang for Uncle Sam's Secret Service.

THE HANGING CAPTAIN--Henry Wade --Ear court, Brace ($2). Complicated goings-on in a down-at-heel English manor.

THE HIDDEN DOOR--Frank L. Packard --Crime Club ($2). A detective fictionist searches the underworld to find who killed his gangland schoolmate.

HOT ICE -- Robert J. Casey -- Bobbs-Merrill ($2). Class war among Chicago's jewel thieves to whom murder is incidental.

Books of the Week

HARDY PERENNIAL--Helen Hull-- Coward-McCann ($2.50). Novel of the U. S. middle-class life, middle-class problems by an expert author.

THIS BRIGHT SUMMER -- Anonymous--Covici, Friede ($2.50). Rape, incest, murder and suicide in New England hills add up to a ludicrously gruesome pastoral of horror--Faulkner material without grace of Faulkner ability.

CANDELABRA -- John Galsworthy -- Scribner ($2). Posthumous essays.

THE UNITED STATES IN WORLD AFFAIRS IN 1932--Walter Lippmann-- Harper ($3).

THE GREAT ILLUSION: 1933--Norman Angell--Putnam ($2.50). Revised edition of Pacifist Angell's famed argument against war.

SELF-SELECTED ESSAYS --J. B. Priestley--Harper ($2.50). Odds & ends of a best-selling novelist.

GRAY WOLF--H. C. Armstrong-- Mint on, Balch ($3). Biography of Turkey's Dictator Mustafa Kemal.

EYEWITNESS -- Major-General Sir Ernest D. Swinton -- Doubleday, Doran ($3). The story of the tanks in the World War.

REVOLUTION : 1776 -- John Hyde Preston--Harcourt, Brace ($2.90). Dramatic searchlight on schoolboy history.

*No counterfeiter, Campaigner Roosevelt has admitted he found it in his stocking.

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