Churchill's Churchill

MARLBOROUGH : His LIFE & TIMES-Winston S. Churchill--Scribner (2 vol.: $6).

When English statesmen retire they often retire into their studies to taper off an active career by writing their memoirs or refurbishing their rusty classics. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, perennial bad boy of English politics, who. though not yet retired, has already written numerous memoirs, now emerges from his study brandishing the first two volumes of a life of his great ancestor, John Churchill, original Duke of Marlborough. Churchills will applaud this sturdily belligerent defense of a family name they consider much maligned. Historians may be amused at Biographer Winston's irrepressibly stout language (he is a past master in the violent use of rubberstamp phrases) and defiant bias. U. S. readers will find Marlborough entertainingly Tory reading, will look forward to the volumes still to come.

Author Churchill (Marlborough's great-great-great -great-great-great-grandson ) leaves no one long in doubt that his sympathies and family loyalty are alike engaged: he is proud to be the Duke of Marlborough's partisan. His introduction to his hero is like a flung gauntlet: ''He commanded the armies of Europe against France for ten campaigns. He fought four great battles and many important actions. . . . He never fought a battle that he did not win, nor besieged a fortress that he did not take. . . . He quitted war invincible: and no sooner was his guiding hand withdrawn than disaster overtook the armies he had led. Successive generations have not ceased to name him with

Hannibal and Caesar. . . . Every taunt, however bitter; every tale, however petty; every charge, however shameful, for which the incidents of a long career could afford a pretext, has been leveled against him." The Duke of Marlborough was born (1650) John Churchill, but his lines were cast in potent places. As a penurious but presentable gentleman at Charles II's court he found favor with the Duchess of Cleveland, one of the King's own. Once, nearly caught in the act by his royal rival, Churchill jumped featly out of the Duchess's bedroom window. ''Delighted with his daring and address, she presented him with -L-5.000." Biographer Churchill admits his ancestor took the cash but weighs carefully the often-repeated rumor that canny John, instead of blowing in these sinful wages, salted them away as the first deposit toward his future fortune. When he met the beauteous Sarah Jennings, although neither of them had enough money, John snapped his fingers at prudence and married her. A character in her own right, who long survived her conqueror husband, Sarah was a devoted wife but no doormat. Once she took the annoying last word by cutting off her hair; to her chagrin John apparently never noticed it. but later she discovered her shorn locks laid away with his carefully guarded treasures.

Churchill served in the army under five reigns (Charles II, James II, William & Mary, William III, Anne). He was a colonel at 24. but 52 before he commanded a large army. After a brief apprenticeship under the French Marshal Turenne, he made a reputation as a putter-clown of rebellions-Monmouth's English yokels, the Irish kerns and galloglasses. When William III died, at 52. the stage was set for Marlborough's European campaigns, those "ten years of unbroken victory'' which Author Churchill will relate in further installments.

The Author's numerous critics have never accused him of shilly-shallying or of refraining from speaking his mind. Even such a scholarly work as this cannot hamper his characteristic style: "During the whole of his life Louis XIV was the curse and pest of Europe. No worse enemy of human freedom has ever appeared in the trappings of polite civilization." By his own enemies called a jingo, a hidebound Tory, moonfaced Winston Churchill has always pined for action. For a politician he has seen plenty though he has never headed his party in power or out. As commander of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers in France in 1916, Descendant Churchill took a soldier's interest in war strategy. His books on the War (The World Crisis, The Eastern Front), written in galloping style, give a clearer picture of the fighting, especially of the War in the East, than most of the defensive memoirs of retired Generals.

Fortnight ago James Roosevelt, back from his European holiday (TIME, Oct. 9), brought his father in the White House an autographed copy of Marlborough, a present from Author Churchill.

Malachi Mulligan

SELECTED POEMS--Oliver St. John Gogarty--Macmillan ($2).

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air." Every reader of James Joyce's famed Ulysses* will recognize this opening passage. But many Ulysses readers are not aware that Malachi ("Buck") Mulligan represents a real person, with other claims to fame besides being a minor character in Joyce's Dublin epic. Renowned as "the wildest wit in Ireland." a doctor, a Senator, an air pilot. Oliver St. John Gogarty is also no mean versifier, occasionally no mean poet. His version of the old tale of Leda (originally printed in the Atlantic Monthly) is very Irish. One stanza: Of the tales that daughters

Tell their poor old mothers, Which by all accounts are

Often very odd; Leda's was a story

Stranger than all others. What was there to say but:

Glory be to God?

To love and its attendant foibles Poet Gogarty's lighter vein is apt: Only the Lion and the Cock, As Galen says, withstand Love's shock. So, Dearest, do not think me rude If I yield now to lassitude, But sympathise with me. I know You would not have me roar, or crow. When he can manage to subdue his wit something simpler and better emerges: I gaze and gaze when I behold The meadows springing green and gold. I gaze until my mind is naught But wonderful and wordless thought! Till, suddenly, surpassing wit, Spontaneous meadows spring in it; And I am but a glass between Un-walked in meadows, gold and green. The Author's most famed productions have never met the public eye, are fitter for private ears. Prolific parent of a Rabelaisian brood of limericks, bans mots, parodies, a troop of outrageous, robustious characters of fancy, Oliver St. John Gogarty is a doctor by trade (throat specialist). Now an Irish Senator, he was a bitter enemy of the Republicans, once faced a firing squad but escaped by swimming the Liffey. In gratitude he presented the river with a brace of swans. A mighty tosspot in his youth, he made a pilgrimage to the top of Featherbed Mountain to restore the snakes to Ireland. When he and Joyce shared a Martello tower near Dublin (Ulysses' opening scene), they protested to the British Admiralty about a warship that interfered with their view, had the ship removed.

Now middleaged, married (with a daughter, two sons), well-to-do (he owns a town house, an island and a Norman castle), with an admired position, with such intimates as William Butler Yeats. AE (George Russell). James Stephens. Dr. Gogarty lives sparklingly in Dublin. Once fond of driving his Mercedes at breakneck speeds along Irish lanes, he has now taken to the air. Says he: "It's the only excitement left the middle-aged man except the divorce courts, and it's far more respectable." On his latest visit to Manhattan (last winter) he gave reporters a lively half-hour, said something new about Manhattan's skyline: "Keyserling says you have not mastered nature, but I think you've made the Rocky Mountains jealous."

China Tea Race

THE BIRD OF DAWNING--John Masefield--Macmillan ($2.50).

John Masefield. Poet Laureate of England, has developed into such a gently archaic poet that readers of his laureations are apt to forget his hard, seafaring youth. But Masefield himself has not forgotten; ships have always been his lights-o'-love, and in The Bird of Dawning he returns to them with his old youthful fervor. This tale of clipper ships of the China sea trade, just before the days when steam swept sail from the seas, would make a young man's reputation, should shore up old Poet Masefield's against the seeping criticisms of sentimental mediocrity.

The skipper of the Black gauntlet had never won the long race home from China to London, the coveted prize of the China tea fleet, though he had come as near as nothing to it; this voyage he swore he would do it. And he was going strong, with good winds, when one foggy night a steamer rammed him. Only one boatload got away before the Blackganntlet sank. Nearest port was at Fayal in the Azores, 700 miles away; Officer Trewsbury thought they had a fair chance of making it till he discovered how much of their boat's stores were ruined or missing. Then there was nothing for it but to keep going as long as they could. Luckily in a few days they sighted one of their rival clippers, The Bird of Dawning, hove to and deserted. The skipper had gone crazy, faked a hopeless leak and frightened his crew into the boats. Short-handed as they were, the boat's crew of the Blackganntlet turned to and sailed her home, not knowing till they reached mid-Channel whether they were still in the race or not. When the Channel fog lifted under a driving breeze they found they still had a chance. They cracked home lucky winners, luckier still to be alive.

Day Before Yesterday

OVER HERE (1914-1918). Vol. V of OUR TIMES--Mark Sullivan--Scribner ($3.75).

Journalist Mark Sullivan is catching up as a contemporary historian. His history of Our Times (1900-25) began appearing in 1926. has now reached 1918. This fifth volume, as full as the others of forgotten details for which historians will be grateful and plain readers too. shows the U. S. in its swiftest recent years, 1914-18.

U. S. citizens who might be pardoned for never quite gathering who was fighting whom, will welcome Author Sullivan's introductory table of Declarations of War, which makes it clear, for instance, that whereas Siam fought both Germany and Austria but not Turkey. Guatemala fought only Germany. Besides numerous cartoons, war maps, newspaper headlines, Compiler Sullivan has exhumed many a curious highlight from the museumed files. Some of them: versions (bowdlerized) of the bawdy war song. "Mademoiselle from Armentieres"; "gasless Sunday." when every patriot did his bit by parking his car in the garage for the day; the late Theodore Roosevelt's furious attempts to get permission from the Government to raise a division and take it to France: the exclusive cable announcing the "false armistice" sent by President Roy Howard of the United Press (TIME. Nov. 20); the tragic decline of Woodrow Wilson from world hero to ex-President.

Murders of the Month

THE CASE OF COLONEL MARCHAND-- E. C. R. Lorac--Macanlay ($2). The Colonel, a "womanizer." is dead after tea with a redhead. Pearls, a bastard and a decomposed cat hang the miscreant.

THE SCARLET MESSENGER--Henry Holt--Crime Club ($2). Murder by knife, extortion by letter, intimidation by tonga bean bring Inspector Silver and Friend Collinson in & out of another mystery.

THE MAN THEY COULDN'T HANG--Oliver Martyn--Morrow ($2). Two corpses for Superintendent Marsden. who cannot read Bell's Visible Speech, suspects his best friend, catches the murderer bashing in a water carafe.

BLACK HAWTHORN--John Stephen Strange--Crime Club ($2). New England interfamily murder centres in a tangible curse which is carefully kept in a vase on the mantel. The trail of an incendiary unveils the clues.

MURDER MOON--Henry Leyford--Macanlay ($2). Wild, romantic doings on the French Riviera result in two moonlit corpses and the unmasking of "La Femme du Mort."

THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY--Ellery Queen-Stokes ($2). On a mountain top. hemmed in by forest fire. Father & Son Queen find their host of a night murdered. No suspect can escape, but two false accusations and another death occur before the Queens descend the mountain triumphant.

SCOTLAND YARD CAN WAIT!--David Frome-Farrar & Rinehart ($2). Plunged anew into a decade-old case, Inspector Lord spots his criminals one by one. recovers the -L-60.000 loot, aided by the blunderings of a very young lawyer.

* Long banned from the U. S. on the grounds of obscenity, Ileysw was & is now being read lie Federal fudge John M. Woolsey to decide whether it shall be permitted legal entry.

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