The Map in Fiction*

Some Melancholy Mishaps In After-the-War Tolerance The Story. What story there is, is tucked away in inconspicuous corners of the book so as not to hamper the author in developing his real theme--post-war Europe. Bertram Pollard is one of those unusually effective majors in the War who find themselves correspondingly unequipped for earning a living after it. Pollard is married to Joyce, patrician to the tips of her fine fingers. But he has other demands on his sympathy--he is half-Irish, one brother-in-law is an Irish revolutionary, later caught and executed, another is a German noble, his father is an extreme Tory M. P., who favors reprisals in Ireland, his father-in-law is an Earl perched on a dizzy pinnacle of aristocracy, his brother, a Black and Tan, is shot by a sniper. Furthermore, Bertram Pollard has an uncommonly soft heart. He can no more hate and despise the " mob" with whom he fought in France than he can turn his back on his Tory connections. So he goes striding disconsolately down the middle of the road, trying to be tolerant, taking no sides, finding it "all very difficult." His child is stillborn. No link remains between himself and his wife, who betakes herself to rather frenzied merriment with the idlers whom he hates. When he refuses a job as Deputy Director for the South Coast, because he sees the home defense force as no more than an instrument of capitalistic tyranny, Joyce calls him a traitor and leaves him in disgust. The disgust is largely mutual. Bertram goes on a tour through Europe--representing a liberal weekly--and the plot stands still for a good many pages of observation. Further developments are an attack of typhus for Bertram, the convenient death of the man whom Joyce had come to love and he to hate, and a sweetly satisfactory ending. Joyce comes back to him, unwarrantably penitent, and they start off on a thoroughly unlikely new life. The Significance. The real hero is not Pollard, but the map of Europe. The result is a bird's-eye view of after-war conditions for those who like their news heavily sugared down with human interest. On every other page the author's heart can be seen cracking. He is a little over-sentimental, a little over-pessimistic about Europe. He loves his fellow-man with a consuming devotion. He is almost incoherent in his eagerness to tell the world what is the matter with it and to beg it to do something about itself.

The Critics. The critical reception of The Middle of the Road has been unenthusiastic, but, in general, favorable. Its defects are generally recognized as those of its unquestioned qualities. There is every likelihood of its wide popularity. The Author. Sir Philip Gibbs is an English journalist and novelist. His journalistic career began at the age of 21 when he became one of the editors of Cassell & Co. He is married and has one son. Cosmo Hamilton is his brother. Among publications, he has been connected with the Daily Mail, the Daily Chronicle, the Tribune. During the war he was a correspondent, with, at various times, the Bulgarian, French, English, Belgian, and British Armies. Since 1921 he has been editor of the English Review of Reviews. His home is in London. His reputation was made by his war books-- The Way to Victory, Days of Glory, Now It Can Be Told, More That Must Be Told.

Men Behind Pens

What Color are Your Favorite

Author's Pajamas? Lewis St. Clair, popular novelist, arose from his perfumed couch, par took of a frugal breakfast of spaghetti and vodka, and stepped out into the glare of his prominence. His 5,000,000 readers, of varying sexes and doubtful ages, gave little excited shivers and trained their opera glasses immediately upon him. For it is a characteristic of all readers that they would rather see an author than read another of his books. They would give ten times the price of his complete works to know that he parts his left eye-brow in the middle. What reader does not find new zest in the works of James Branch Cabell, after learning that that urbane satir ist does most of his writing at night, is proud of his distinguished ancestry, and boasts a highly protective spouse? Or in those of Joseph Hergesheimer after being told for the first time that he began life as a student of painting, lavished a for tune on a few exuberant weeks in Venice, and is a discerning judge of cocktails, tobacco, fabrics? Or in those of Hugh Walpole, when they discover that he is a genial and witty Englishman, with a pair of glasses on his nose and an admiration for Amer ica in general and for Jurgen and Seventh Heaven in particular? Reading a novel is, after all, like being told a story, except that you cannot see the teller. It is like a telephone conversation, only more so. It works both ways. Every thing you learn about the man will explain something in the work, while from every line he writes may be deduced some new and bigger and better repression in his private life. If you find an incident in his latest thriller about the horrible mur der of a mother by her son, it may be inferred that the writer's boyhood was made difficult for him by maternal dictatorship. If, on the other hand, someone tells you an anecdote about a youthful episode with a re versed hairbrush, how much more easily will you understand the imagined matricide when you come upon it. The whole thing, in short, boils down to the fairly obvious fact that the author and his work are one and inseparable.

*"The Middle of the Road." Philip Gibbs. Doran ($2.00.)