Candide Recrudescens*
Pigs, Pocks, Panegyrics
The Story. Peter Pock, Jr., was born in a bed of roses with a silver spoon in his mouth.
His father, a pork-packer, had started life with but a single pig, but so brilliantly had he manipulated that lone porker, that he had at length attained unto dizzying financial plenitude and a mansion on Chicago's Gold Coast. He had, moreover, a passion for cleanliness. In public life, he stood for: "Clean Water Supply (Prohibition!), Clean Education (Paul Revere's Ride!), Clean Literature (Pollyanna!), Clean Minds (belief in the stork!)."
Thus, when the 12-year-old Peter said to his parent one day: "Papa, here is a picture called Immaculate Conception. What is Immaculate Conception?" the elder Pock replied smoothly: "That's the name of the lady, Peter."
Peter grew up, cheerful, well-pursed. He had all but completed his education at the famed Bah-Bah University, when he fell in love with the fair Georgina, butcher's daughter. Peter's stern parent forbade the match, threatened to cut him off with but a single pig. To cure him of his passion, it was decided to ship him off to Paris with his tutor and mentor, one Rufus Gabbe, M.A., Ph.D., panegyrist of Bah-Bah philosophy.
To Paris they went. When Peter had time to spare from his other pursuits, he thought on Georgina and was faithful to her after his fashion.
Came the War. Peter and Gabbe joined the French forces at the front, . where in due course Peter was wounded. In the hospital Georgina (who had conveniently come over as a nurse) consoled him by saying: "War isn't what it used to be. Nowadays you can face the enemy and still get a wound from the rear."
There were gay times in Paris with Georgina after Peter had recovered. He wooed her with champagne and hors d'oeuvres, wanted her to marry him at once; but the thought of that one pig deterred her. She decided it would be too hard upon the pig to have to support them both. So, as a compromise, he bought her a lock bracelet and departed for the front, keeping the key.
From now on, the story runs riot. The War ends, Peter returns home, his father relents, he marries Georgina amid a swirl of roses and Rolls-Royces. But something that (to the reader's slightly puzzled intelligence) seems like an attack of amnesia, causes her to drive off in her new Rolls on their wedding night--while her unsuspecting husband sits by the moonlit lake and meditates, and never misses her till morning.
The rest of the story is a dizzying melange of Peter's wanderings seeking Georgina amid the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Sinn Feiners in Ireland, the Fascisti in Rome, the Ku Kluxers in the U. S. Georgina is continually turning up, conveniently but mysteriously, in the course of his terrestrial ambulations, and ectoplasmically fading from the picture again.
The Significance. In this preposterous extravaganza of modern life, Mr. Cournos has shot his shafts blithely over the whole universe. There is, of course, not much more than a suggestion of the famed original Candide. In fact, the foreword has Candide objecting strenuously to his reincarnation as the son of a pork-packer, Cunegonde worrying about what's going to happen, and Pangloss not quite happy at being made a bootlegger. But this blithe young gravedigger has exhumed their altered corpses with such obvious relish that one has not the heart to quibble with what he has dug up.
The Author. Born at Kiev, Russia, in 1881, John Cournos migrated with his parents to Philadelphia at the age of 10. He was successively factory-hand, newsboy, journalist, author: The Wall, The Mask, Babel. Living now in London, his recreations are: "Reading the Greeks and Elizabethans, watching the folly and wonder of life, playing with pebbles on the beach."
New Books
The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:
ON THE LOT AND OFF--George Randolph Chester--Harper ($2.00). A pleasant picture of the cinema industry as conceived by the average fan. The hero, gifted with a winning smile, infallibility, a flat stomach and gangle shanks, sells his services to "Magnificent Pictures" at an initial salary of one dime per week and progresses in nine years to the dignity of a divorce scandal and his life-long ambition: "Isidor Iskovitch Presents." The story of his rise begins with the assembling of a $10,000-stake from seven Iskovitch uncles blessed with red beards and businesses of the varying styles to be expected from the name, and closes with million-dollar mergers, assisted by the flapper granddaughter of a financial magnate. Izzy marries the flapper, and the villain is shot--anonymously but most satisfactorily--dead. It is an enjoyable story by the late creator of Wallingford and Blackie Daw, but it falls, perhaps, somewhat short of the heights attained by those classic heroes.
THE MIDDLE TWENTIES--John Farrar --Doran ($1.50). Into this slim, trim volume, the editor of The Bookman has packed poems of infinitely varied moods. There are elfinly humorous love lyrics, the brooding sombreness of a group called Portraits, War Women, and even one appalling trifle which concerns itself with a cocktail made by alcoholizing the bodies from Egyptian tombs:
"Plop!--and down you go!
After a cracked-ice shaking,
Into a stiff fat wife
Before a rich fat dinner.
Umm! What a curious flavor!"
THE BLACK HOOD--Thomas Dixon-- Appleton ($2.00). Author Dixon blandly and bravely prefaces his story with the suggestion "to the five million members of the new Ku Klux Klan that they read this book." A tale of the original Klan in the days following the Civil War, when it was ordered dissolved, it breathes all the mysterious and sinister significance of the "Invisible Empire," and swirls the reader along with it under its exciting black hoods and white sheets. It stops by the wayside to terrorize one dark-skinned Julius Caesar, self-styled "Apostle ob Sanotification," known to his rivals as "dat slue-footed hypercrite." But most of the time, horses gallop, blood flows, hero rescues, villain pursues, disguises disguise--all in the author's most approved manner and with the technique developed in his Birth of a Nation (cinematized by Griffith) and The Southerner.
John Trotwood Moore
"Jackson Was the Greatest Man America Has Ever Produced"
There is something overwhelmingly appealing about the old type of southern gentleman. When such a gentleman is a scholar and a politician, the combination is well-nigh irresistible. Such is John Trotwood Moore, delegate from Tennessee to the late Democratic National Convention. He is the author of several novels and many stories of the South. The Bishop of Cottontown is being made into a motion picture by the Metro Co. The Old Cotton Gin is well remembered. Mr. Moore is slender, wiry, fervidly Democratic. His hero is Andrew Jackson (of Tennessee), about whom he has just written a novel. Since I have lately finished collaborating on a play about the same gentleman, I found immediately a common bond.
"You come over to my hotel and I'll show you Jackson's marriage certificate," said Mr. Moore. "Jackson was the greatest man America has ever produced, the greatest President and the greatest General. We need a man like him in the White House today, a man who understands the needs of Labor, a man of the people."
Naturally I made no attempt to discuss politics with Mr. Moore. We had chosen different periods in the life of the fiery President for our efforts, so we could compare notes without coming to blows.
Mr. Moore is one of those picturesque figures that one misses when one stays too close to New York City. Polished, courtly, yet positive, he exudes romance. His very address--Granny White Pike--speaks volumes. He was born at Marion, Ala., in 1858. In 1885, he moved to Tennessee. In 1905, he began to edit his own magazine, Trotwood's Monthly; then he joined Robert Love Taylor and called it The Taylor-Trotwood Magazine (1906-1911). Since 1919 he has been Director of the Tennessee 'State Library of Archives and History. Among those documents to which he has access, he has searched in an effort to reconstruct the character of Jackson. He has found him gruff, tender, the duelist, the fighter with pistol, with sabre and with politician's eloquence; he has found him rough-mannered and sentimental, eager to defend the honor of women, a devoted husband, a sorrowing widower. To me, Jackson represents, as he does to Mr. Moore, something that is very deep in the inheritance of the U. S.--something common and strong. Before Jackson, the Presidents of the U. S. had been aristocrats ; with him, the heart of the U. S. came into its own.
J. F.
* THE NEW CANDIDE--John Cournos--Boni, Liveright ($2.50).