What's Wrong with the World?
Gold--
What's Wrong with the World?
The Story. The scene is Vienna; the first part of the book describes certain incredibly unpleasant people in their unhappy youth about the year 1881, and the second in their even more unhappy age about the year 1921.
Ulrika Woytich, a young woman with an irresistible personality, a consuming ambition and a total lack of scruples, comes up to Vienna "on the make." It is her intention to windlass the family fortune out of a miserly and almost--not quite--inhuman old uncle who has previously cheated her father and would apparently prefer to see her starve to death. It is in the midst of this undertaking, however, that accident opens a more brilliant prospect. The family of Helmut Mylius, a curio dealer, has been kept by him in a state of semi-starvation, shabbiness and sullen despair on the plea of extreme poverty. Ulrika discovers that Mylius is in reality a multi-millionaire who has kept his fortune secret out of his excessive miserliness. She brilliantly inserts herself into the bosom of the family, makes herself dominant in the household, opens its eyes to the truth, and encourages it in a reckless extravagance which finally breaks and kills old Mylius.
Ulrika piles up a fortune on commissions out of the general flood of money, after she has thoroughly demoralized the children--the only son develops into a degenerate--and brought the rest of her own family and friends to feed at the trough. Only one daughter, Josephine Mylius, withstands the influence, and a battle ensues between the wicked, but clever, and the good, but dumb, which concludes at the end of Part I with the defeat of Josephine. She is unable, in a world wholly full of rottenness and decay, to find her own feet; and Ulrika achieves her most brilliant success in marrying her off against her will to a clever and unscrupulous scoundrel who uses Josephine's millions to achieve a great position in a sham world.
Forty years later the same battle is renewed. Josephine's life has been ruined, although she is the wealthy widow of a man who had become a Baron and died at the height of his glory. Ulrika's life has simply been lived--she has had a good time, but it is over, and she has retired to her country house to hoard, with what is apparently a congenial avariciousness among Viennese, the fortune she has amassed. And then the author introduces the extraordinarily beautiful, self-possessed and unspotted grandchild of Josephine. The two women fight for her and Josephine wins.
The Significance. In Gold, Mr. Wassermann pursues, in that large, leisurely and intensely depressing manner which the Germans have made their own, an unrelieved essay on social decadence. The book is one more powerful and pessimistic description of the kind of society which produced the War--and judging by the observed results it is difficult to say that the descriptions have been overdone. It was, as Mr. Wassermann sees it, a society involved in the dry rot of overcivilization, going rapidly down "the great slide" because of a great decay. The translator's title is unnecessarily stressing the obvious when it insists that the book is about money--but more accurately it is about greed--greed for money and for other things as well. Wassermann's world is diseased by greed for sensation, for life, for security.
The Author. Jacob Wassermann, Austrian, of poor parentage, with no school education, began his literary career in the period when realism and naturalism were rampant. Says he: "Of my own life there is little to tell. It is to be found in my writings and can be easily read there." He is the author of some 20 novels. The World's Illusion (written during the War) and The Goose Man have been translated into English.
New Books
The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:
ANDORRA--Isabelle Satidy--Houghton ($2.00). This translation from the French has caught the rugged sweep of the original, in its handling of the almost Russian conception of the eternal inarticulate tragedy of the peasant. It is a dramatic tale of the wild Andorran mountains--fierce, primitive religious little country dropped down between France and ardent Spain, and remaining through the centuries untouched by the growing modernity of either. There are some poetically descriptive passages, such as: "Andorran nights, august, solemn, imperial, that for ten centuries have not fallen upon the misery of a single battlefield; nights whose serenity lies like fleece upon the naked souls of unhappy men."
THE HOME-MAKER--Dorothy Can-field--Harcourt--$2.00). Eva starts out on Page One energetically scrubbing grease spots off the kitchen floor and worrying the life out of her husband and three children. She ends up as a serene and successful saleslady in a cloak-and-suit department, while her husband, being poetically inclined, has taken over the job of bringing up the children. The moral seems to be that woman's place is not always in the home. One would have thought that axiomatic by now. A very real and sympathetic insight into the psychology of childhood lifts this story above the commonplace and makes of it that dubious but doubtless necessary creation, a "book with a message."
THE CREATIVE LIFE--Ludwig Lewisohn--Bom, Liveright ($2.50). Mr. Lewisohn is that rarity among writers, the iconoclast who can build up beauty to more than fill the place of what he tears down. These essays are his impassioned defence of Art and artists-- his preaching-in-the-wilderness against the sin of blind conformity to the herd. Against a rich background of literary allusion he defends that creative freedom which, mercifully blinded to the judgments of the world, has given us our Shelleys, Poes, Nietzsches and Goethes--more the pity that in our age they should need defence! His thesis is that to fetter this freedom with the bonds of convention or custom is to stifle the genius which is the artist, in toto--and he proves it with every weapon at his command, wielding the bright sword of eloquence and irony and beauty and truth. It is not easily read--one feels an almost physical stimulation in plumbing the depth of his thought--but it more than repays the reading.
Padraic Colum
"The Colors and the Sounds of Words"
The Irish artistic immigrants in America are many--and it is astonishing how quickly they become acclimated. Take Ernest Boyd, for example, whose literary influence has caused no mean flutter in American criticism, or the Hacketts, or John Butler Yeats, whose death last year took from us one of the most delightful personalities of Greenwich Village, or Dudley Digges and J. M. Kerrigan, actors both from the Dublin boards. Of all these, the most thoroughly of the spirit and heart of Ireland seems to me to be Padraic Colum himself, looking for all the world like an elf, the best modern writer of fairy stories in my opinion and a poet of eminence, a novelist, an essayist, a playwright.
Colum has a romantic background, a background that is reflected in every word he writes, in the lilt of his voice, in the motions of his hands, in the occasionally fiery manner of his conversation. He was born in the town of Longford, in the Irish midlands, where his father was master of the Workhouse. From earliest childhood, he says, he was interested in wayfarers and vagabonds--and he says to his father's place came all the tramps, ballad-singers and strolling musicians of Middle Ireland. This, and his later life in County Cavan, in a place where there were still traditional singers and traditional story-tellers gave him a grounding in the speech and thoughts of folk writing. At 18 he was a clerk in a railway office. Before twenty, he was writing plays and verse. Among his friends were W. B. Yeats and "A. E." from whom he learned of poetry. The men and women who were building up the Irish Theatre, Willie and Frank Fay, Dudley and Mary Digges, taught him of theatrical matters. It was for them that his first plays were written.
If you like fantasy and words used with a peculiar understanding of their colors and sounds, read The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter or The Girl Who Sat by the Ashes.
This spring Padraic (or Patrick as one might call him if one dared) is at the MacDowell Colony for writers, in Peterboro, N. H. Last year, commissioned by the Hawaiian Government, he studied the folk tales of the island and reproduced them in his fascinating prose. I believe that Colum's residence in America and his fondness for us, has been a precious addition, for more than any other quality, it seems to me, our writers lack the sense of mystic fantasy, of homely beauty, of child-like imagery that this Peter Pan-like Irishman has. J. F.
--GOLD -- Jacob Wassermann -- Harcourt ($2.50).