A Formalist

Critic Boyd is too Sensitive to Be Earnest in Public

The Book. Portrait painting is distinctly not among the lively arts. Wherefore it is not profitable in the U. S. nowadays. But even scholars and gentlemen prefer to have their books sell. Wherefore Mr. Ernest Boyd, though he has called his new book Portraits, has not been indulging solely in profitless portraiture. He has also, and more often, been cocking a sharpish eye, flicking a sharpish pen and dashing off a row of caricatures as lively as ever you please.

The entire collection is hung under two general placards, Imaginary and Real. In the first row, all of them caricatures, hang sundry types of mankind which it has been Mr. Boyd's fortune to encounter or divine--Aesthete: Model 1924, A Literary Lady, A Literary Enthusiast, A Critic, A Liberal, A Synthetic Gael, The second row is subplacarded Impressions--brief sketches of Cabell, Hergesheimer, G. B. Shaw and others; and Close-Ups --the big pieces of the exhibit, presenting among others George Jean Nathan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Moore and Mr. Boyd's countrymen --Yeats, Stephens and George W. Russell. These latter are the proper portraits of the exhibition, the "serious" work.

Not that Mr. Boyd is ever actually serious. He is at once too sensitive and too self-assured to become earnest in public. His concern with men is not vicarious. It is the concern of a formalist who takes you among men to show you the shapes of their minds, their ideas, their words and how they use them, their manners and how men are revealed therein. Being vigorous and Irish, he walks close beside you, pointing here, there, with nervous, witty gusto. Being excessively sensitive and shy, he hides himself behind a mask of erudite satire whenever he is the least suspicious that your attention is not riveted on something or some one other than himself. Or, being enormously proud of this mask, which is really most impressive, he puts it on just for the secret sport of being pompous.

His sportive pomposity amuses Mr. Boyd enormously. Most of the time it amuses the reader. His greatest delight and accomplishment is punning in phrases, giving a clever twist to another's epigram, or setting, in the midst of an immaculate sentence, some rich gem of slang. Occasionally his erudition waxes into windy verbosity, but not for long. Soon there will come a forthright shaft of sarcasm, or a quotation, such as Yeats' remark about George Moore: "What a pity Moore never had a love affair with a lady--always with women of his own class!"

The Significance. The most notable of the caricatures, Aesthete: Model 1924, first published in the maiden issue of The American Mercury, gave Mr. Boyd the intense satisfaction of stirring to obscene and frenzied anger a whole Greenwich Village nestful of half-baked literati whose baseless pretensions to significance it is Mr. Boyd's spirited but impersonal mission in life to deny. The Yeats, Moore and Stephens portraits, while of small dimensions, are of a purity which few contemporary critics could well equal. Add to these considerations the facts that Mr. Boyd is the thorough master of several languages, both dead and alive; that he is as industrious as he is accomplished; that his admirations, while far fewer, are no less fine than his contempts-- and it would seem a fortunate thing for American letters that he is on the contemporary scene.

The Author. Born in 1887, privately educated at his birthplace, Dublin, Ernest Boyd had no large part in the Irish literary renaissance but came well under its influence. He was on the editorial staff of the Irish Times for three years, married in 1913 (an able Frenchwoman) and entered the British Consular Service. After moving from Baltimore to Barcelona to Copenhagen, he returned to the U. S. in 1920, having vigorously continued his literary studies the while. Of late years, besides his omnivorous reading and a steady stream of magazine articles, book reviews and advice to Publisher Alfred A. Knopf on European literature, he has found time to complete an 18-volume translation of DeMaupassant.

He looks like an understudy for Anton Lang, chief actor of the Oberammergau Passion Players; he hates the country "except as medicine"; loves crowds; is to be seen nearly every afternoon striding spiritedly up Fifth Avenue, Manhattan.

Muscle

THE ROUGHNECK--Robert W. Service--Barse and Hopkins ($2.00). " 'Fire, damn you.' . . . 'Hurry,' she cried to the policeman, 'Get help! He's sinking!' . . . 'Hell,' said Jones. Then he cornered Arootoo! . . ." Such statements, several to the page, enlighten this novel by Robert W. Service, loud versifier. The narrative concerns one Jerry Delane, whose career as a respectable member of society is cut short by an unjust imprisonment for safecracking. He becomes a pug, a hobo, a beachcomber, breaks noses in Frisco, hearts in Papeete. All these things Mr. Service has himself experienced; he also was once a reporter--doubtless a good one. In this book he has written a thrilling news-story.

Mind

THE SEVEN SLEEPERS--Francis Beeding--Little, Brown ($2.00). As big as a Chinese laundry ticket and half as legible, a certain piece of paper had some figures on it. It was signed with seven names--the signatures of the seven richest men in Germany. It was an order for the destruction of Europe. Paris betrayed, London falling in flames--that was what that little laundry ticket meant. But because it fell into the hands of Captain Tom Preston, the conspiracy was undone.

Money

THE INEVITABLE MILLIONAIRES--E. Phililps Oppenheim --Little, Brown ($2.00). Life for Stephen and George Henry Underwood was a prolonged struggle against the adversity of success. To these meek brothers their father had left a vast fortune with the instruction that they should "disseminate among their fellow creatures a considerable portion of their income," adding that the art of spending was as difficult as the art of saving. They tried to lose by backing a musical comedy, an open-air theatre, a golf club. Always, miserably, they profited. Mr. Oppenheim-King Spider, spinner of a thousand diabolical detective tales --here chuckles with the reader in an elaborated humorous anecdote, borrrowed from George Barr McCutcheon.*

Albert Bigelow Paine

Fearlessness, Kindliness, Humor

Albert Bigelow Paine has returned from France, where he has spent several years in research work preparatory to writing his new book, now nearly finished, the title of which he does not yet wish to announce. He returned to America to find the Mark Twain autobiography (TIME, Nov. 3), produced under his care, one of the most read and discussed books of "the year. This did not surprise him, for he knows his Mark Twain, and he knows how great a place in the consciousness of our people the great humorist holds.

Mr. Paine's silver-white hair is parted carefully in the middle. His eyes twinkle. His complexion is rosy and his features--especially his nose--are sharp. This is the man who for years was editor of The St. Nicholas League, who has written dozens of books for grown-ups and children, whose first published volume was of poems, in collaboration with his great friend, William Allen White, and called Rhymes by Two Friends.

We were at What Price Glory? and Mr. Paine was finding it moving and tender and humorous, as who does not? We talked of writing, and the friend and biographer of Samuel Clemens proved tolerant, interested in new things, pleased to reminisce of the old. Did he remember Stephen Crane? Indeed he did; in fact, he had reread The Red Badge of Courage within the last month. He remembered Stephen in the days of The Lantern, a literary club in the downtown regions, where Crane and others congregated--Crane pale, nervous, always a good fellow.

The one thing that Mr. Paine could understand least in the habits of some of the new writers was their ability to put things together in such a slapdash fashion. For him, it is necessary to gather material, to digest it, to think about the finished product as a whole. To write a biography is the work of several years, not of a few weeks. He works in the mornings, or walks, or plays pool with the Editor of St. Nicholas: he considers pool his exercise. His reading is done before he sleeps at night and early in the morning. Driving a car he finds impossible in New York City; but in Bronxville, where he lives, he essays it often.

In many ways, those early collaborators, William Allen White and Al- bert Bigelow Paine, are much alike--in their humor, their real sentiment, their kindliness, their fearlessness. They are of a tradition that persists, in spite of changing habits of mind.

J. F.

*PORTRAITS, REAL AND IMAGINARY--Ernest Boyd--Doran. ($2.00). *Author of Brewster's Millions, published 20 years ago, one of the most popular novels of the period. In it Author McCutcheon employs a plot almost identical to that of Mr. Oppenheim.