James Stephens

The Elf Inspects Brobdinag

The author of The Crock of Gold and In the Land of Youth is thoroughly at home in New York City. He would be at home anywhere, in a curious, amused, detached sort of way. They tell of Irish charm. One sees it in varying quantities. James Stephens has more of it in the crook of his little finger than any other Shamrock wearer I have ever met has in his whole carcass. Small, wiry, with an effort almost of crookedness in the bend of his walk, with a face crinkled and traced by the ways of much laughter, he is constantly making his little jokes. Something of the mystic, something of the comedian and a little of the clown, he looks at life with great enthusiasm and tempers that enthusiasm with a wit that is at once tender and ironical!

I have not yet seen Stephens do any of the usual things : reading his poems, or performing in any way before the multitude. I only met him with a couple of his old friends, exchanging yarns of Dublin, listening to Marc Connelly's jokes, repeating the famous parodies of Oliver Gogarty, being distinctly human and entirely at home. He had arrived very late, and it had taken a great deal of shouting out the window to bring him finally to the right door. Traffic in New York puzzles him. He now gets on a street car with an address in his hand and, as he says, "counts". As long as he doesn't cross a bridge, he knows that he isn't too far lost, and is content. He thinks the best prose from the U. S. recently is Don Marquis' great play, The Dark Hours.*

"You have one gorgeous building, anyway," he says, and there is no possibility of reproducing the brogue, or the cadence or the Hit of the voice. "What is he, that big fellow with the gold top?" "They do funny things to you in New York," he goes on. "A man came at me sudden out of a doorway the other day, and he says : 'Have you any use for a lady's necklace ?" Now I didn't know the answer to that, so I looked at him puzzled for a while, then I thought of it. Td rather have pyjamas,' I told him, and he went away." The Irish literary school has its great men: soft-voiced, indefinite Yeats, grandiose and pompous Dunsany, brittle and quarrelsome Shaw, half-mad and experimenting Joyce; but here is a soul that springs from the folkways of the world, to whom all the humdrum affairs of life take on the gold cloaks and the swords of legendry, who sees elves dancing the Woolworth Tower and a mystical little joke making faces from a subway turnstile. A great poet and a great personality. May he stay long and return often. J. F.

*THE DARK Hours--Don Marquis--Double-day, Page ($1.75).