Parthenogenesis *

Parthenogenesis*

Feminism, Immaculate Conceptions, Democracy are Rhapsodized and Jolted

The Story. Save for Phaon, a lovechild of 12, and an orphaned girl-baby called Deodata by her poetic foster-mother, the numerous survivors of the wrecked S. S. Cormorant are all mature women. There are an artist, a circus rider, a novelist, a harlot, a U. S. debutante, a doctor, a mystic, a Negress, many miscellaneous. Most are young, most are beautiful, or soon rendered excessively so by life upon the paradisiacal island of their Robinson Crusade. The aging artist, Anni Praechtel, assumes the presidency of the Mother State, which, by shrewd conscription of mental and spiritual resources, soon luxuriates.

In the absence of male society, feverish unrest at times approaching hysteria moves among these healthy females. But the mysterious conception of a child by one ripe and ecstatic ex-servant, followed by a teeming succession of pregnancies among the other women (of equally mysterious causation), calms all and gives rise to a salutary myth about Mukalinda, deity of fertilization, who appears as a brightly burning youth; and to a satisfying religion under a female godhead, Bona Dea.

Each year there is a season of mystical nuptials. The population of He des Dames multiplies apace. With Phaon growing into a handsome youth, and in view of certain semi-authenticated episodes, Anni Prachtel and a few cynics remain dubious of the annual parthenogenesis. But they preserve the myth, and five years after the first crop of childen, the virgin mothers feel so self-sufficient that the disposal of male offsprings is an issue. Some are for Amazonian exposure on the mountains, some for the method that elevates voices and renders docile. Instead, compassion prevailing, an isolation colony, Manland, is formed under Phaon's governance; and here, while the maidens of lie des Dames grow up in an atmosphere of chaste fertility, vestal visions (including a unicorn) and athletic womanhood, the boys become men, taming beasts, hewing forests, building halls and palaces, fortresses and boats.

Twelve male Light-Bearers have been introduced as accessories to the annual ceremony of the Temple Sleep, thitherto participated in only by Mukalinda and his brides. A rebel arises in Manland, demanding shares for him and his wild fellows in the rite. The Light-Bearers themselves are infected with revolt and there is a year when the dedicated maidens have nothing to report of their sleep in the temple save pleasant dreams. The maidens smell fraud and burn the temple, whose flames signal a lusty and welcomed invasion from Manland. In the orgy of innocent rapine and surrender that follows, Phaon is pursued, somewhat to his distaste, by bands of ardent maenads, toward whom he being older has felt somewhat as a father.

With Deodata, now the detached Arachne (weaver) of the society, who is exquisite to behold and like himself a product of the Dark Continent (Europe), he sets sail from He des Dames to seek the high destiny predicted in his horoscope at birth. One of his loveliest daughters pursues him into the very waves, frantically lashing her zebu bull.

The Significance. Here is an Elysian Held of fantasy out of which one will flush any number of gorgeous poetical pheasants, sly ironical foxes, and profoundly philosophical serpents. Shakespeare's Tempest is the most convenient comparison for beauty of writing. Feminism, immaculate conceptions and modern democracies are the chief butts of satire. Such a book has not been written since La Revolte des Anges.

The Author is thought of thus:

"The foremost German poet of the present day."--London Times.

"Now that Ibsen is gone. . .most conspicuous figure in the dramatic world."--Chicago Record-Herald.

"It is as if the comic talents of George Bernard Shaw were combined with the keen tragic sense of John Galsworthy, the easy virtuosity of Pinero and the poetic imagination of Barrie."--(That caustic 100 percenter) H. L. Mencken.

Gerhart Hauptmann was born 63 years ago, son of a hotelkeeper, grandson of a weaver, in Salzbrunn. Germany. He mixed farming and school, until old enough (18) to become a sculptor in the art school at Breslau. He interested himself in the natural sciences and sociology, married wealth and built up a reputation as a dramatist upon plays expressing his revolt against social and artistic conditions in a milito-capitalistic state. The uproar caused by his sententious eloquence paralleled Corneille's presentation of Le Cid in 17th Century Paris, and drew such attention that in 1905 Oxford hailed him as "Doctor" and in 1912 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. More recently he remarried and built a home amid the towering crags of Silesia.

Mr. Glass

Y'UNDERSTAND--Montague Glass --Doubleday, Page ($2.00). Since Abie's Irish Rose stole his long-rumbling thunder, not much has been seen or heard of the author of Potash and Perlmutter. Somehow, the Jews presented in Y'Understand (eight short stories) seem modernized, less Semitic than their forerunners. Perhaps that is mere geography: "Blood Is Redder Than Water" (mistaken identity in a fight over women and a will) transpires at Rockaway Beach, L. I.; "Cousins of Convenience" (a comedy of clothes) hints at the annual hegira to Florida; "Never Begin with Lions" (cinema tribulations) is in Los Angeles. Abe and Mawruss appear at length, however, fond anachronisms in a friendly quarrel over "Keeping Expenses Down."

Mr. Huxley

ALONG THE ROAD--Aldous Huxley--Doran ($2.00). Not a very satisfying book unless you are either a passionate pilgrim or a fervent admirer of the sheer literary skill of slender, drooping, cynical Mr. Huxley. Here he is less cynical than usual, for he is traveling, enjoying himself, not trying particularly to be clever. In Rotterdam, Mantua, Siena, Munich, Monte Carlo, he idly employs his notebook to jot notes which will keep his warm coat of culture sleek and glossy. He takes the usual liberties--writing about his spectacles, the books he takes, Why Not Stay Home, etc.--but still he is Mr. A. Huxley, one of the more intelligent phrasemakers of our time.

Motley

The Publishers Cooperate With the Set-Hunter

Libraries go in motley nowadays. Even if you take their jackets off and abandon alphabetical progression for a color scheme, modern books never give the orderly, formidable effect of grandmother's shelves (in the front parlor), with their 30 brown-backed Dickenses, the dozen buff-and-scarlet George Eliots, the two sizes of Tennyson-- blue octavos, fatter and darker quartos--and the line of grey Jane Austens. In grandmother's day, when book-agents and Santa Claus came around with complete sets, "novels" were confined to "the study" (where one's uncles smoked their cigars) between Dante and Homer book-ends.

Now our novels are in the rooms we live in, and it is the Bulwer-Lyttons, the looming Gibbonses, the dusty dragoons whose company front goes "A to And," "And to Aus," etc., that are relegated elsewhere. Decorators tell you that the broken lines and patchy colors of a shelf full of modern novels furnish a room discreetly. Obviously it is so: there is no feature about them strong enough to detain the eye.

Yet most people have the collector's instinct and delight to place a new Cabell, for instance, beside its chestnut fellows. Four or five red Hardys in a row, with their gold title-plaques, give one, even if he cannot afford the whole set, the sense of having acquired well. The publishers try to be consistent about bindings, and beneath their blaring, jazzy trade-clothes each author's works remain fairly accumulable into sets.

Indeed lately the publishers have found it profitable to put uniforms upon related portions of their heterogeneous output and call these portions "libraries" in themselves. Early and popular was the "Modern Library," recently taken over from Messrs. Boni & Liverignt by a new firm, Modern Library Inc., whose first offering is Jungle Peace by William Beebe. A. A. Knopf's "Blue Jade Library" of colorful rarities is nearly a year old and gleams richly now with The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer. "The Rogues' Library," got out by the Dial Press, began promisingly with The Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs and The Buccaneers by Don C. Seitz; it now includes The Autobiography of a Crook. The Viking Press has started a European Library, with Five Oriental Tales by the Comte de Gobineau, and Strindberg's Confession of a Fool.

And of course re-editions, translations and collected works are al- ways at the disposal of the set-hunter. J.S.M.

*THE ISLAND OP THE GREAT MOTHER-- Gerhart Hauptmann--Viking Press ($2.50).