Evening star., 1923-01-16
NEW BOOKS
AT RANDOM
A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF. BY Theo-

4
A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF. BY Theo-
dore Dresser. Boni & Liveright.
4 This has been called an honest
1 book. 1t is. Honesty. however. is
not the motive power behind it. Self
absorption is the driving force of the
story And a perfect abandon of self
disclosure delivers it. Honesty is a
mere accident in this passion for self
/, expression, where nothing pertaining
/ TO the writer is negligible, where
| everything is vital Inevitably an
author in this state of being runs to
words. Mr.. Dresser does. He here
gravely offers 500-page volume to
period of his, to him, momentous daily
! existence. Only that innocence of
mind possessed by children alone
children and a few Mr. Dreisers-
could, in sober earnest, achieve this
gesture. His. painstaking devotion to
all the multifarious "details of HIM
self contains a CLINT of humor for
the reader, while to the writer it is
obviously up to the last letter a most
serious business. And to be sure,
everybody is to himself a serious
! business. Fortunate the one, how
ever, who learns to laugh little now
and then over the fix he is in. This
! is the fix that we are all in. Mr..
Dresser is one of the unlucky who
never for an instant sees the joke OF
/ himself
X X X
If the author were to build a house
| In the manner of his building this
book any one qualified to pass upon
his work would say. right off, that he
was no architect; that he had not
the ghost of a notion of those pro-
portions upon which any structure
depends for much of it's beauty and
for the most of it's stability. And
Mr.. Dresser would say that he knew
this very well; that he was not try
ing to create architectural units. but
| that, rather, he was following the
plane OF the Almighty, who never
takes the trouble to show to man any
| complete and rounded aspects of life,
but leads him instead through a nit
or-miss welter of events, which He
\ suddenly shuts off squarely before
one can gather even a hint of gem
erai design or purpose or of his own
individual part in working out some
special patatern. God, and the Rus
sian writer's. and Mr.. Dresser, all
work that way.
| Tramping the Chicago streets on
| the trail of news, this .oVergrown.
unwaywise boy became an explorer,
an avid youth hunting life And he
came upon wonderful things Over
| joyed, he found out that the big city
was of itself personality, with hours
of bewitchment upon 1.-THE night,
the brooding dawn, the open day.
Amazed, he discovered much about
the sublimate chemistry of all Gre
iation-man. human life. SO beautiful
and so terrible. These contacts soak
ed through his senses down into his
emotions. The boy became over
charged and was likely TO explode
with the wonder of its existence. A
little part of this he came gradually
TO let out on paper for newspaper
print. Much the larger part of it,
however, went into romantic philan-
deripgs, tenuous and unreal as
| dreams. Fhe lovely chin and throat
curve of a girl. or sheen of hair, or
/ lure of glance, would send him OF
| into some impossible seventh heaven
He mouthed queer things-some of 1t
| poetry-and worked out social theo-
| ries of his own-marriage a mistake:
too many delays about it, the delay of
courtship, the delay of engagements.
the delay of the marriage ceremony
| itself; better to seize life hot off the
fire than to wait till it has grown
clammy and tasteless like a cold pan
| cake. He is vain, absurd, bombastIc
grotesque, inordinateIy proud of his
/ small advances in the press game
For he did advance little of this
surge got into his writing and the
powers caught the difference between
his copy and that of the more sophis-
ticate. They thought, guardedly
that it might go, that they might
give the fellow little more rope
now and then. The basic fact at this
a belated and painful adolescence
crazy and dazed with himself and
with life large part of the time
And he tells all he knows right II
this book-at any rate, one hopes
that he knows no more than he has
told here.
The newspaper proved finally moi
to be his medium. The story, he felt
would make a better channel for him
So he fell to reading the best of oul
story -writers-Howells and the rest
No, no: none of this would do-pretty
polite, polished things, but not real
had nothing at all to do with life
At the most these were but variant:
of the OLD fairy tale. Then he came
upon Balzac and ate him up. Here
was the very stuff of life, and here
was the way to put it across. Anc
by and by there will emerge Theodore
Dresser, writer of sprawling, cumber.
some novels that are, nevertheless
tacutely conscious of the ways of the
human heart, hand in glove with tht
contradictions and vagaries of human
ibehaviors. To go back to the book
! in hand, here is a big. bewildered
cropping. persistent1y cropping, human
infinitely pathetic, not in himseli
alone as Theodore Dresser, but as {
human implication in the wilderness,
lof life. A lovable person, too: but
he would not care a straw for that.
A THOUSAND AND ONE AFTER.
MOONS IN CHICAGO. BY Ber
Hecht. Covici-McGee.
Another Chicago newspaper man
Another rebel against the "hypocri
sizes" of life and letters. Another
novelist, this one of a realism so deer
and thick as to menace one some
times with the ooze and slime of It
A genuine artist at heart: If be-
lhavior, q freakish gamin who shouIc
be spanked. A follower of Theodort
jDreiser, whom, in frank homage, ht
CLASSES with thnaa uYaqfion