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The Nation

[Vol. 134, No. 3487]

*The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln.* Translated with Introduction and Notes by Marvin Lowenthal. Harper and Brothers. $3.

An honest, whole, brave, strong personality paints itself in this extraordinary book. It has the solidity and forthrightness of a portrait by a Dutch master, and as a discerning eye can reconstruct a whole contemporary culture from the details and background of such a portrait, so, with even more fulness and actuality, can Jewish life at the end of the seventeenth and the first part of the eighteenth century be visualized in Glückel's memoirs. Glückel wrote the "little books" as a means of passing the difficult hours of a long period of sleeplessness, and intended them to be a memorial to her children. Her unconsciousness of a "public" is apparent throughout, and gives the volume intimate immediacy. Native literary gifts give it color and movement. Apart from the impact of Glückel's own personality, two facts become impressively clear: how persecution, humiliation, and restrictions concentrated Jewish life in the family and in the synagogue, and turned the idealism and pride of a strong race inward; and how, through the fact that almost the only relationship between a government and its Jewish subjects was taxation and bribery, money became the essential condition of the life of Jewish communities and fostered the myth of Jewish money-madness. Within the borders of their own community, as Glückel's narrative shows, the Jews lived then with the same liberality that characterizes their freer life today.

*The Devil in the Flesh.* By Raymond Radiguet. Translated from the French by Kay Boyle. Foreword by Aldous Huxley. Harrison Smith. $2.50.

"The Devil in the Flesh" would be a remarkable novel under any circumstances; as the first novel of an author who was still hardly more than a boy when he died a few years ago, it is extraordinary. This story of the love of a fifteen-year-old boy for a girl slightly older than himself and married to a soldier at the front is told with a delicacy and refinement of style, a directness of intuition, and a precise description of emotion that are a perpetual delight. Probably Radiguet was influenced by the work of Stendhal, and even more by that of André Gide; but the lucidity with which he unknobs the tangled skein of adult love and the problems of adolescence—Raymond and Martha face the world as children, but the emotions they experience face to face with one another are entirely mature—is uniquely his own; it reveals the sure touch of genius. Kay Boyle's translation is as excellent as Aldous Huxley's foreword is inadequate.

*That Girl.* By Jacques Deval. Translated from the French by Lawrence S. Morris. The Viking Press. $2.

Chérie at ten "knew what a man of thirty often tries to forget," but it may be supposed that Jacques Deval does not forget that a cinematographic novel of a prostitute and of international espionage in the Panama Canal zone may make a reasonable bid for Hollywood. M. Deval is a clever storyteller; he can mix a tender, ironic, and sentimental tale of a little French prostitute whose sole aim in life is to get enough money together to return to her native land with a thrilling tale of intrigue highly flattering to the efficiency of the American navy's intelligence department. "That Girl" ought to appeal to those who are tired of badly written, hackneyed crime stories; it has all the doubtful virtues of these without ever degenerating into anything lower than the highest-class tripe.

*This Man Is My Brother.* By Myron Brinig. Farrar and Rinehart. $2.50.

In his new novel Myron Brinig returns to his Singermanns of the crude little Montana mining city of Silver Bow. The time is now 1931. The novel proceeds by a process of taking

up the stories of old and new members of the family, weaving these stories into each other, and bringing the varied conflicts in which the people are involved to successive crises—the madness that overtakes the brilliant and neurotic Ralph, the marriage of Sylvia to a Gentile, the disastrous love affair of Nina, the tragedy, with a racial and homosexual motivation, of Harry. Brinig's writing has warmth and power and sweep. The intellectual caliber of his work is high. Yet the novel lets us down. Perhaps the fundamental weakness of the book lies in the too-well-rationalized relationship between the several characters and the dramatic significance of their lives, on the one hand, and the background, themes, and ideas, on the other—as in a propaganda novel. Mr. Brinig is a novelist of emotional intensity and power, and he might well have left his overtones of meaning and purpose to make themselves heard as they do in life—not so logically but more poignantly. "This Man Is My Brother" remains, nevertheless, a fine novel, quite out of the rut, profoundly moving if not completely satisfying.

## Art
### The World of Florine Stettheimer

THE sensation of the show of the American Society of Painters, Printers, and Gravers at the Whitney Museum this season was surely Florine Stettheimer's witty and satiric apothesis of popular American art, splendor, and ceremonial entitled Cathedrals of Broadway. All the hieratic domes and columns and beds of golden lights of the Roxies, the Paramounts, the Capitols, and the Strands, and their ritualistic scarlets and golds and parades of uniformed ushers, their banners, "art" galleries, and magnificent custodians, were essentialized in it; and built up into a kind of gaudy shrine about a central rectangle of silver solemnly inscribed with the vulgarly handsome mask of Jimmy Walker opening the baseball season; the derby atilt on his head; the face of him hard as a wise-crack; the baseball offensive in his twisted hand. And the hub-bub the picture provoked was a perfectly legitimate one. The "Cathedrals" was observed of all observers not merely for its satiric humor. It is a piercing, an amusing, and elegant piece of work, and very brilliantly pigmented. Originality of idiom distinguishes it from the mass of derivative and compromising pieces necessarily evident in any omnibus show, and certainly not without representation in the exhibition at the little museum. Besides, the rarity of the occasions on which works of its gifted author have been displayed to the public gave the picture the further distinction of novelty, and tended to set it apart from the productions of the other gifted but better-known craftsmen which figured on the many broken walls.

The canvases of Miss Stettheimer, indeed, stand well among the exceptional works of art now being produced in the United States. Their spirit and their style are quite as individual as the technique by which the painter achieves her luminosity of color, marvelously responsive even to poor and to half lighting. There are serious people who claim that she is one of the three important women painters in the country, the other two being Georgia O'Keeffe and Peggy Bacon; and that the three of them compare somewhat as the three typical operas "Tristan," "The Barber of Seville," and "La Belle Hélène" compare with one another—O'Keeffe representing "Tristan," Peggy Bacon the Offenbach masterpiece, and Miss Stettheimer the masterwork of Rossini. From this comparison it will be gathered that the art of the latter lady is an ornate, a feathery, a spangled one,

May 4, 1932]

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full of trills and coloratura and fioritura. Indeed, it is a witty, an elfish, a humorous affair; almost a Christmas-tree art, but the art of the most tastefully and exquisitely trimmed of all Christmas trees. Those brilliant canvases of hers do resemble gay decorations in colored paper, and lacquered red and blue glass balls, and gilt-foil stars, and crepe streamers, and angels of cotton wadding, and tinted wax tapers. That is because she has a highly refined decorative sense combined with a certain predilection for the ornamental, the frivolous, the festive; indeed, a sense of the poetry and humor and pathos of what is merely embellishing. Many of her graceful, delicate shapes are imitated from festoonery, plumage, tassels, rosettes, fringes, bouquets, and all kinds of old-fashioned trappings. Others are the forms of some Oriental elfin world in which everything is sinuous, diminutive, and tendril-like; and huge bees and dragonflies and glorified insects and all sorts of non-human, vermicular, and winged creatures are the norm. She seems to delight in garish, tinselly, glittering colors; the colors of "paste" and bric-a-brac and paper flowers; and induces her paint to form tiny sparkling brilliants. It is a fabulous little world of two-dimensional shapes with which she entertains us; but beautifully, sharply, deliciously felt; and perfectly communicative of the pleasure with which it was created.

It is an expression of aspects of America, tinged with the irony and merriment of a very passive and very detached observer. A number of her paintings represent personal and intimate experiences; for the artist ranges herself emphatically among those who find the personal record one of the opportunities of art. They include portraits of the members of a genteel family circle, and portraits of friends such as Carl Van Vechten, Marcel Duchamp, Stieglitz, Louis Bouché, and Virgil Thomson. Others are Americana: let it hastily be stated that the idea of grandiose documentary caricatures of the land of the free found expression in Miss Stettheimer's art some while before it was popularized by the *American Mercury*. Besides the Cathedrals, this series contains a very dainty Atlantic City Beauty Contest, a Spring Sale at Bendel's full of exquisite, capricious shapes and figures, a golden Beach at Asbury Park, rich in amusing Negro silhouettes; also a Fifth Avenue, a West Point, and several syntheses in a similar vein.

But of course the artist has expressed those aspects of the reality which harmonize with her own idea and way of feeling. Thus, the figures of the family and its adherents have a certain very Parisian dollishness, as befits inhabitants of a rarefied and not quite probable world. The characteristics of the persons and their surroundings are combined in a dreamily fanciful way, and conceived in terms of archaic popular images. The ignorant and devoted Irish nurse stands masterfully beside her dressing-table as beside an altar, and about her head float the cherubically winged heads of the five children she reared and made over in her idea. A romantic sister, her cheeks ablaze beneath huge dream-bewildered eyes, floats through the erotic night, beneath a blazing Christmas tree on the crimson couch on which her dream has stretched her. As for the various floral American fantasies, they are full of marvelously chic and quite diaphanous persons; and if these puppets have the American seriousness mixed with the American childishness, and are all exalted and pompous about ridiculous things, they also have an elegance and elfishness which is not quite of this world, and of one whose inhabitants might have larked in the train of Titania and Bottom. In fact, the values and relations and accents of Florine Stettheimer's art are so fastidious and incorporeal and weightless that we seem to be moving through them upon a planet smaller than ours, some large asteroid swimming joyously in its blue ether—the asteroid "Florine"—and getting both the experience of this delicate, remote little sphere and a sense of the grossness and preposterousness of our own earth.

PAUL ROSENFELD

BANANA
GOLD

by Carleton Beals

Author of "Mexican Maze," etc.

There is a high-tempered, hard-fisted, colorful, crafty writing about this story of jungles, guns, the bandit Sandino, the politics and corruption, the coffee ranches, bananas and heat of Central America. Mr. Beals describes his spectacular man-hunt through hot murky tropical forests and sleet wrapped mountains for the embattled Sandino—a story and commentary as fabulous and rich as the travels of Marco Polo. *Colored frontispiece and decorations by Carlos Merida.* $3.00

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