The Literary Digest

INTERNATIONAL
BOOK REVIEW

FEBRUARY

1926

Carl Sandburg Interprets Lincoln

By WAYNE GARD

The Vulgar Habit of Laughing

By THOMAS L. MASSON

What Scientists Say of Evolution

By JOSEPH COLLINS

A Champion of the Romantic Nineties

By JULIAN HAWTHORNE

Aaron Burr, Wizard of Mystery

By ARCHIBALD HENDERSON

Seeing the World in Many Moods

By BLAIR NILES and Others

New York FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY

London

Volume IV

Price 25 Cents

Number 3

["THE LITERARY DIGEST INTERNATIONAL BOOK REVIEW", "198", "A Close-up of Books and Authors", "THE John Billings Fiske Poetry Prize for 1925 at the University of Chicago was won by George Hill Dillon with a group of poems entitled \"White Spring,\" with the group of authors in the University Record. With some of the poems published in the University Record, in this group, and with some others published in the magazine Poetry, Mr. Dillon won a $100 prize for the most promising work submitted during the year by a young Chicago poet. He also received first honorable mention in connection with the recent award of the Witter Byner Prize for undergraduate poetry. Mr. Dillon is a Junior in the University of Chicago. He is president of the Poetry Club of the University, editor of The Forge, published by the society, and also associate editor of Poetry.", "Giuseppe Prezzolino, a former exchange professor at Columbia University and now editor of Leonardo, a monthly literary review published in Rome, has been the prime mover in bringing together a series known as \"One Hundred Best Italian Books,\" which is being distributed in this country by the Italy-America Society, 23 West Forty-third Street, New York City. These books are not translations. They are printed in the original Italian and are intended for the use of Italians living abroad and of persons interested in Italy. The series includes not only fiction, poetry and the classics, but such \"practical\" volumes as a cook-book, a dictionary of Italian and English, a history of the United States in English, travel guides, art guides, and an almanac.", "During the latter part of February, Dorrance & Co. will publish the \"Plupy\" stories, by Judge Henry A. Shute, now running in The Saturday Evening Post. The title of the book will be \"Plupy, Beany and Pewt, Contractors.\"", "J. S. Fletcher, writer of detective stories, is represented on the spring list of Alfred A. Knopf by three novels, \"The Amaranth Club,\" published in January, \"The Kang He Vase,\" to be published in March, and \"The Cartwright Gardens Mystery,\" which will appear in May. One is reminded of the late Isaac Ostrander, who produced stories at the rate of four each year and had them published under four different names, thus avoiding the appearance of working overtime.", "In February the Dial Press will publish \"A Chapter on Autog- raphy,\" by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Don C. Seitz. This is", "the first time the articles in this volume have appeared in book form. They are comments on the handwriting of some of Poe's distinguished contemporaries, and they were first published by Poe in The Southern Literary Messenger. In 1853 they were reprinted in P. T. Barnum's Illustrated News. Among the celebrities considered are Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, Bryant, Greeley, Cooper, Irving and others, some of them now Bryan forgotten. The signature of each of these is reproduced in facsimile, together with Poe's outspoken judgment on the writer.", "Charles Fielding Marsh, author of the novel \"Shelter\" (D. Appleton & Co.), is a direct descendant of Henry Fielding, the eighteenth-century English novelist and dramatist.", "One of the most important publishing enterprises of the year is \"An Outline of Christianity: The Story of Our Civilization,\" issued by the Bethlehem Publishers, Inc., in conjunction with the Dodd, Mead & Co. The entire work will be in five volumes, the first of which will probably have appeared before these lines are printed. The aim is to present \"in one continuous narrative, based on sound scholarship, absolutely free from sectarian influence, a readable and complete story of our Christianity, in loth its secular and religious influences on our civilization.\" Among the authors who are cooperating in this monumental work are", "Dean W. R. Inge of St. Paul's, Prof. Michael Pupin of Columbia University, Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, Dr. Henry van Dyke, Dr. John H. Finley, Father Cornelius Clifford, Ralph Connor, Samuel McChord Crothers, John Erskine, Roscoe Pound, Bishop Brent, A. Maude Royden, and others of equal national and international standing.", "Now that \"The Vanishing American\" (Harper & Brothers) is safely launched both as a book and as a movie, Zane Grey is off on another fishing trip, this time to New Zealand. He will probably remain until the end of May. He will then return to the United States, but whether to work or to fish his publishers do not say.", "© Henry Miller News Pictures Service, Inc.", "IRVIN COBB ATTENDS THE ANNUAL ROUND-UP AT PENDLETON, OREGON", "Lewis Brown, who wrote and illustrated the popular history of the Jews, entitled \"Stranger Than Fiction,\" returned not long ago from the Orient, where he has been gathering material and making sketches for an illustrated history of the religions of the world. The Macmillan Company expects to publish the book some time this year.", "THE LITERARY DIGEST INTERNATIONAL BOOK REVIEW", "199", "The first performance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's \"The Great Gatsby,\" dramatized by Owen Davis, and produced by William A. Brady, with James Rennie in the rôle of Gatsby, was given January 25 at the Playhouse, Great Neck, Long Island. Special interest attaches to this opening, because Great Neck, disguised as \"West Egg,\" is the actual scene of the novel and the play. The regular run of the play in New York City will be at the Ambas- sador Theater, beginning early in February. Mr. Fitzgerald, whose new book of stories, \"All the Sad Young Men,\" will be published by Charles Scribner's Sons this month, is giving up his apartment in Paris, and will shortly move, with his wife and small daughter Patricia, to Salies-les-Bains, in the south of France.", "Langford Reed's new anthology, \"The Book of Nonsense Verse,\" is a new approach to the spring list of G. P. Putnam's Sons, illustrated by H. M. Brinton, also made the drawings for Mr. Reed's \"The Complete Limerick Book.\"", "Among the books of verse on the spring list of E. P. Dutton & Co. is \"Dawn Boy: Blackfoot and Navajo Songs,\" by Eda Lou Walton, with an introductory note by Witter Byner. Miss Walton has lived among these tribes and studied their myths, legends and songs. She has not translated these literally, but has recreated them, preserving the essence and spirit of the Indian conception without the endless repetitions and the obscure references that are characteristic of aboriginal songs. Witter Byner says of Miss Walton in his introduction that she has \"brought into more congenial English than any other interpreter has found, the simplicities, the serenities, the grave and happy mysticism of Indian song.\"", "In addition to his qualities as musician and statesman, Mr. Paderewski is a linguist of unusual ability. He has recently written a criticism of James M. Beck's \"Constitution of the United States,\" which well illustrates the facility with which he writes English and the charm of his style. It was in the form of a personal letter to the author of the book, and is here printed with Mr. Paderewski's permission:", "> I have now completed the reading of your \"Constitution\" and I can not tell you how intensely I have enjoyed it. For years I have not read a more interesting and captivating book. It is full of knowledge without being pedantic, it is full of vigor and of life and yet so noble and benevolent in spirit. The wealth of erudition, a multitude of new hitherto unknown facts, the admirable grouping of an enormously rich material, collected with the patience of a Beneficent king, make it one of the most important and most valuable contributions to the history of our civilization, while the lucidity of the gracefulness of the narrative and, above all, the uneasily generous human touch, add to its fascinating, irresistible charm.", "All those remarkable men who took part in the momentous assembly are portrayed with the skill of a master-paintor. How lofty, dignified, majestic is Washington! How harmonious and lovable is the dear old Franklin! How engaging and vivid are: the sagacious and conscientious Madison, the impulsive and chivalrous Hamilton, as a novel and discreet Luther Martin, and so many others! How sorrowful and trage is the figure of John Fitch, the unfortunate precursor, the poor discover whom you have now discovered and vindicated with such a generous compassion!", "What a delightful picture is that dinner at Franklin's house! The reader, invited by you to the historical repast, eats with the illustrious convives and drinks with them, but he can not help thinking what would happen to those giants who made your country so \"great in its infancy,\" who founded the mightiest of all white nations, were they still alive and still drinking that delicious \"porter.\" They would be naturally arrested, censure and punished for the transgression made by themselves. The \"temple-mantle\" was it not a pious man, the head of your Navy Department, who, some years ago, made all your sailors \"dry,\" dis- regarding the fact that the first patriarchal navigator, Noah, had a well- pronounced inclination for drinking and even, according to the chronicle of his race, indulged in it more than a little!", "There are so many things I would like to say in connection with your beautiful book, and especially about the last three chapters, treating the problems of the golden ratio, the golden rectangles, and the golden rectangles, as well as the problems in the problems in the problems in the problems

Good Manners Open Many Doors
that Money Will Never Move!

"ELEPHANTS at large in the garden" is the way Emily Post describes the millionaire who thinks that his money gives him a right to everything. Good taste and a knowledge of what to do and when to do it are the only sure passports to homes of refinement and real social leadership.

Good taste and knowledge—some people call this “manners,” others “etiquette.” The name is less important than the thing itself. Mrs. Post knows the laws of social usage thoroughly and at first hand. She is not only a prominent New York society woman herself, but also a brilliant novelist and a woman of broad understanding. Her book on etiquette is a masterpiece of accurate knowledge, friendly suggestion, and common sense.

## A Standard of Reference

This book is already preeminently the standard of reference throughout the country—praised by the critics, accepted by society leaders, and eagerly sought by those whose instinct tells them that only a woman in Mrs. Post's position and with her ability can be an authoritative and friendly guide.

# The Blue Book of Social Usage

More Than 110,000 Copies Sold

So great has been the demand for this book that it is now in its 13th large edition. Among other reasons for its popularity, not the least is the way Mrs. Post fits her suggestions to every walk of life and every pocket-book. Her theme is not wealth but good manners—whether in country estate, city apartment or suburban cottage.

This witty, entertaining and yet minutely correct volume on those elusive laws governing social life is entirely different from the many "books of etiquette" now before the public.

## Friendly Example—Not Ridicule

It does not ridicule or exaggerate trivial mistakes, but tells fully and exactly how to deal with every situation encountered by a hostess or by a gentleman—a book full of examples taken from daily life, one that even the most experienced welcome for reference, as a check on their own memory, and as an invaluable friend and guide to those of more limited experience who are entering new surroundings. "Just what to do, say, and wear by one of New York's prominent society women," says the Philadelphia *Inquirer*.

## Gives Correct Procedure For Every Occasion

*   **How Strangers Acquire Social Standing in a Community**

*   **When Introductions Are Not Necessary**

*   **How a Young Girl Is Presented to Society**

*   **Engagements — Wedding Gifts — Bridegroom and Bridesmaids**

*   **Country House Hospitality**

*   **Letters of Introduction and Recommendation**

*   **What to Wear in a Restaurant**

*   **Luncheons — Afternoon Teas — Dinner Parties**

*   **Etiquette of the Ballroom**

*   **How to Ask for a Dance**

*   **Etiquette of the Club—At the Bridge Table—On the Golf Links**

*   **How to Invite a Girl to Supper**

*   **At the Opera and Theater**

*   **Correct Forms for Invitations**

*   **Phrases Never Uttered in Society**

*   **Writing Paper and Envelopes**

*   **Wording a Letter of Thanks**

*   **How to Address Eminent Personages**

*   **How to Begin and End a Letter**
*   **Christenings—Funerals**

## The Most Reliable Authority

The *New York Tribune* declares that "not since Mrs. Sherwood sponsored her book on etiquette some fifty years ago has any one so obviously well equipped appeared as authority on the subject."

The *Chicago Tribune* says "it is the most complete book on social usage that ever grew between two covers."

The *Cleveland Plain Dealer* says "it is invaluable to the average thinking man or woman who wishes to live to-day's life in as polished and near- conventional a manner as possible."

## The Blue Book of Social Usage

# ETIQUETTE

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
354-360 Fourth Avenue, New York

I enclose *$4.18, for which please send me
Emily Post's "Etiquette." Int. B. R. 2-26

Name

Address

City

State

*Make your remittance $7.68 if you wish the Special
Gift Edition. Bound in Full Flexible Leather, Boxed.

## EVERY BOOKSELLER IN YOUR CITY HAS IT

EMLY POST is a masterful writer with several successful novels to her credit—"Parade" (just published), "The Title Market," "Purple and Fine Linen," "The Flight of a Moth," etc.

"Etiquette" itself reads like an absorbing piece of fiction. It is human—it clings to realities—it is all about the inner home lives of worth-while people. To read it is to know them as friends.

Your Bookseller will recommend this as the one standard authority and will advise against purchasing substitutes or imitations in similar binding

639 pages; 16 full-page photo reproductions of table-settings, home interiors, decorations; Indexed. Rich Blue Cloth Binding, $4. net; $4.18, post-paid. Special presentation Edition, in full flexible leather, gold-edged paper, in box, $7.50, net; $7.08, post-paid.

IF A BOOK-STORE IS INACCESSIBLE ORDER DIRECT ON THIS COUPON

220 WEST 19th ST., NEW YORK
Tel. Chelsea 8860

THIS CLIPPING FROM

Publisher's Weekly
NEW YORK, N. Y.

JAN 15 1927

## The Book Hunter

Christmas may come and New Year's
may go but according to the Books Wanted
columns of the *Publishers' Weekly* for De-
cember books are still sought after by col-
lectors. The carrying on of the search thru
the Christmas holidays may even be due to
the gift-giving season, for there could be
no more delightful present than a very
scarce first or unique edition of a favorite
author. At any rate there was no let down
in requests for any first editions or any
separate titles. In fact, there was a new
interest shown in a field very little touched
on in these columns before this month, that
of illustration. Four separate requests for
books with Rackham illustrations, two for
Dulac and others for Lovat Fraser, Beards-
ley, Howard Pyle and John Austen show
that the general interest in book illustra-
tion of which we have been hearing so
much recently is not theoretical.

Jean Toomer enters the list for the first
time and Gertrude Stein who has always
just missed appears this month. For the
rest it runs in pretty much the same way
it has for the list six months, Cabell leading
with a fair total. Here is the list, given
by order of demands:

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>All Firsts<br>Wanted</th><th>Separate<br>Titles Wanted</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>James Branch Cabell</td><td>6</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>Rudyard Kipling</td><td>6</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>Joseph Conrad</td><td>5</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>Mark Twain</td><td>5</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Edgar Allan Poe</td><td>4</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>John Galsworthy</td><td>4</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Norman Douglas</td><td>4</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Lafcadio Hearn</td><td>4</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>James Stephens</td><td>4</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Sherwood Anderson</td><td>4</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Oscar Wilde</td><td>4</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Bret Harte</td><td>4</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>James Joyce</td><td>4</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Amy Lowell</td><td>3</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Robert Louis Stevenson</td><td>2</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Theodore Dreiser</td><td>1</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>Will Durant</td><td></td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Joseph Hergesheimer</td><td></td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Christopher Morley</td><td></td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>James Fenimore Cooper</td><td></td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Ben Hecht</td><td></td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Jean Toomer</td><td></td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Stephen Crane</td><td></td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Paul De Kruif</td><td></td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Edna St. Vincent Millay</td><td></td><td>3</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><tr><td>John Cowper Powys</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Romain Rolland</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Gertrude Stein</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>H. G. Wells</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Walt Whitman</td><td>3</td></tr></table>

## Reading List

G. B. SHAW

Lays down the law

With rather a sharp concussion,

By telling the throng

All things are wrong

Unless they are wholly Russian.

H. G. Wells

The whole world tells—

And causes a mild sensation—

That in less than a wink

We'll be on the brink

Of the end of civilization.

Sir James Jeans,

Of cosmic scenes

A scrupulous fact recorder,

Says it's true

That the world's askew

And the universe out of order.

Theodore Dreiser,

Sadder and wiser

Than many another writer,

Finds the past

Is overcast

And the future not much brighter.

So I shall incline

To Gertrude Stein,

That somewhat different poet;

If sadness lurks

In her published works,

No one will ever know it!

—Harold Angell.

THE NEW YORKER

May 1, 1927

MORE AUTHORS COVER
THE SNYDER TRIAL

I

WHO DID WE DID DID WE

WE DID, SAYS MISS STEIN!

By Gertrude Stein

THIS is a trial. This is quite a
trial. I am on trial. They are
on trial. Who is on trial?

I can tell you how it is. I can
tell you have told you will tell you
how it is.

There is a man. There is a wo-
man. There is not a man. There
would have been a man. There was
a man. There were two men. There
is one man. There is a woman where
is a woman is a man.

He says he did. He says he did
not. She says she did. She says she
did not. She says he did. He says
she did. She says they did. He says
they did. He says they did not. She
says they did not. I'll say they did.

II

JOYCE FINDS SOCKSOCKING IS
BIG ELEMENT IN MURDER CASE!

By James Joyce

TRIAL regen by trialholden
Queenscountycourthouse w ith
tumpetty taptap mid socksocking with
sashweights by jackals. In socksock-
ing, the sashwiring goes: guggengag-
gleoggoggsnukkkk. . . . To corsetsale
is to alibi is to meetinlovenkillenlove.
Rehab des arbah sed drahab! Not a
quart of papa's booze had poison booze
vor the killparty for the snugglesnug-
gle. . . .

III

OUT A MILE, WRITES COBBI!

By Ty Cobb

STEALING home from a bridge
game is a clever stunt, if properly
worked. But it should never be fol-
lowed by the hit-and-run play.

It's not like the Cry Baby bandits
—four bawls and a walk to Sing Sing.
Snyder merely hit into a double play
and was out a mile, Syracuse to New
York to Syracuse.
—J. G. T.

THIS CLIPPING FROM
SAT. REVIEW OF
LITERATURE
NEW YORK CITY

FEB 1 2 1927

MacLeish Emerges

STREETS IN THE MOON. By ARCHIBALD MACLEISH. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1926. $5.

Reviewed by LOUIS UNTERMEYER

FROM the first it was obvious that Archibald MacLeish had something to say, something that, in spite of the many-voiced chorus of modern American poetry, had not been said. But, even on the point of clearest revelation, his utterance would often thicken and become confused with echoes. "The Happy Marriage" opened with a note too Robinsonian to escape comparison; "The Pot of Earth" owed a little to Aiken's music and relied on T. S. Eliot not only for its structure, its manipulation of "plot," and juxtaposition of opposites, but for its very inflection, its free use of dissonances, its rich, allusive texture. But "The Happy Marriage" sounded, although tentatively, a metaphysic very different from E. A. Robinson's, and "The Pot of Earth" vibrated with an affirmative passion not at all like that in Mr. Eliot's world which ends "not with a bang, but with a whimper." In "Streets in the Moon" the complete MacLeish emerges. There are still traces of the Eliot technique, but it is used less as a borrowed form and more as an implicit "influence." Eliot's "tone" may have directly affected only a few of the younger poets, but it is impossible to gauge how far those few (who happen to be sounding some of the most arresting notes) are affecting a generation. It was so in the case of Gertrude Stein. Unreadable to 99 per cent of even the literary world, her insistent tonality, her almost maddening repetitions are not only being accepted but relished by readers who, unaware of the origin, discover "a new note" in the prose of Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and the short stories of H. D.

But MacLeish is now firmly himself in temperament as well as timbre. No man in America is making such daring—and usually successful—experiments toward a new poetic language. What this speech may become may be approximated after a reading of MacLeish's "Prologue," "Interrogate the Stones," "Signature for Tempo," "The Too-late Born," "Eleven." These are not the best or even the most quotable poems in this volume, but they indicate a significant progress toward a poetry which is as much a poetry of the future as the once incomprehensible orchestration of Wagner is the almost derided cliché of today. One may already —granting nothing more than prejudice temporarily restrained—see the beginnings of that speech in the dissimilar experiments of E. E. Cummings, Laura Riding Gottschalk, Allen Tate, Hart Crane: a free

FEB 26 1927

The Art of the Short Story

WHAT has become of the art of the short story? Twenty years ago the literary journals rang with its celebrations. What the short story was, what it could do for literature, what it might serve in life, was a daily theme for the writer of criticism.

Collections of short stories drop today from the presses like eggs from a prize hen: there are rewards, dinners, memorials, but the talk is of the past, not the future, of success not potentiality, of technique and marketability and type, not of hope and novelty and desire. Like the automobile the short story has become standardized and the changes are in model not in kind.

The truth is that while the reception committee was greeting the best designs of 1927 on the front porch the art of the short story slipped out the back door. It wearied in the moment of success and sought refuge elsewhere.

And where but in the novel! That originality which with elaborate skill focussed narrative upon a burning point of experience—if you look for it now you will find it in the new novel of flowing consciousness. The novels of Virginia Woolf, of John dos Passos, of Joyce, of Huxley, are essentially short stories. They are not short, but they are brief; they are not focussed upon a moment, but they are narrowed to a phase. “Mrs. Dalloway” is as concentrated, as unified, as dependent upon a single strand of suspense as a story of Poe. The art, it appears, was not in brevity in words but in sharpness of focus. A line accomplishes the desired purpose, if a point no longer serves. To seek a revealing situation which, captured in brief narrative, should be significant for life, was one way of achievement, Maupassant’s way, Kipling’s way, O. Henry’s way. To penetrate the consciousness on a straight line, co-ordinating external life to the mental state of the hero, is another way; to link episodes on a lengthening chain the continuity of which alone is significant, because it is ego and the links incongruity, is still another way, and these are modern and the chosen methods of novelists wearying of the broad Victorian canvas, discontent with the simple situation, wishing to go deeper, truer, narrower, toward the goal of reality.

Henry James was an intermediary in this new art of the stretched short story. His later novels, “The Wings of the Dove” for example, are studies of single situations expanded to the bursting point. Subtlety could go no further in that direction, could describe, analyze, project no further. So subtlety pierced inward, and accepting its limitation (like science) to truth about a man before the picture of men should be painted, drove its tiny bore on a thread like line into the core of the brain. Henceforth and for a while the waves of sensation vibrating upon that inner consciousness were to interest

critics. And no method of writing, however fantastic, not even the endless musings of a Dorothy Richardson novel, not even the rhythmic nonsense of Gertrude Stein's style, nor the inconsecutive episodes of “Manhattan Transfer,” nor the trivial worthless experience of tired Parisians, nor the half-mad moonings of pathological cases, seems without significance.

It is all extraordinarily interesting and technically important to a high degree. Yet after all, the stretched short story is like the old short story, a device, a means, a barrow in which one picks up what the great novelists of scope and power have left unregarded by the wayside. The comparison may seem unfair to the best writers. It is like a new projectile of greater penetration the principles of which will later be applied to great shells that bursting break the crust of life and reveal its inner chambers. But let us drop confusing figures. The experimental novel is still an experiment. It cannot yet satisfy the human desire to see society depicted in the large, men and women, not merely psychoses, neuroses, pathologies, states of consciousness. In English, Galsworthy, Bennett, Willa Cather—to choose typical examples—are doing for this generation what some later novelists, who will adapt to the world what is being tried upon the ego, will accomplish for the next. Old-fashioned? Yes, perhaps. But we should have no record of our society in its normal aspects, no “characters” in the age-old sense if they, too, tried to write books where breadth was sacrificed to depth and intensity.

McNaught Monthly
FEB 1927

It is undeniable that the majority of the super-intelligent have seen the joke already, and are coming down out of their trees, to write and talk like the rest of us. But there will always remain the immortal Gertrude Stein. We offer you another paragraph of one of her discussions of “being living”:

> The older one was one who did with distinction telling about being one being living. She was one who was being living. She was one telling about this thing and many people were not listening. She was telling about this thing about being one being living, telling about this thing with some distinction and some were knowing this thing were knowing that she was telling this thing, telling about being living and telling it with distinction and they were not listening, were not listening to her telling about this thing, telling about being living, telling with distinction about being living. She was one being living and she was telling about this thing telling about it very often, beginning and going on then and certainly very many then were not listening.

THIS CLIPPING FROM

LOUISVILLE, KY.
HERALD

MAR 6-1927

A VERY charming lady, one who reads and knows, nevertheless was willing to admit a non-acquaintance with Gertrude Stein.

With all the panache of a knowledge just one week old, I told of that singular performer, of her quirks and quiddities and observed that very much I doubted whether either one of us, or anyone else for the matter of that, could gather a meaning out of the words she wastes.

By way of "piece justificative," as a contribution to the documents in the case, I append these cheerful moonings from "The Fifteenth of November"—any old day would suit as well, or better; perhaps it is desirable to note that this is dialogue;

He said enough.
Enough said.
Enough said.
He said enough.
He said enough.
Enough said.
He said enough.

To my way of thinking he said amply and overmuch. But the conclusion carries, as conclusions should, the answer. As thus:

Not only wool and woollen silk and
silken not only silk and silken wool
and woollen not only wool and woollen

silk and silken not only silk and
silken. . .

There is, alas, more where that came from. And it's art, if only one can be brought to believe it.

Since I wrote last, I have read Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner's second novel, "Mr. Fortune's Maggot," and I am delighted by it. It is far, far better than her first, "Lolly Willowes." There is something in her attitude to her hero, the poor missionary, Mr. Fortune, which reminds me of Lytton Strachey's attitude to General Gordon in "Eminent Victorians." I have never read a book which made me laugh so much while it moved me. There are also most beautiful passages about the tropics, a wonderful account of an earthquake, the eruption of a volcano and a geometrician's definition of an umbrella. But what makes the book unforgettably beautiful is the character of Mr. Fortune's one convert on the island, the boy Luelli, who has all the charm of a beautiful, well-mannered, slightly skeptical animal.

Every one with a sense of humor will delight in "Mr. Fortune's Maggot"—every one with any sensibility will dissolve in tears, as I quite unexpectedly found happening to myself, and those who care for the art of writing will get the most pleasure of all. Good luck comes into telling stories well, as it comes into every success, and Miss Townsend Warner has been extremely lucky in her second book. Everything, one can see, has gone well from the beginning, and there is a formal beauty implicit in the very conception of the tale.

ABOUT this time of the year all the publishers who have young authors are speculating on who is going to be given the Hawthornden Prize. It is a very jealously guarded secret, and on one occasion, when I was present at the prize giving, the publishers of the writer honored were present in the certain conviction that the prize was going to be given to another of the authors on their list. So certain were they, indeed, that

they had already set up an advertisement of the wrong man's book! I say this to show that I know nothing; I don't even know if the judges have come to any decision yet. But I have thought over it, and my bet, which I would back for a small sum, is that the prize will be given to Victoria Sackville-West for her poem, "The Land."

## SONNET

Lead me, O night, into some secret place
Where day-worn Beauty soothes her heavy eyes
With green wet leaves, and covers her white face
With the still flower of darkness; and the wise
Dim stars forget her weeping. . . . Should there be
A silver path of rain for little feet
While Beauty sleeps, and there are none to see,—
The wind so cool, the almond bough so sweet?
O god of the hidden moon, and the unborn dream,
Let me lay quiet breath unto her breath,
Touch with shy hands her slender hands that seem
So much of loveliness, so much of death. . . .
Rise with the dawn, but let no tear betray
The brave young glory of another day!

Ruth Lechlitner.

HENRY

THE ORIGINAL
ROMEIKE
PRESS CLIPPING BUREAU
No Connection with any other ROMEIKE

NEWYORK

THIS CLIPPING FROM
EVENING POST
NEW YORK CITY, N. Y.

APR 23 1927

David Garnett's London Letter to Beard's
"American Civilization'

The Authors' Protest
For Joyce---a "Typo"
In Gertrude Stein!

By David Garnett, Author of
"Lady Into Fox," "A Man in
the Zoo," and Go She Must!"

London, April 12, 1927.

R. JAMES JOYCE is being
entertained as the guest
of honor at a dinner of
the London P. E. N. Club.
I must confess I have
never been an admirer of

his work. I disliked "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and, although I have plowed my way through "Ulysses," I found it terribly heavy going, and the formlessness and prolixity of the book disgusted me, rather than its grossness, which does at all events slightly relieve the medium. But, though I don't care for "Ulysses," I was glad to see that a protest had been made against its being published in America without the author's permission, and in a mutilated form. The signatories, collected at short notice, were over one hundred and seventy in number, and included Sherwood Anderson, Arnold Bennett, Albert Einstein, E. M. Forster, John Galsworthy, Maurice Maeterlinck, John Masefield, Arthur Pinero, H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats. The document was expressed in very forcible language and was headed "Stop Thief!"

To be publicly branded as a thief by
a collection of some of the most dis-
guished men of letters in the world is
a moral chastisement which few editors
or publishers will be prepared to risk,
but the protest will do a real service
if it calls public attention, not to Mr.
Joyce nor Mr. Samuel Roth, but to the
deficiencies in the laws of copyright.

THE "Opening Pages of a Work in Progress," by James Joyce, appear in a very, very advanced magazine called transition, the first number of which has just come out in Paris, and the whole work is promised to its readers. The new book looks like being very much tougher stuff than "Ulysses." I think that this time Joyce has given his admirers something to chew on for some time. Here is a sample, the first two sentences in the book:

riverun brings us back to
Howth Castle and environs. Sir Tris-
tram, violer de'amores, fr' over the short
sea, had passencore rearrived from
North Armorica on this side the scraggy
isthmus of Europe Minor to wielder-
fight his peninsolate war: nor had top-
sawer's rocks by the stream Oconee

exaggerated themself to Laurens
County's gorgios, while they went dou-
blin their mumper all the time: nor
avoice from afire bellowed mishe mishe
to taftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet,
though venissoon after, had a kidscad
buttered a bland old isaac: not yet,
though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie
lestshers wroth with twone nathandjoe.

As you see from this, one of the more
lucid passages, the author has evolved
a language of his own, which has the
advantage or disadvantage of making it
impossible for the reader to detect mis-
ents. On the other hand, I think that
stands a better chance of getting
through the American customs!

With this first number of transition is
given a supplement containing a re-
print of Miss Gertrude Stein's contribu-
tion. The editors explain that the ver-
sion printed in the magazine "while con-
taining all the correct words presented
them in the wrong order, through an
inadvertance on the part of the print-
ing establishment."

Here they really have put their fingers
on a vital point. It is impossible to
exaggerate the importance of the correct
words appearing in the right order in
literature, if the reader is to get the full
esthetic effect, or even to understand
their meaning. But now that the mean-

ing of words is considered less important
the necessity of a right order is obviously
less, and in time it may disappear. Here
is a real opportunity for a revolutionary
writer who is anxious to experiment. By
cutting up the Bible with a pair of scis-
sors and shaking the words in a hat
he will be able to get quite new and thrill-
ing literary effects, and, speaking as a
professional writer, I feel sure that in
almost all cases, this method will give
greater facility in composition. How-
ever, the new literature is still to come.
We are living today in a world of tran-
sition, as this following passage from
Miss Stein will show; (I need hardly say

that I am quoting here from the version
with the words in the correct order):

Can there at this rate can there have
been at this rate more and more.

Can at this rate can there have been
at this rate can there have been more and
more at this rate.

At this rate there can not have been
there can not have been at this rate there
can not have been more and more at this
rate.

At this rate there can not have been
at this rate, there can not have been more
more and more. There can not have been
and more at this rate there can not have
been more and more at this rate.

The worst, I find, about these tran-
sitional writers, is that when one loses
one's place in the book one can never

be perfectly satisfied that one has found
it again. For instance, there is a page
where Miss Stein (authorized version)
prints the lines "I think I will" and "I
think I won't" one after the other irregu-
larly, twenty-six times, with one "Of
course" interjected two-thirds of the way
down. If you lose your place you have
to start that page all over again. I
started three times and then gave up.
But, in spite of these technical difficul-
ties, Miss Stein's way of writing has its
charms, and it is with real regret that I
leave her for the present.

She is, however, a useful example
and was quoted by E. M. Forster in one
of an amusing and admirable series of
lectures which he gave on the novel at
Cambridge University and which I un-
derstand he will publish shortly in book
form. Following on his lectures, For-
ster has been made a supernumerary
fellow of King's, his old college. This
is a pleasant, honorific distinction which
carries with it a few privileges, such as
walking on the grass of the college
lawns, but it entails no duties.

AN ADMIRABLE series of French
translations is being published by
Routledge under the title of the Broad-
way Library of eighteenth century
French literature. The volumes are
edited by Richard Aldington, and the
series so far consists of "The Dialogues
of Denis Diderot," translated by Fran-
cis Birrell; Crebillon's "The Sofa,"
translated by Bonamy Dobrée, and the
letters of Voltaire to Frederick the
Great, translated by Richard Aldington.
All the volumes are most admirably

translated, and this is peculiarly impor-
tant in the case of Diderot, some of
whose work here was printed only many
years after his death from copies of his
manuscript, and these are the hardest
French I have ever attempted to read.

Mrs. Dobrée's first novel, "Your
Cuckoo Sings by Kind," published by
Knopf, has had extremely good reviews
and is enjoying quite a success, and so,
by the way, is Romer Wilson's novelette,
"Latterday Symphony." But the great
sellers during this last month, have, I
think, been Jonathan Cape's. Lawrence's
"Revolt in the Desert" has fulfilled my
exact predictions in selling thirty thou-

sand or so in a month. Meanwhile Law-
rence, a private in the Royal Air Force,
is in India, and if he thinks of his book
it is to laugh at us as a fox laughs over
the pack of clumsy hounds brawling over
a cold, almost evaporated line of scent.

"Elmer Gantry" is being a big suc-
cess also, but there is no need to speak
of that, or of "Jew Suss," which sells
and sells.

URDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE, APRIL 30, 1927

NOX MII

Avoid Arabian courtesy, requite
Not genius with the headsman's accolade,
Nor on the thousand and the second night
Present the bowstring to Scheherazade!

## Gyring and Gimbling

(Or Lewis Carroll in Paris)

THE giants in the old fables were often lacking in a sense of proportion, sometimes in a sense of humor, and so are those Titans of English-speaking Paris, the half mythical James Joyce and that lesser mistress of experimental prose, the prophetic Gertrude Stein. Joyce we have been able to estimate as a figure of more than common size by his vigorous "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and the powerful technique of "Ulysses," a Gothic cathedral of a book rich in portraits, gargoyles, and grotesques. The conception of "Ulysses" was clearly giant-like, the execution subject to controversy. Its details were praised by some of the discriminating, but by more who delight in art in proportion to its obscurity, and detest the very name of common sense. Gertrude Stein we knew in feats of word legerdemain which had strange powers since some minds were fascinated by her scrambled sentences and others driven to wails and cursings.

Now, thanks to the midwifery of Mr. Elliot Paul, an American resident in Paris, where presumably one can take the English language without too much seriousness, and to the magazine "Transition," we can see Mr. Joyce in his latest work and find Miss Stein "elucidated."

"Ulysses," we are told, was a night book, the new work is a day book and the rivers of Ireland are its heroes. Apparently it, too, is to have scope

and plan, not to be judged from the brief extracts so far published. Therefore without prejudice to the scheme of the whole, which may be as impressive as that of "Ulysses," we can study the expression by which this giant of our days proposes to erect his second cathedral. It is not English, although there is vigor in the sound of it; it is not indeed language by any known tests; nor is it sound merely, since some of it is unsoundable except by Gargantuan lungs. In this fashion does the book begin:—

riverrun brings us back to Howth
Castle & Environs, Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr' over

the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North America on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselfe to Laurens County's gorgios, while they went doublin their mumper all the time; nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, hada kidscad buttended a bland old isaac; not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twoe nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen rigsome on the waterface.

The fall (badalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronnton-nerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounownskawtoohoohoordenenth-urnuck!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrlsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the schute of Finnigan, erse solid man, that the humpty-hillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturn-pikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since Devlins first loved livy.

What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishygods! Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Úalu Úalu Úalu! Quáouauh! What chance cuddleys, what cashels aired and ventilated! What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers! What true feeling for their's hayair with what strawng voice of false jiccup! O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, O my shining stars and body! how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! But waz iz? Is ent? Ere were sewers? The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where ashes lay. Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.

This is like those Phi Beta Kappa orations in Latin when one was supposed to laugh, but where? More succeeds—

(Stoop,) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! A terricolous vivelyonview this; queer and it continues to be quaky. A hatch, a celt, an earshare the pourquose of which was to cassay the earcrust at all of hours, furrowwards, bagawards, like yoxen at the turnpath. Here say figurines billycoose arming and mounting. Mounting and arming bellicose figurines see here. Futhore, this liffle effingee is for a firefing called a flintforfall. Face at the eased! O I fay! Face at the waist! Ho, you fie! Upwap and dump em, face to face! When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit.

In between is of a like intelligibility. The man has a design, that is certain, for Joyce is a giant, even though myopic, he can write, one feels that, but what has he written? What (students of "Ask me Another?") does it mean? Here at last is the consummation of Browning's "Fancies that broke through language and escaped!"

Gertrude Stein comes to the rescue. She is no coward like Joyce's disciples, who explain in perfectly simple English what Joyce means in the whole, while carefully ignoring his incomprehensible parts. Miss Stein is all parts—at least to our limited intelligence. She believes that the sound of words conveys a meaning far more significant than sense, therefore away with sense! Is nonsense sense? Is cents not sense? Is sense non-cents? Joyce agrees, but adds that the appearance of words has a more esoteric significance than their denotation. Adds, that is, by inference, as the above quotations prove. For a statement of theory one must go to the mother founder of the school, Miss Stein.

"Since unfortunately," says the editor, Mr. Paul, "the version of Miss Gertrude Stein's 'An Elucidation,' printed in the April number of 'Transition,' while containing the correct words, presented them in the wrong order* (through an inadvertence in the printing establishment) the text has been re-arranged."** In "An Elucidation" Miss Stein

*(Continued on Page 782)*

*"'My God,' said my Uncle Toby."

**Is it permissible to guess that one of the French printers knew English and followed Nature instead of copy?

"hits upon the happy idea" of illustrating "a technique and artistic conception transcending the kind of writing which consists in a long line of bits of information placed end to end," by a series of examples where she can explain herself in her own terms. Since it may be possible to understand Joyce by comprehending Stein we hasten to be elucidated. Perhaps two of her examples will serve:—

## AN ELUCIDATION
Halve Rivers and Harbours

Elucidation.

First as Explanation.

Elucidate the problem of halve.

Halve and have.

Halve Rivers and Harbours,

Have rivers and harbours.

You do see that halve rivers and harbours, halve rivers and harbours, you do see that halve rivers and harbours makes halve rivers and harbours and you do see, you do see that you that you do not have rivers and harbours when you halve rivers and harbours, you do see that you can halve rivers and harbours.

I refuse have rivers and harbours I have refused. I do refuse have rivers and harbours. I receive halve rivers and harbours, I accept halve rivers and harbours.

I have elucidated the pretence of halve rivers and harbours and the acceptance of halve rivers and harbours.

This is a new preparation.

Do not share.

He will not bestow.

They can meditate.

I am going to do so.

I have an explanation of this in this way. If we say, Do not share, he will not bestow they can meditate I am going to do so, we have organised an irregular commonplace and we have made excess return to rambling, I always like the use of these, but not particularly.*

## ANOTHER EXPLANATION

I think I won't

I think I will

I think I will

I think I won't

I think I won't

I think I will

I think I will

I think I won't.

I think I won't

I think I will

I think I will

I think I won't

I think I will

I think I won't

I think I will

I think I won't.

I think I will

I think I won't

I think I won't

I think I won't

I think I won't

I think I will

I think I won't

Of course

I think I will

I think I won't

I think I won't

I think I will

This is a good example if you do not abuse it. Where they like.

Can follow where they like.

I think this is a good example.

I think I will.

I am afraid I have been too careful.

I think I will.

Two examples and then an elucidation and a separation of one example from the other one.

I think I will.
Then very certainly we need not repeat.

At this rate there can not have been there can not have been at this rate there can not have been more and more at this rate. At this rate there can not have been more and more. There can not have been at this rate, there can not have been more and more at this rate there can not have been more and more at this rate.

What did I say. Full of charms I said.

Full of what. Full of charms I said.

What did I say, full of charms I said.

If in order to see incidentally I request to see extraordinarily.

If in order to see incidentally I request to see,

I see you I see you too.

The charm of this phrasing is undeniable. It has the suavity of Lewis Carroll's whiting, "Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?" and the mystic suggestion of that "Aoi" in the "Chanson de Roland" which no one has ever been able to translate. But this is not the language of snails and whitings or of Frankish primitives; it is a tongue of the future when our words will clash like cymbals symbols and mean what they sound like, if you know what that means. We shall translate our thoughts into airy syllables that spell nothing at all.

Many take Miss Stein seriously (she is already a cult) and so will we. This is onslaught and ravage upon the English language which hitherto has been able to combine the highest imagination with sense, common or uncommon. Language was made for men, not men for language, but these Parisian expatriates would turn over the age-old structure in order to get new effects. Lyllly, quite as intelligent a genius as Joyce and Stein, tried it in the sixteenth century, powerfully influenced his literary contemporaries, as they have, and with his "Euphues" and his imitators became a by-word. The parallel is not inexact, for "Euphues," like "Ulysses" and this new work by Joyce, is a book of scope and plan, intolerable only in its execution.

The giants are often like that, especially in a period of decadence and affectation. Their obfuscations and great motions never carried through touch the imagination of men weary of the shining lucidities of the gods. They have attempted new things and the wise may learn of them, but for the foolish they are illusion, delusion, and confusion. When, blundering up the ramparts of Olympus, they murmur with Miss Stein—

If in beginning, if in beginning, I begin to be connectedly and carefully and collectedly if I agree, if in beginning I agree, then I agree you agree and we agree—

may Lewis Carroll be there on the ramparts, to take his vorpal sword in hand and smite the frumious Bandersnatchs!

*See first note.*

HENRY
NY

NEWYORK

THIS CLIPPING FROM
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
EAGLE

OCT 19 1927

## Passed in Review

By GEORGE CURRIE

The Prize Ring With a Foreword by "Gentleman Gene Tunney—Ernest Hemingway and Burton Rascoe Almanac—A Perfectly Good Alibi.

"GENTLEMAN GENE" TUNNEY, who flavors his one-two punch with deft quotations from the Bard of Avon and Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is the proud author of the foreword in "Ten—And Out!" by Alexander Johnston (Ives Washburn), which bestows the following accolade upon itself: "The complete story of the prize ring in America."

As an author, Mr. Tunney shows a remarkably narrow creative capacity. He rings in all the old cliches and hackneyed sob-lines which have been set down in print to glorify the American pug. And on one point one is impelled to enter a demurrer. He says: "Sportsmanship and mind are the requirements for success."

Plenty of cash customers is the only desideratum, as he very well knows.

THE PRINCIPAL objection I have to "Ten—And Out!" is its express-train speed. One races through the great fights of our history, gets warmed up in interest, only to have to change trains and go off on another breathless jaunt through another historic battle. Johnston has sensed this defect, I think, and attempts to add scenery to his personally conducted tour of Fistiana by a copious use of anecdotes, some of which are rare and most of which are not so rare. The change from the heroic bare knuckle days into the modern contests between financial giants is much too abrupt. He is not interested in the economics and philosophy of the ring. Indeed, one suspects he does not believe the prizefighters have any philosophy, at all, and the unfortunate part of it, for a book critic, is that he is probably correct.

Of course, Mr. Johnston has attempted to cover a great deal of ground. For the fight fan, his book has some purpose. Perhaps the cabid fight follower can be persuaded to spare some of the dollars needed for $25 and $40 seats to buy this book. It would certainly relieve pressure on the sporting desk telephone, where, a few days before the big fight, reports of trap-shooting contests are constantly being crossed with alcoholic pleadings from strangers to "settle a little bet on whether John L. and Paddy Ryan fought at Mississippi City in 1882 or 1892." "Ten—And Out!" is bound to be of interest to the fight fan, but I find it hard to say that it will interest the general reader. But it has always been the misfortune of the prize ring that nobody has been willing to write a popular history of it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY has arrived at the parting of the ways. He has, become "significant." His books sell in fabulous numbers. "The Sun Also Rises" accomplished the unusual effect of giving the reader a first-class jag throughout, and not a headache in a chapter.

Now comes a collection of short stories, called "Men Without Women" (Charles Scribner's Sons), a group of brisk, conversational and

at times exciting tales. "The Killers" has caught the fancy of the critical world, because it is something "new." It deals with something which did not happen. Ole Andreson, eating every night at a restaurant in Summit, failed to show up the night that two tightly dressed yeggs showed up to blow his brains out with a sawed-off shotgun. When Nick, from the hashery, goes to warn him, Ole tosses the buck to fate. He explains there is no longer any use of trying to elude his Nemesis. The whole story has a funeral parlor atmosphere which this particular reviewer did not happen to find so horrible.

Much more thrilling is "Fifty Grand," the story which has set Hemingway apart more prophetically than even "The Sun Also Rises." If you haven't read it yet, get the book and read it. It is by all odds the best fight story from an American. "The Undefeated," which might also be called "The Bull-Fighter's Last Fight," is another ironic yarn which more than justifies the book.

"ECONOMISTS and students of finance rarely attempt a prognostication for more than six months in advance," writes Justin H. Edgerton, credit manager for a New York department store, in "Morrow's Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1928" (William Morrow & Co.), Burton Rascoe, Philom.

"Railroads anticipate large earnings for this and next year," he continues, further along.

Which, I think, proves that this is a real almanac. Particularly when this financial genius lets himself out with the following: "Keep in mind, however, that it is a Presidential year, and refrain from asking too many questions."

But it is not with the individual prognosticators and speliers we have to deal in this almanac. So far as they go, Allison Danzig's forecast for 1928, which happens to be a breezy review of sport for 1927, is by far the livest and the most pleasing.

BURTON RASCOE, himself, supplies the most meat, in his apologia to the reader. He allows himself to warm with sorrow for Aristotle, who is still the simile for a mountainous intellect and a colessal erudition. How sad that Aristotle never read Gertrude Stein. How lucky that he never had to catch a last train for Flushing. "He knew, as they say, his onions; but that, when all is said and done, was not as much as was known to the farmer of the last generation who read Piso's or Ayer's Almanac," says Mr. Rascoe.

The inference is, of course, that by reading "Morrow's Almanack for 1928" we can all know more than did Aristotle. But since Aristotle knew so little, it might be objected, what is the object in departing upon a quest so soon accomplished?

"If this adventure of ours should meet with your kind approval, we will make of this almanack an annual affair," is the answer. And Mr. Rascoe may be assured that his readers will look forward for "Morrow's Almanack for 1929" with some pleasurable anticipation. I will, too, even if he has discovered that such as I, born under the sign of Leo, would be better advised to go in for bossing a section hand gang or operating a subway ticket-chopper or directing the making of moving pictures, and that such as I, born under the same circumstance, "are rather more than likely to run after women."

BEST BY ATTEST
Original Romeike
PRESS CLIPPINGS
220 WEST 19TH ST., NEW YORK
Tel. Chelsea 8860

THIS CLIPPING FROM THE
NEW YORK
N. Y.
DIAL

NOV - 1927

COMMENT

ONE sometimes encounters in one's reading an implication that book-reviewing is not criticism, and admitting that sometimes it is not, asks perhaps inhumanely, why print it? The reviewer, or should one say critic, ought to be collaterally informed and a kind of writing would be welcome in which "everything is easy and natural, yet everything is masterly and strong." Common sense is not innately favourable to Dick Minim, "the great investigator of hidden beauties," and has no particular need of the writer who is so obsessed with his own identity that he cannot refrain from deploring what is merely deplorable. THE DIAL may be abecedarian on occasion, despite its liking for naturalness, substance, and simplicity; but it would rather exposit the treasurable than advertise mediocrity. It agrees with the editor of Copleston's warning to reviewers ¹ that "the unbearable repartee" is silence, and though it licenses as antiquarianism an occasional cock-fight, the hurtful inhumanity of Gifford, Wilson, and Judge Jeffery, never make it envious. A business-like rancour may exist in the heart of one who has learned from Erasmus "the smoothest form for each suggestion of politeness," but ill-nature on the part of those who have not learned politeness from Erasmus results usually in a collapse of unequestrianism. If criticism is "the effect of the subjection of the product of one mind to the processes of another," is not the reviewer's own mind disparaged by him in resorting to an inconsequent and disrespectful *ruade*?

THOSE who are displeased by an unduly academic literary mechanics may consider the advantages of verbal unfearfulness, in the recently inaugurated little cinema review, Close Up.² To

¹ Advice to a Young Reviewer With a Speciman of the Art. By Edward Copleston. 12mo. 22 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $2.

² Close Up. Published monthly by Pool, Riant Chateau, Territet, Switzerland. $3.50 a year.

other than its own, without having mastered the terms of the
auxiliary art is surely an experiment; but zeal, liberty, and
beauty are allied phenomena and apart from oddity there are in
Close Up to reward us, besides certain other items, a poem about
light by H. D.; a report of Kopf Hoch Charley that holds the
attention; a contribution entitled Mrs. Emerson by Miss Stein;
and a letter to the editor: "*About cinemas. I do not care for them,
but I do not know why I don't . . . . . . . . I think my prejudice
is hardly justified. But I couldn't write about it. I've nothing to
say. I'm so sorry.*" We like the letter and we like the movies.
We have said something about the theatre's undeserved, sanctified
background as compared with the reluctantly accepted celluloid
permanence of the movies ¹ and we feel, with Close Up, that intelli-
gence is "'sadly lacking'" in the films' critics as in the film world.
In producing films, "brains and education" ought not to be "dead
weights against you" and often "one wants to see films one has
missed."

We are not sure that Close Up is in the strict sense informing
though it tells us that "all Americans in France, Switzerland, Eng-
land, are printing their books at the shop of the master printer,
Maurice Darantière, Dijon." We read advertisements as we read
the body of a magazine and like the impression of energy and
ability conveyed by the announcement that the firm of John and
Edward Bumpus is to the reader what the camera is to the film.

Perquisites are of secondary importance; motive is the lively
factor, and we find here a zeal for enjoyment and for not keeping
that enjoyment to one's self. Despite stock phrases, ambiguities,
italics, capital type, superlatives, and certainties so sanguine as
somehow to seem like uncertainties, there is friendliness here. "By
mixing more in the world," "a healthy enjoyment of the business
of life is imparted" as Mr Larkyns, the rector, was able to convince
Mr Verdant Green's father. It is incumbent upon us occasionally
to consent to be lured into the society of others who have, like
ourselves, a special fondness for art.

¹ THE DIAL, February 1927, page 178.

COMMENT

ONE sometimes encounters in one's reading an implication that book-reviewing is not criticism, and admitting that sometimes it is not, asks perhaps inhumanely, why print it? The reviewer, or should one say critic, ought to be collaterally informed and a kind of writing would be welcome in which "everything is easy and natural, yet everything is masterly and strong." Common sense is not innately favourable to Dick Minim, "the great investigator of hidden beauties," and has no particular need of the writer who is so obsessed with his own identity that he cannot refrain from deploring what is merely deplorable. THE DIAL may be abecedarian on occasion, despite its liking for naturalness, substance, and simplicity; but it would rather exposit the treasurable than advertise mediocrity. It agrees with the editor of Copleston's warning to reviewers¹ that "the unbearable repairer" is silence, and though it licenses as antiquarianism an occasional cock-fight, the hurtful inhumanity of Gifford, Wilson, and Judge Jeffery, never make it envious. A business-like rancour may exist in the heart of one who has learned from Erasmus "the smoothest form for each suggestion of politeness," but ill-nature on the part of those who have not learned politeness from Erasmus results usually in a collapse of unequestrianism. If criticism is "the effect of the subjection of the product of one mind to the processes of another," is not the reviewer's own mind disparaged by him in resorting to an inconsequent and disrespectful *ruade*?

450

COMMENT

burst into feeling so to speak, and praise an art through a medium other than its own, without having mastered the terms of the auxiliary art is surely an experiment; but zeal, liberty, and beauty are allied phenomena and apart from oddity there are in Close Up to reward us, besides certain other items, a poem about light by H. D.; a report of Kopf Hoch Charley that holds the attention; a contribution entitled Mrs. Emerson by Miss Stein; and a letter to the editor: "*About cinemas. I do not care for them, but I do not know why I don't . . . . . . . . I think my prejudice is hardly justified. But I couldn't write about it. I've nothing to say. I'm so sorry.*" We like the letter and we like the movies. We have said something about the theatre's undeserved, sanctified background as compared with the reluctantly accepted celluloid permanence of the movies ¹ and we feel, with Close Up, that intelligence is "'sadly lacking'" in the films' critics as in the film world. In producing films, "brains and education" ought not to be "dead weights against you" and often "one wants to see films one has missed."

We are not sure that Close Up is in the strict sense informing though it tells us that "all Americans in France, Switzerland, England, are printing their books at the shop of the master printer, Maurice Darantière, Dijon." We read advertisements as we read the body of a magazine and like the impression of energy and ability conveyed by the announcement that the firm of John and Edward Bumpus is to the reader what the camera is to the film.

NATION
NEW YORK, N. Y.

NOV 16 1927

# An Enemy Worth Having

MOST personal organs, whether issued by an individual or a coterie, suffer in common from a distressing sort of anemia. Whether radical or conservative, devoted to imagism or to deep breathing, they look, feel, and taste so much alike that one can remember nothing about them except that they are printed on soft paper and bound up like one of Mr. Otto Kahn's speeches. Nothing of the sort can be said, however, of the substantial quarterly, *The Enemy*, edited and for the most part written by Wyndham Lewis. It is full of fresh ideas and intellectual excitement.

Mr. Lewis, who, by the way, recently visited America in a spirit less condescending than is usual with his countrymen, devotes most of the present issue of *The Enemy* to American affairs. He has one trait (and probably only one) in common with our own Mr. Mencken. That trait is the result of an insatiable interest in every phenomenon of contemporary society combined with a capacity to make an original comment on each. Whitehead is not too abstruse for him, nor Ring Lardner too popular, and in the midst of a discussion on Alexander's time philosophy he can see just how Anita Loos's fiction illustrates one of the most important tendencies of our age. Pages could not contain a catalog of his enthusiasms or his hates. He believes, for example, that Mencken and others have presented America with an inferiority complex which finds its expression in Sherwood Anderson's dithyrambs over the Negro; and he believes that the New York skyscraper is less the result of the narrowness of our island than of the competitive advertising of Big Business working among a people who have assumed that the biggest business will have the biggest skyscraper. In literature he is against James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and all Montparnasse. He is against Mr. Lawrence's "dark God within" and against the "revolt of Asia" implied in Bolshevism. He is also against Bergson's philosophy of change, and he invents interesting classifications like the "time mind" and the "cult of the child" by which he can link James Joyce with Henri Bergson or Gertrude Stein with Anita Loos.

Mr. Lewis is a radical in the literal sense of the word—he is looking for the roots of things and as he digs down after them the dirt flies. But he accepts, on the other hand, very few of the dogmas of current radicalism and he is no part of the dominant Spirit of the Age. He sees no reason why the opponents of certain "radical" tendencies should confine themselves to dull platitude nor why all the daring and brilliance should be on one side. Perhaps, indeed, he is really that very rare and hence very valuable thing, an intelligent conservative who, for example, can criticize the ideals of the modern revolution without thereby implying that he thinks President Coolidge is a great statesman, and who can also have interesting doubts about James Joyce without suggesting any suspicion that he considers Thomas Nelson Page the greatest writer yet produced in America. As such we welcome him. For all those who fear to see radicalism solidify into dogma, the free play of his robustly critical mind and the suggestiveness of his opinions will be the source of delight. Even those who believe most firmly in all that he doubts will do well to read him, for he is an enemy worth having in a day when radicals seldom have a chance to match themselves against any except second-rate minds.

HENRY
ROMEIKE
PRESS CLIPPING BUREAU
No Connection with any other ROMEIKE
NEW YORK

220 WEST 19th St., NEW YORK

Tel. Chelsea 8860

THIS CLIPPING FROM

TRIBUNE

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.

OCT 31 1927

## The First Reader

### Monday Publicity.

One of the most profitable diversions in the lit'ry game is to observe how publishing houses deal with publicity. Every publicity man is an author and publisher in embryo. Sometimes he is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

When a publicity man tells you how good his book is you can set him down for a novice. When he tells you how good you are you realize at once that he has reached the age of understanding.

It is a pretty fixed belief in publishing houses that the way to literary favor is through the stomach. The most astute publishers omit cocktails. That is not because they do not favor poisoning all the critics and reviewers in one batch. They simply don't wish the event associated with their imprint.

Publicity is so important to publishing houses that in a number of cases the heads of the firms do it themselves, and so unimportant that in several instances no publicity is issued, whatsoever.

The publicity person who has appeared herself to us most at this time sent a book on economics with the remark, "I can't understand a word of it." We'll never tell her boss.

The most exciting publicists are Simon & Schuster, who rarely write letters, but invariably telegraph, even in Manhattan. You are apt to get a wire at any moment telling you that there actually is such a man as Trader Horn.

On the other hand, the most modest of all publishers in their demands for publicity are the Holts—Henry and Guy. Guy is the fourth hand in the John Day Co. and is said to be responsible for the Day policy of using no superlatives on the book jackets. This absence of ballyhoo has served to give literary editors the impression that every John Day book may hide a discovery, with the result that all of us have lost much time.

The best publicity now being written consists of the little pamphlets describing foreign authors on the Knopf list. These are both informative and critical, and we advise students who are interested to write the publisher for them. They are intended to educate the public rather

than sell books. Sometimes we get the impression that they are intended to educate literary editors as well.

Publicity is often written by some very able men, and numerous authors have been through the mill. Barry Benefield was with the Century for years, and Ives Washburn, who has started his own publishing house, was his assistant. George Op PENNEBHEIMER, now a partner in Viking Press, was with Knopf, and so was Franklin Spier. Isadore Schneider, at Boni & Livertight's, is a sensitive spirit chained to a desk. His latest poem appeared in "The American Caravan."

The latest recruit is John Herrman, author of a book which the United States customs has refused to admit. Herrman was a martyr for three days, but as he is young he will probably live it down.

The following letter throws light on a modest but highly capable member of the publicity profession:

"Dear Mr. Hansen: Lend your attention. Attend the ceremony of unveiling the ghost. You are informed that the piece on Gilda Gray, signed by Gilda Gray, in 'Morrow's Almanack,' was written by Arthur Kober. Mr. Kober is by profession a press agent. He is that rare specimen, a bashful one. He doesn't know Miss Gray. He never saw her perform on any stage, but saw her once in the movies.

"Sidney Skolsky.
"No. 399 Eighth avenue."

William A. McDermid, advertising expert, writes to report the effect of Christopher Robin's poems on certain imaginative residents of Sound Beach, Conn.:

"Dear H.: I can give you accurate data on the reaction of 'When We Were Very Young,' on two children, aged, respectively, four and two and a half. Briefly, it excelled in popularity all other books and was extensively memorized with the utmost of enjoyment by both. We have given away at least half a dozen copies (and recommended it still more) for children under six and, allowing for the difference in children, have noted about the same results. To my amazement, gentle little girls got a great kick out of 'Sir Brian had a battle-ax.'

"W. A. McDermid."

Gertrude Stein's prose continues to be a major force in the literary world.

"Dear Mr. Hansen: Have you ever heard of Gertrude Stein and her short story, 'The 15th of November' in 'Georgian Stories—1926?' It was amusing to see what some of those Georgian authors had in mind, but when it comes to 'The 15th of November' I give up.

"If you have read it and have come to any kind of conclusion about it I would be most glad to read it in your column.

"No, 634 East Fifth street."

I have come to no conclusion, Mr. Davis, because I am waiting for the lady's collected works and should like to keep an open mind until then. I understand movie magnates are bidding frantically for screen rights to her stories, for they are admirably adapted to the Hollywood practice of throwing away the book and writing a scenario around the title.

HARRY HANSEN.

Copyright, 1927, N. Y. World News Service,

644

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[Vol. 125, No. 3257]

temporary "revolutionary" literature as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, along with incidental comment upon the world of what Mr. Lewis calls "High Bohemia" in which various artistic fads become fashionable; but Book Two, "An Analysis of the Philosophy of Time," brings him to the theoretical consideration of certain habits of thought which he regards as the ultimate cause of the failure of modern literature and which are the chief subjects of his book.

Bergson, demoted though he is, Mr. Lewis considers to be the father of the contemporary time cult, and he traces through Russell, Einstein, Whitehead, and Alexander the growth of an orthodoxy within the limits of which all the leaders of contemporary metaphysics are comprehended by virtue of a common agreement that time is the ultimate reality, or, much more properly, that it supplies the aspect under which all phenomena may be most profitably regarded. This "time-mind," generating as it does a veneration in the philosopher for mere flux as such and producing in even the popularizer a tendency to regard nothing important except as part of a history or an evolution, Mr. Lewis attacks as fundamentally antithetical to the processes of art and hence as inimical to the development of any satisfactory human society. It reaches, he says, its ultimate absurdity in the misty lucubrations of Spengler, who seems to maintain that the Western World is dying *because* it alone has risen to a realization that nothing has any meaning except as history; and it transforms all those who have any aesthetic sensibility into what he scornfully calls "timetrotters"—people, that is to say, whose minds rush back

tending, it has become for us, living in a time-world, rather the history of the thing's evolution or even, at times, merely the nature of its origin. And against the assumption that this change of attitude represents a gain, that man can live better or more profitably as part of a flux which has no meaning outside itself, Mr. Lewis protests with all vigor. Though we may be children of time we *want* to be children of eternity, and though I am not sure Mr. Lewis would accept this formulation of the dilemma it will serve nevertheless to illuminate the direction of his striving. "What I am concerned with, first of all, is," he says, "not whether the great time-philosophy that overshadows all contemporary thought is viable as a system of abstract truth, but if in its application it helps or destroys our human arts. With that is involved, of course, the very fundamental question of whether we should set out to transcend our human condition (as formerly Nietzsche and then Bergson claimed that we should); or whether we should transplant into human terms the whole of our datum. My standpoint is that we are creatures of a certain kind, with no indication that a radical change is imminent. . . . I prefer the chaste wisdom of the Chinese or the Greek to the hot tawny brand of superlative fanaticism coming from the parched deserts of the Ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness. I am for the physical world."

The argument of "Time and Western Man," carrying though it does an immense burden of detailed criticism directed against the chief exponents of the time philosophy, is conducted with great acuteness and illuminated with flashes of maliciously humorous characterization like that

## Plastic and Temporal in Art

By JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

IN so far as Wyndham Lewis can be thought of as part of any movement, it is with T. S. Eliot and the other intellectualists that his thought allies him; but nothing could, of the other hand, be more unlike the costiveness of their minds than is the fluency of his. Ostensibly prophets of a new faith engaged in announcing the glad tidings of a salvation by abstract thought, a certain despairing lassitude and has unreasonably enough fallen upon them and it is with the greatest difficulty that they succeed in squeezing from their minds two paragraphs of prose or one quatrain of verse per year. With him, on the contrary, the pen can at never keep pace with the brain and one treatise is not half done before another is projected. Originally a painter, he has been led on from subject to subject and, plunging with enormous gusto into the midst of the abstrusest problems, he has emerged each time from a review of countless volumes with a great deal to say about everything. Within less than two years he has published three long, erudite, and passionate books, but he has the air of a man who is just warming up to his subject, and the latest ends, characteristically enough, with the statement that it is merely a prolegomenon intended to clear the ground for his own thesis by a criticism of prevailing theories.

Like all of Mr. Lewis's books "Time and Western Man" includes almost too much for a single treatise and its method is highly discursive. Book One, "The Revolutionary Simpleton," offers perhaps the most interesting criticism which has ever been made of such leaders in con-

1 "Time and Western Man." By Wyndham Lewis. London: Chatto and Windus. 21 shillings.

644

The Nation

[Vol. 125, No. 3257]

Bergson, demoded though he is, Mr. Lewis considers to be the father of the contemporary time cult, and he traces through Russell, Einstein, Whitehead, and Alexander the growth of an orthodoxy within the limits of which all the leaders of contemporary metaphysics are comprehended by virtue of a common agreement that time is the ultimate reality, or, much more properly, that it supplies the aspect under which all phenomena may be most profitably regarded. This "time-mind," generating as it does a veneration in the philosopher for mere flux as such and producing in even the popularizer a tendency to regard nothing important except as part of a history or an evolution, Mr. Lewis attacks as fundamentally antithetical to the processes of art and hence as inimical to the development of any satisfactory human society. It reaches, he says, its ultimate absurdity in the misty lucubrations of Spengler, who seems to maintain that the Western World is dying because it alone has risen to a realization that nothing has any meaning except as history; and it transforms all those who have any aesthetic sensibility into what he scornfully calls "timetrotters"—people, that is to say, whose minds rush back and forth through the centuries "doing" the culture of this period and that much as the globe-trotter "does" the medieval cathedrals one summer and the civilization of India the next.

"Plastic" is the adjective which Mr. Lewis chooses to describe that aspect of things upon which he prefers to concentrate his attention. It is a painter's word, and one may suspect that it is employed by him in such a way as to include not merely those relationships in space which are the elementary concerns of the painter but also those which a metaphysician would call "logical" and which a mystic would describe as those perceived when a thing is seen *sub specie aeternitatis*. It serves, however, as well as any other to stand for all that is missed when we fall into the habit of assuming that we have plucked the heart out of a thing when we have traced its origin, its development, and its death as an evolution occurring in time; and we reach the crux of the matter in a passage cited by Mr. Lewis in high disapproval from Alexander's "Space, Time, and Deity." "It is, in fact," says Alexander, "the cardinal defect of universals as conceived by Plato or the Pythagoreans that they were changeless, immovable, and eternal. For not even the mind of Plato could be free from the habits of his age, one of whose tendencies was to seek the highest ideal of perfection in gravity of action and statuesque repose rather than in restless motion. . . . It is claiming no great credit that for us universals should have from the beginning the form of motion, should be not merely spatial but spatiotemporal."

Upon this patronage of Plato and his fellow-ancients Mr. Lewis empties the vials of his scorn. The thing to be noted is, he points out, the contrast implied in the fact that while the essential aspect of anything was, for the classical age, that static perfection toward which it was

tending, it has become for us, living in a time-world, rather the history of the thing's evolution or even, at times, merely the nature of its origin. And against the assumption that this change of attitude represents a gain, that man can live better or more profitably as part of a flux which has no meaning outside itself, Mr. Lewis protests with all vigor. Though we may be children of time we *want* to be children of eternity, and though I am not sure Mr. Lewis would accept this formulation of the dilemma it will serve nevertheless to illuminate the direction of his striving. "What I am concerned with here, first of all, is," he says, "not whether the great time-philosophy that overshadows all contemporary thought is viable as a system of abstract truth, but if in its application it helps or destroys our human arts. With that is involved, of course, the very fundamental question of whether we should set out to transcend our human condition (as formerly Nietzsche and then Bergson claimed that we should); or whether we should transplant into human terms the whole of our datum. My standpoint is that we are creatures of a certain kind, with no indication that a radical change is imminent. . . . I prefer the chaste wisdom of the Chinese or the Greek to the hot tawny brand of superlative fanaticism coming from the parched deserts of the Ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness. I am for the physical world."

The argument of "Time and Western Man," carrying though it does an immense burden of detailed criticism directed against the chief exponents of the time philosophy, is conducted with great acuteness and illuminated with flashes of maliciously humorous characterization like that in which Bertrand Russell, "whose mind is that of an excited and rather sentimental amateur," is described as a man possessed of an entertainer's instinct which leads him always to take the "entertaining" or "exciting" side in a debate. Perhaps the discourse would be somewhat clarified from a metaphysical standpoint if Mr. Lewis would state more clearly than he does whether, in his championship of the "plastic" against the "temporal" view of reality, he attacks the latter as a falsely assumed "truth of reference" or merely as a conception functioning less fruitfully than the plastic view when each is considered merely as an *als ob*. But since he is chiefly concerned with art or with life-considered-as-an-art, and since in the realm of art the distinction between a "truth of reference" and a fruitful *als ob* inevitably disappears, this defect is not of great importance. Indeed the disappearance of this distinction is exactly the thing which differentiates art from life, and though the present book is only a prolegomenon it is easy to see that Mr. Lewis's line of thought must eventuate in a plea for the absolute and formal virtues of a "classical" literature, painting, or sculpture.

May it not indeed be said that the entire contemporary renaissance of interest in "form" is the result of a longing for something outside of time which is closed and complete in itself—for something with a pattern in which each part is so joined to every other part that it returns upon itself instead of either leading on to something else or trailing off until it is lost in the dark boundless chaos? Romantic art had as one of its ideals a suggestive incompleteness, a deliberate imperfection intended to provoke rather than to satisfy and to suggest boundlessness rather than boundaries. The stories which it told are not stories with a beginning and an end but episodes, lifted almost at random, from an endless chronicle to which the imagination

is led back again at the inconclusive conclusion and in which its thoughts and emotions as well as its events are left dangling. But the human mind wearies at length of expansion and inconclusion. It turns to art for the completeness and the perfection which it does not find in nature, and it discovers even in rigidity a certain peace. It asks of art a pattern, something which can be regarded as a whole in itself, and it does not object to the absence of that inclusion of opposites aimed at by the romantics if it can receive in exchange a sense of equilibrium existing within the limits which the work of art, detaching itself from the stream of life, sets up. And it is just this which a classic art supplies. It leads the imagination not into life and time but out of both into a world so frozen as to seem to be seen *sub specie aeternitatis* because it exists, each part locked together with each other part, within the confines of a frame and hence is as complete and changeless for us as life itself has been fancied to be in the mind of that God for whom all moments are one.

THIS CLIPPING FROM
New York Saturday
Review of Literature

JAN 2-1926

Newcomers

I.

GERTRUDE STEIN

THE writings of Gertrude Stein stand a mas-
sive doorpost in the entrance to the latest
American literature. Her use of words
which for a decade exhilarated the newspaper mind,
has opened a way before the new writers and made
them dare. What they have dared adds every year
to Miss Stein's significance. The new period of poetry
and prose is relativistic in nature. Words are not
realities for Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg,
Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Waldo Frank,
Marianne Moore. Recognition of the relativity
of language, its competency to communicate only
what lies between the thinking mind and the ob-
jects present to it, underlies the work of a rush of
newcomers. The location of the field of poetry in
the floating space between the poet and the object
brought into relation to him in the quick movement,
has become incalculably productive of the many
individual voices which make the literary situation
exciting. The very growth of the personal demo-
cratic literature not in imitation but in the inten-
tion of Walt Whitman comes largely from the iden-
tification of the poem as the interaction of the poet
and the thing before him. Invitation to precisely the
individual rhythm, the inner life of the artist, is
the great effect of the revolutionary orientation.

It bars all formulae. In this joyous condi-
tion of union with the object before him, what is
unreflectively known to the artist is a potentiality
established within himself, a pattern of the emo-
tions, a suite of involuntary attitudes. In bodying
forth this blind musical state, he is impelled to pro-
duce very directly his own experience, to make his
fundamental responses to life, and express the uni-
versal element with which he works in harmony.
The quick movement, never identical, places all
facts in solution and bids the artist reconstruct them.
And while certain of the new men, Sherwood An-
derson in particular, have acknowledged the support
and direction upon the new pathway gotten from the
woman who initiated for English, and has practiced
and doggedly pursued relativistic literary form all

her career; and while others have acknowledged
it tacitly by adopting her ideas and even incorporat-
ing entire sentences into their proper works; all the
newer writers, and not only the Americans, but
Joyce of Dublin and the young dadas in Paris as
well, owe part of their present position to what the
dumb grotesque of the journalists first felt, and
massively held in words.

The age's sense of the primacy of rhythm organized the new way of writing first used and relentlessly developed by Gertrude Stein, in her the feeling of slow movement in an almost static universe. In the world focussed by her art opposed states succeed one another, drowsy, regular, and monotonous in their alternation. It is a cosmos experiencing a periodic exaltation and depression of ponderous physical forces returning so fixedly to a point of departure that in the drugged circling no advance is apparent. Matter lies mountainous, impersonal, brutal, not to be budged. Perhaps this American woman's sense of the primacy of rhythm was speeded by the radicalism of Cézanne electrifying the Parisian air around her in the 1900's. In Cézanne's painting as in the painting of her friends, Matisse and Picasso, the combination of movement and of poise is indirectly revealed the artists' chief concern, and Miss Stein's essays on the paintings of Matisse and Picasso, introduced together with their art to the American public by *Camera Work* in 1912, show how directly the impulse toward an emotional combination and correlation of the parts of literature came from them to her. It could not have come had some consciousness of the basic rôle of rhythm not been present in her, and evident to her interchangeably in the sounds and shapes of words, and in people and all life. Her use of words reveals personal integral feeling not of their sensuous charm, but of their physical movement and direction, their weight or lightness, their positive or indefinite effects. The ordinary words have feelings of stone and lead for her, or movements of flying and gliding, or qualities of explosiveness or qualities of stability; and she has marshalled them in accordance with her feeling, to stand positive, massive, and solemn in combination, bricks in a wall and Hebrews in company. They come slowly, carried by a rhythm almost slack, in phrases often repeated, legendary in tone, sustained for a breath and then dropped, and picked up and dropped again, speedless for interminable stretches, giving the feeling of mountainous volumes. If relative excitement sometimes seizes them and slaps them faster and faster on each other, the climax is low and brief, and the firm, stolid, tireless march left to resume.

She feels an identical rhythm in people, hears
it by listening against objects and by listening
to what they do to the hearer in the way a medical
genius might auscultate a body and feel the indi-
vidual balance and coordination of its organs; a
rhythm in which the sexual rhythm is merely an
episode; a counterplay and adjustment of funda-
mental impulses; a permanent relation of the ob-
ject to the universal element which works through
it. This rhythm, like the rhythm of words, is
felt as massive, slow, fixed, the passive movement
of the pond lily floating on the rippling surface

and inalienably fixed to its roots. It is heard
through static half piffling and half tragical lives,
through women whose existences are a series of
brilliant beginnings and sudden evaporations;
women who lose a lifetime in freeing themselves
from family fixations; old maid sisters housing
drearily together and circling slowly about their re-
lation to each other; servant girls going through
life without heads, serving, wasting themselves,
perishing.

The effort to give form to these feelings by
bringing the word and the states sensed in people
together, has led Miss Stein to an ever more un-
compromising relativism, to the use of the word
as a simple integer of rhythm. How large and sub-
stantial the success of her experiment in the rela-
tivistic literary forms has been, cannot yet be esti-
mated, for the reason that her work is known only
in part. She has made her contribution with the
bulk of her manuscripts stored about her in her
studio in Paris; and exerted great influence de-
spite gross mismanagement. The least interesting
and complete of her books, "Tender Buttons," ex-
ploited for the purposes of sensationalism by some
foolish friends, made her known, or better, ren-

dered her obscure; and both she and the friends
of her art paid heavily for the poor strategy. It
is already evident that she is an unequal creator.
Numbers of her saurian compositions are trivial and
incomplete, as others are formed, dense, complex,
and moving with profound experience and pen-
tration of hidden human truth. Most of the ver-
bal structures of "Tender Buttons," and certain of
the unlyrical, humoristic "poems" and "plays" in
"Geography and Plays," suggest themselves as
products of the boredom, resentment, and slack
feeling they awaken; and others appear experiments
in the unhappy "automatic writing" favored by the
younger dadas about her.

It is equally evident that work of hers is part
of American literature, and that before the young-
er writers gave her a place in profiting by the new
form, she had established it massively. Relativistic
writing exists in her work in three satisfying stages
of development. The first, embodied in "Three
Lives," balances language used in the interests of
description with language used primarily for the
purposes of communicating the direct feeling of
things, the rhythmical pattern created in the poet
by the object. The information given about Me-
lanctha, the protagonist of the best of these early
pathetic novelettes, assists the sound, the feel, the
rhythmical play and repetition of words communi-
cating the tragic discordances of impulse present in
the being of the wandering. girl Possibly because
the author's attack was still indirect and inexpert,
and her surfaces broken, the art at the first stage
leaves only blurred outlines in the mind. Yet the
deep grasp of motives and character manifest
in the play of impulse and the Beethoven move-
ment of the prose give an immediate, dense, se-
renely resigned feeling of life.

The second stage, clearer in its technique, is re-
presented by the just published fifteen year old novel
"The Making of Americans,"* indubitably the most
monumental fiction to be given since the publication
of "Ulysses;" by the charming short stories "Ada,"
"Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," "A Family of Per-
haps Three," and by some of the essays (Matisse,
Picasso, Italians). This stage sharply subordinates
the informative, symbolical rôle of the word. What
the word stands for, merely permits the author a
point of contact with the reader. For their real
meaning the stories rely almost entirely upon their
sonata-like suites of rhythms, their slow oppositions
of states of being, and the effect of the often re-
peated, slightly varied vocabularies; and sometimes,
as in the tale of what went on in the cultivated life
of Miss Furr, "cultivating quite a pleasant voice"
in a place "where some were cultivating something,
voices and other things worth cultivating," the
meaning is well nigh independent of the sign-situ-
ation. Adverbs expressing indefinite place and time
grow thick. And the third and present style, at
its firmest in the portraits of Mabel Dodge and
Constance Fletcher, and in some of the geographi-
cal essays, dispenses entirely with the symbolical
function of language, and relies exclusively on its
emotive one. The words are used entirely for their
tonal and associational qualities. If a certain num-
ber of words symbolically related to the subject are
included, it is merely for the purpose of binding
the experience together and supplying a key. It
is with a superb logic that this stage of the develop-
ment of Miss Stein's way of writing has focussed
the ridicule of the newspaper minds. A litera-
ture resembling, with a grotesque superficiality, her
massive, often sonorous aggregations of words used
for their powerful gestures and positive clamors,
is to be found each morning in the serried columns
of the daily prints; and is differentiated from hers
only by the slight circumstances that the journalists
use words for their detonations and sensuous effects
under the illusion that they are communicating facts
about things with them, while she uses them cor-
sciously for their emotivity, and with the cleanness
and creative infectiousness of the artist. It is as
such she is about to be generally recognized. Not
all newcomers are first-bookmen. Some are artists
to whom the world is a little slow in coming.

PAUL ROSENFELD

*The Making of Americans. By Gertrude Stein. Paris:
Three Mountains Press. 1925.

ing, he liked to think about what was good for every one around him in their eating, and he was always changing, he was always beginning, and often he was full up with impatient feeling; this could be in him about the way of eating as it was about everything in his living.

Lest the reader of this review grow “full up with impatient
feeling,” I will consider the author’s mode of progress, one step
forward and half a dozen backward, as being now sufficiently
indicated. It is always like this in the maze of a thousand pages,
for, quite like Marcel Proust in his memories of times past, when a
scent or a note of music would cause him to desert half-told a
scene of passion in order to recall his grandmother’s deathbed,
so Gertrude Stein mixes up generations in a maddening way; but,
also like the French genius, she never loses the clue which enables
her to retrace her steps.

And “as I was saying,” it is not for the cheap sport of ridiculing
her that I write this review, but to show, if possible, that in
planning her book, or rather, in making a sort of scenario of it,
as she admits she did, she has advanced upon herself. To set
down what Miss Stein said to me in this connection, in her old-
fashioned but cheerful apartment in Paris, where she has lived
for over a quarter of a century—an apartment heated à l'Anglaise
with ruddy grate fires and decorated with many canvases by
Picasso and artists of his ilk—is a way to make this plain.

"It was a fault of 'Three Lives' that I permitted that book to write itself resistlessly," said she; "now I do not write anything until I have the whole thing in my consciousness. I was always tremendously interested in the volume and rhythm of words, and in my early work I wrote in long and complicated sentences which kept on until I had completely freed myself of whatever conception was in my head. Gradually I found I could create the same intensity of conception by making the sentences enormously short. Thus the sentence falls in my Americans: "Resisting being is one way of being," wherein in seven simple words I have cast a thought which formerly might have seemed to me to require a long paragraph.

"But near, quite adjoining this condensed sentence, is another which can not be boiled down to tell my meaning. I will read it to you." And then she read from page 521 an incoherent sentence so long that it would fill more than one-third of a column if I 'reproduced it here. "A serious conclusion like this, drawn from recollections that fill more than 500 pages of my book," said Miss Stein, "involving a myriad of personal recollections; comprehending innumerable little sights, sounds, acts, feelings—these 'could not be summed up in a sentence of seven words. It is impossible."

"If you have in your mind clearly enough what you want to put down of your impression of a place, a person, or the world, sometimes you have to make it terribly long and sometimes terribly short; gradually your style of writing evolves out of your recognition of this fact. The recognition comes to different persons at different times and in different ways. When you are young, everybody tells you, and you know it yourself, that you have a certain sort of ability. But you don't easily learn how to use it, and you don't know what it is all about, particularly if you develop slowly. Often such a person can do almost anything well, but he has not yet found what he can do especially well. Every one about him chooses a different field for him, but that is nonsense, for each person must find his own field. If he has character and determination, what he is meant to do especially well will be sure to come out of itself. When I was younger and determined to write I knew nothing of the ancient Greek curse on us all, heredity; now I have seen, I have weighed, I have reflected, I know, and my 'Americans' is the outcome."

In spite of her being anchored in Paris for so many years, and
in spite, too, of her erratic output, which has always excited curi-
osity, if nothing stronger, Gertrude Stein remains to many liter-
ary persons what the hippopotamus was to the farmer, "no such
animal," and a brief record of her may not therefore be amiss.
She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, about fifty years ago.
When she was still very young, her family came to Europe and
lived three years in Vienna* and one year in Paris. The elder

children learned to speak German and French. On returning to
America, the family settled in San Francisco, which is still the
home of the author's brothers. Gertrude spent a year in London
studying Elizabethan prose (in 1903), and then resumed her
studies at Radcliffe, graduating from that college and going thence
to study medicine at Johns Hopkins. But, ambitious to write,
she gave up the idea of medicine and came to Paris to try. She
was then twenty-eight. Her first book was "Three Lives."

"I found the money to publish it myself," said Miss Stein; "no publisher would look at it. But that did not discourage me, I was not the first author who paid his own admission."

Among her earliest friends in Paris was Picasso, the artist whose
canvases, long ridiculed, now fetch enormous prices, and of this
famous friendship the partner in it said:

"Nobody had ever heard of either of us, and we worked har-
moniously together, each on his own. I started to write portraits
of everybody who came to the house—Picasso, Matisse, Carl
Van Vechten, all who wrote or composed or painted. I called
this collection 'Geography and Plays.' I am doing another
series now, spasmodically and as a sort of rest from other work;
it will be called 'Portraits and Prayers.' Just now I am writing
a novel which I call 'A Novel,' and another manuscript I can not
class, which I call 'Natural Phenomena.' Both of these will be
long, but there is no limit set on the latter, since I am the only
one to decide what is and what are not natural phenomena. I
particularly like doing this last book.

"The Making of Americans' took me two years to write. I finished it in 1908, and not a word has been changed in it since. Several parts were published as a serial in an ill-fated magazine published in English in Paris, but I was glad to take it back when the magazine went under, for I do not care for serial publication. Nobody wanted to publish the book, and I had no money to do so myself; finally a friend, young and enthusiastic, pushed it through. In manuscript my friends sometimes found my 'Americans' difficult reading; everybody finds it perfectly simple now."

It is as difficult to follow Gertrude Stein's conversation as to
read her book. She indulges in hydra-headed beginnings, such as
"Quite frankly—that's not—but then . . ." and every·new
sentence is a bog she must struggle out of. But she does get out,
and among other things she confessed that she "has to wait until
ready" before she can write, meaning, perhaps, that she waits on
what is called "inspiration." She reads everything, but prefers
"perfectly simple travel stories and perfectly simple sentimental
stories." "I like to read biography, too," said she; "all sorts, for
I take an interest in all kinds of people, just as I like all kinds of
food, meats and vegetables and fruit and candy and cake."

She is simple, and does not hesitate to show her pleasure when
she has received praise from any source. The crowning glory of
her work came from Jean Cocteau, that many-sided genius whom
the French critics are still trying to place. Miss Stein read aloud
what he said of her:

> I can sense her rhythm even in translation; she possesses the *métier poétique*. Her "Portrait of Picasso" is like a bas-relief; I seem to run my fingers over it, as tho it were a piece of plastic art. Hers was the first writing which struck me as being a new thing in the English language.

If this short piece is a bas-relief, what are we to call "The Making of Americans"? It is a canvas as vastly stretched as the Sistine Chapel's "Last Judgment," and containing, one may assume, as many figures, but . . . but with the kindest spirit imaginable for the author one couldn't call it in any sense a work of art. Gertrude Stein discovered heredity and made a big book out of it. She ought to have the credit of never losing sight of her theme and always sticking, limpet-like, to her scenario. From the first word to the last it is there, and here are the last words of this sprawling enormity:

> Any family living can be existing when not every one has come to be a dead one. . . . Some being living and being in a family living can come then to be dead ones. Any one can be certain that some can remember such a thing. Any family living can be one being existing and some can remember something of some such thing.

SATURDAY REVIEW OF LIT,

NEW YORK CITY

FEB 27 1926

The Virtue of Intolerance

IF criticism owes a duty to tolerance—and no one, we suppose, would deny that the very keystone of good criticism is open-mindedness—it has no less an obligation to intolerance. For quite as much as it must be hospitable to the new and the experimental must it be cold to the shoddy and the merely eccentric. Poise is of equal value in criticism with enthusiasm, and balance is a virtue devoutly to be courted. But balance unfortunately is one of the rarest of virtues. For it is the way of human nature if it espouses a cause to cleave to it strongly, and the more warmly it upholds it the less to be able to see its faults. Thus it is that admirers, her banalities and dulnesses seem the earmarks of genius, and her cult take on the seriousness of gospel. The mere fact that to the mass of the cultured public her manerisms seem absurdities, her repetitions and involutions atrocities, has no weight with her followers. If these qualities cannot be appreciated by the conservative, why, so much the worse for the conservative. And that, in the language of the day, is that.

But it is not that, it is not by any means the whole of the matter. For Gertrude Stein and her disciples may be perfectly negligible phenomena, but the criticism that treats them not only with respect but as of enormous importance is a serious matter. It is the kind of criticism that is by the nature of the case militant rather than persuasive, that is supercilious to tradition, and scornful of standards. It is a proselytizing criticism that is dangerous since it makes a god of novelty and attaches to the bizarre inherent merit. It is sadly lacking in the saving grace of humor, is warped out of perspective by its own heat, and is self-hypnotized into seeing aridity as simplicity, oddness as beauty, emptiness as pregnancy. Surely such writing as Gertrude Stein's could not hold attention for a day if it were not for the smoke screen of importance which the critics have thrown about it. Its own stupidity would have laughed it into oblivion.

Some time ago in a Commencement address, Professor John Livingston Lowes of Harvard, after commenting upon the delights of good reading, added: "And after one has wound up one's faculties, like Mrs. Battle, over serious things, one may indulge with propriety in what I suppose one may designate as a slumming expedition among books." And he went on to explain his statement by saying that to Macaulay a slumming expedition was a

technique, and whoever has something to write and a strong desire to write it is well repaid for all the time he may spend in study and practice, under any system or none. Few patent medicines are intrinsically harmful. The harm is done by the promises that are pasted on the bottle.

To teach the tricks of the writing trade without trying to establish first as a groundwork a mastery of clear and accurate English is to encourage tricksters rather than artists. It would be a pity if any of our universities had joined with our quack advertisers to create an impression among the simple-minded or the avaricious that this art of writing may be purchased ready-to-wear; that like a suit of Klever-Kut-Clothes it may be donned regardless of lack of vocabulary and good taste and even ideas and immediately present to the world the Well-Dressed Writer.

It would be a pity, because Heaven knows that just now there is too ready a market for standardized literary products with interchangeable parts.

220 WEST 19th ST., NEW YORK

Tel. Chelsea 8860

THIS CLIPPING FROM

APR 17 1926

Miss Gertrude Stein, it is a pleasure to report, has be-
come so intelligent that she is utterly unintelligible to all
except herself and T. S. Eliot. This places her away
ahead of relativity, which is understood by six or eight.
Miss Stein has written a piece about "The Fifteenth of
November" in Mr. Eliot's magazine, *The New Criterion*.

Art-Snobs and Humbug

NOTE: This review is not alone in exposing the humbug in some
of the new forms of literary expression. "Affable Hawk," con-
tributor of a weekly page of book criticism to the sound and able
New Statesman of London, explains Gertrude Stein, James Joyce,
T. S. Eliot, and their imitators and followers in the paragraphs be-
low.

The door of welcome [to rubbish in art] is first opened
ajar by genuine experimenters, then pushed wide enough
to admit enormities by a little crowd of people who are
passionately eager to be the first to understand. It is
afterwards propped open by logical art-theories, while
free passage is maintained thanks to a threat: namely,
the threat to all dissidents or doubtfuls that if they are
not duly respectful towards the aforesaid enormities, they
will find themselves numbered among the philistines who
in the past laughed at and rejected "the unknown beau-
ty." In the current number of the *New Criterion* M.
Cocteau flourishes this lash; modernist poets are never
tired of pointing out that Coleridge and Keats were once
jeered at; the supporters of cubist art continually remind
the public that it once heaped abuse upon the now re-
spected Impressionists. Indeed, the threat is in constant
use, and it has an alarming effect upon people in whom
the desire to be right about art is rather stronger than
their power to enjoy it.

In its subtler forms it reduces the diffident to aspen-
hearted acquiescence. One of these is to write in an airy
confident tone as though it was, of course, only fools and
block-heads who are even conscious of precisely those
misgivings which are internally gnawing the would-be
proselyte, and at the same time to remind him, perhaps,
in the words of the De Goncourts, that, "The Beautiful
is that which seems abominable to uneducated eyes. The
beautiful is that which your mistress or your cook in-
stinctively finds hideous." If, at the moment of reading,
the poor art-snob has any misgivings about either his
cook or his mistress, such a quotation will at once open
his eyes to the merits of the poet or painter in question.

Note the flattery implicit in it. He will henceforth
feel lifted above his fellows proportionally as they dis-
agree with him, and also be able to pass through the
houses of the rich and the galleries of collectors with
pleasant, supercilious equanimity.

Episodes & Epistles. Poems by W. L. Thomas Seltzer. $1.75.

A curious melange. Some of the pieces remind one of
E. E. Cummings, others of Gertrude Stein, one is a poor imita-
tion of Carl Sandburg, and at the close there is a classical
sonnet sequence. But the book forbids hasty dismissal. Just
as a given poem begins to shape, some ineptitude of phrase or
rhythm or a clanking rhyme makes a mess of it. Yet there are
fine images, and there is the stamp of masculinity all over
W. L.'s work. The poet is sensitive to the terrifying beauty
of the ageless elements and to the ugly cruelty of our own
time.

SAVANNAH, GA.
PRESS

APR 17 1926

ATTENDED LECTURE
IN CHARLESTON

MRS. BARROW AND MRS.
STRONG HEAR TALK BE-
FORE POETRY SOCIETY

Mrs. Craig Barrow and Mrs. Paschal N. Strong drove over to Charleston last week to attend the lecture which Louis Untermeyer delivered on Friday night before the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Mr. Untermeyer was to have lectured here also during his trip South, but the engagement had to be cancelled on account of conflicting dates, so Mrs. Barrow and Mrs. Strong took advantage of the opportunity to hear his talk in Charleston.

They describe him as a delightful talker, witty and interesting and a reader of unusually sympathetic charm. His subject was a comparative presentation of British and American poetry, a topic in which he necessarily touched only the high spots in the short time allotted to him. He took for granted they said, that his audience knew most of the prominent figures, although to them briefly, and reading from some of the poets not so well known. He gave some selection from the poetry of Edith Sitwell who he amusingly described as "combination of Gertrude Stein and Mother Goose."

The lecture was held in the South Carolina Hall, which was filled to capacity, many people sitting or tables during the talk. Mrs. Strong who is chairman of the working group of the Poetry Society here had a talk with John Bennett, of the South Carolina Society, in regard to the method of reading and judging the original poems, which she found very helpful and interesting.

They had lunch while in Charleston with Du Bose Heyward and his wife, both of whom know Mr. Untermeyer in the artist colony at Peterboro.

584

THE OXFORD MAGAZINE

JUNE 17TH, 1926.

A Word on Gertrude Stein.

I may as well be honest. I have read neither *Geography and Plays*, nor *Three Lives*, nor *The Making of Americans*. And what skill is not able to conceal, simplicity is constrained to admit. Yet Miss Stein is so unmistakably as important as she is neglected, that even if one cannot send people back to her works with intenser, because more conscious, appreciation—the higher function of the critic, one is doing work of some value, if one can perform only the lower function of the critic, and increase or incite their curiosity about her writing.

When Miss Stein spoke in Christ Church last week she shattered one or two current delusions about herself pretty completely. First, by pointing to the interest maintained in her works for twenty years, she proved to those who required a demonstration that she is a genuine creative artist and no charlatan. Second, in answer to a question, she said that she used all words in their common or garden meanings: which shows that she is far too sensible to try—as some of her intrepidly 'modern' admirers accused her of trying—to divorce words from meaning. She is no demented or mystical mathematician, attempting by a process of arbitrary and capricious juxtapositions of words, to build up a literature of abstract patterns.

The precious word 'abstract' has been the cause of innumerable misconceptions of modern art. There is and can be no such thing as abstract art. If there is one thing common to all works of art, in what medium and of what period soever, it is their concreteness. A philosophical concept is not a work of art. A work of art is an intuitive apprehension of reality, conceived in terms of concrete form in some sensuous medium. A cubist picture consists of paint on canvas, and is appreciated through the eyes. One does not appre-

hend the law of excluded middle in terms of a visual or a concrete image. To speak of abstract art is, therefore, bunkum.

Even Miss Sitwell has fallen for this comprehensive and comfortable term in her article on Gertrude Stein in the early October number of last year's *Vogue*. She accounts for the difficulty of Miss Stein's work by saying that we are unaccustomed to abstract patterns being built of words. She then quotes the following lines by way of illustration :—

With the flag.
With the flag of sets.
Sets of colour.
Do you like flags.
Blue flags smell sweetly.
Blue flags in a whirl.
The wind blows.
And the automobile goes.
Can you guess boards.
Wood.
Can you guess hoops.
Barrels.
Can you guess girls.
Servants.

She could not have chosen a worse example. This is an easily understood passage. The continuity of the series of images which compose these lines is the obvious one of subjective associations. Why, then, employ 'abstract,' the smug euphemism of the baffled art critic, in describing it?

Miss Stein is like every other pioneer in the history of literature. She is not trying to invent a new style. She is not so silly. She is merely striving to find the most accurate means of expressing her own relation to her time and her environment. Accurate and, therefore, new.

Any new idiom is, as Miss Stein herself said on Monday, difficult. But Miss Stein offers greater difficulty to readers of her day than did, say, Aeschylus or Marlow or Coleridge to their. Why? Because she is more ruthlessly subjective. Living as she does in an age when local or national feeling in art is a thing of the past, when sophistication has made men as acutely individualized as states are widely diffuse, when it is impossible to be sincere without being subjective, Miss Stein has set herself to make a personal, as opposed to the conventional, selection (e.g., of the Romantics), from her own subjective impressions. Her works may almost be said to resemble the shadows cast by the unconscious upon the conscious mind. But whether this simile be too fantastic or not, her intensive individualism sufficiently explains (not explicates) the obscure and the eliptical in her writings.

GILBERT ARMITAGE.