Tory Tension

Tory Tension*

The Story. In old New England Chesterbridge, a town of traditional things, the Nevilles spoke only to Corseys, and Corseys were snubbers of kings.

John Corsey grew up the tensest little aristocrat of all, with passions to match his principles; to assault them; never to bend them, but eventually to break them, and break him. He was the kind of little boy who hides the humiliation of undeserved punishment. As a young man he seared in fire the hand with which he struck his friend. He rode at perilous water-jumps because he was afraid of them. He quit law because he could not find in it a way to make the world finer.

When he found Nina Michaud, she fulfilled his deepest nature, gave him freely a rich love that was a whole way of life. But his ancestors poisoned his happiness. The more Nina was his, the less inclined he was to introduce her to his mother. The old Corsey servants were enough to remind him that she was only a poor artist's daughter, that she lived in the wrong part of town, that Cor seys had never paraded -- never thought of marrying! -- their mistresses.

He was relieved when she went away -- and stricken spiritually dead when, after he had married Mildred Ashley, he learned that Nina had gone away to bear his son. By then his marriage was a failure, though he did not know that it failed because he would have been revolted to find in a fellow aristocrat like Mildred the passion he sought in life. And by then Mildred too was carrying a son of his. They had to stay married.

And they stayed unfulfilled. Their son, Rush Corsey, was their one joint achievement and salvation, but the War took him. They both tried infidelity, but it was futile. John could not bring himself to it; what he needed was a life not a liaison. And Mildred soon lost her lover by having, in her honesty, to tell him she did not respect him.

When Nina Michaud came back to Chesterbridge--brimming with life, a celebrated sculptress, still single, with her grown son--she found them thus: John, the burntout editor of the Times, unbending before the new regime of upstart Jew manufacturers; Mildred, a proud, suffering, spent stranger in his house. John was able to make some amends to Nina. He abandoned his code to the extent of lying to get their Communist son out of jail. But neither Nina nor the boy really needed even that. They were self-sufficient. They loved him, thanked him and took their ways. John accepted an ambassadorship and invited Mildred to go with him, to live out their failure together.

The Significance. Mr. Bullitt's story is too crisp and close-packed for adequate retelling. It is set down with a force, sweep and wine-laden atmosphere quite its own. On these first credentials alone the author passes for as formidable and welcome a newcomer among U.S. novelists as has arrived in many a day-- a writer with the wide stance of the old school, the bold tongue of the new, and the deep, unfaltering insight which is taught in no school but is the birthright of big human historians.

The Author. William Christian Bullitt is a 35-year-old Philadelphian who, after a brilliant career at Yale, reported abroad and at Washington for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. His abilities and connections obtained him a position in the U.S. State Department, which sent him to Paris attached to the Peace Commission. In 1919 he went on a special mission to Russia, causing a diplomatic ruction of international proportions when, upon his return, he divulged various Allied attitudes toward the Soviet regime. He left the State Department under something of a cloud. In 1921 he accepted the post of "managing editor" of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Married, he abides in his native city of brotherly love.

Hesitater

CYNTHIA CODENTRY--Ernest Pascal--Brentano ($2). The psychological network that entangles Cynthia Codentry and causes her retreat from metropolitan philanderings to the dumb worship of Dirt-Farmer Swedge of Long Island, all unravels to the old copybook line about him who hesitates. In his wisdom and mercy, Author Pascal makes manifest some reasons for Cynthia's hesitations -- unnatural home life with her divorced actor-father; the enervating effect of life among rich school girls; a sophisticated girl's natural fear of being prematurely pigeonholed by life. But these extenuations do not suffice to save Cynthia from standing indicted for modernity's most prevalent shortcoming: emotional anemia induced by self-seeking and self-indulgence. The book is far too finely executed to be referred to solely as a moral essay. It is an intricate story sensitively told. Yet many readers will bethink themselves of many Cynthias and wonder if it is too late, or just timely, to pass the book along.

Wodehumor

HE RATHER ENJOYED IT--P. G. Wodehouse--Doran ($2). This is one of those books which, if read in a club car or dentist's waiting room, will cause people to glare at you, pretend to stare out the window and finally move away. Readers realizing that private mirth is a public nuisance will, unless malicious, arrange to meet Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge in some secluded spot. He is a rather large, angular young man with a napping yellow mackintosh, a piercing eye, a jumpy back collar-button and no economic roots in society save vigorous tendrils of loquacity with which he attaches, from dismayed friends, the trifling bits of capital necessary to promote such glittering projects as a trick-dog college; a serious-minded fistic behemoth; the abduction and restoration of his future wife's aunt's parrot; an occasional square meal. The Wodehumorous idiom that created Jeeves, Psmith and their fellows is more agile than ever. It teeters, like a clown on stacked tables, atop absurdities whose sickening crash never comes. It rides the handlebars of logic backwards, reaching its points with convulsing speed and accuracy. It convinces you that Funnyman Wodehouse must be the world's most amusing conversationalist or its sourest nervous wreck.

Nose

GANDLE FOLLOWS HIS NOSE--Heywood Broun--Boni, Liveright ($1.50). The organ that Colyumist Broun ("It Seems to Me" in the New York World) has constructed for Bunny Gandle has the color of health, no really bad snuffling habits, a humble bend rather than a priggish tilt, and a sprinkling of fairly honest freckles. It leads its possessor through a life-fantasy braver than most -- through a youth's magic-lantern illusions, a young man's dragons, a grown man's gods and battles, an aging man's dead gods and vainglory, to a thoroughly egotistical death. But likable though he is. Gandle is dawdling. His nose, though appealing, is so snub that it is difficult for any one else to follow. Fantasies are fantasies, and lots of fun, too, making people guess their meaning, if any. But Colyumist Broun too often falls between the stools of sense and sensibility. He leaves one wondering whether he himself is really a brave, humble, big-hearted man who refuses to relinquish youth's bright ideals, or an overgrown boy in rompers trying to gambol like Mr. James Branch Cabell.

Naturalist

JUNGLE JOE--Clarence Hawkes--Lothrop, Lee & Shepard ($1.50). Unfortunate the boy or girl who grows up, or has grown up, without reading about Shovelhorns, the moose monarch; Shaggycoat, the astute beaver; Black Bruin, the genial bear, and a score of other wild personages whose biographies have been set down by the typewriter of painstaking Clarence Hawkes.

Jungle Joe now joins their company, a youthful elephant captured with 55 of his elders and betters in a drive on the Malay Peninsula. He is brought over the oceans to Madison Square Garden; shipped across the continent with a big circus to winter quarters in Hollywood, and then back again to grace the zoo of a small New England city.

Joe's trainer and "brother," a Malay lad named Ali, is with him through thick and thin, from the night the bellowing tuskers mill and trample in their first stockade after crushing the life out of Ali's father. Together the two weather a Pacific typhoon; a plunge from a railroad trestle in their boxcar; a 100-mile race against an Arab horse; a pulling-match with four draft horses; a cinema tiger-hunt that turns serious.

The Author. Born in Goshen, Mass., 46 years ago, Clarence Hawkes lost a leg at the age of nine and, four years later, both eyes. Afield to try a new gun, the boy strayed from his father, stumbled in swampy land, discharged his weapon into his own face and had to struggle two miles to the highway alone.

He spent five years at the Perkins Institute, Boston, where he was Helen Keller's contemporary and friend. Casting about for an occupation, he tried music, piano-tuning, chair-caning, but resolved finally upon lecturing and poetry. Recognition was slow. He once received $1.65 for a talk delivered to 13 people. His poem, "How Massa Linkum Came," later a popular favorite, was refused by 17 editors before the Springfield Republican accepted it.

In 1899 he married Bessie Bell, a Hadley (Mass.) girl, who had illustrated his first book of verse. A volume of stories, Master Frisky, woven about their pet collie, was well received and the blind man began to go back into the bright memories of a boyhood spent in woods and fields for the material of eight books of nature lore. Later he prepared animal stories by collecting and having his wife read him exhaustive data on the country and creature he wanted to write about. He wrote of bison, wolves, wild horses, reindeer, moose, bear, beaver. He laid his scenes in Kentucky, Alaska, France, Baffin Land, Norway, New Brunswick, the Adirondacks, the Rockies, the prairies. His literary activities have been incessant and of great variety. But among two score titles, the best are those on wild life.

His writing reflects the true instinct and feeling of a born naturalist, and he has long been accepted as the peer of men like Ernest Thompson Seton and the late Jack London. Acclaim has come not only from naturalists but-- much more important--from hosts of readers who know what's what about storytelling. That celebrated field naturalist, Director William T. Hornaday of the New York Zoological Park, has paid tribute to Mr. Hawkes' "marvelous fidelity" in describing the sunlit world he knew so briefly and in supplementing (as all good nature writing must be supplemented) with lore from trappers, hunters, birdmen, trainers. For imparting personality to his animal characters, he is another Kipling, though without that writer's fanciful propensity for endowing beasts with unscientific abilities.

Like many another seemingly handicapped man, Author Hawkes says: "I don't do anything differently from anyone else." Fishing is his great recreation, and his acute hearing has made him a delighted auditor at football and baseball sidelines. On the occasion of Hadley's 250th anniversary parade, he designed 30 floats, working out color schemes with his wife's aid. A radio enthusiast, he hopes soon to have broadcast to his 100,000 fellow blind people in the U. S., his autobiography, Hitting the Dark Trail.

It may be true that Author Hawkes does as others do, but not all do as he does. Not all have overcome a like amount of difficulty. Not all have a quiet country house easily distinguishable to its many visitors by flocks of wild birds that refuse to leave the vicinity, blow, hail and snow as it may Not all, living in a dark world the size of a haycock, have led thousand into the wide light world of all-outdoors.

Burnt Husband

AFTER NOON--Susan Ertz--Appleton ($2). A burnt husband shuns the altar. Charles Lester, left with vivid twin daughters by a flighty runaway wife, guards his British independence, his tolerance and intelligence from further exposure. But an American widow's frank piquancy is too much for him. He marries her, and when she really learns that clinging-vine love is not for folk walking erect in the afternoon of life, they enter upon a happy ever-after. It is a cool, delightful study in mature emotions from the poised pen of the author of Nina and Madame Claire.

ALERT READERS --are not permitting the season to slip by without having read, or planned to read, books designated by the best current criticism as:

Rich Writing

Spanish Bayonet--Stephen Vincent Benet ($2). Romance and deviltry on an indigo plantation in 18th Century Florida.

Black Harvest--Ida A.R. Wylie ($2). A powerful grotesque in the occupied Rhineland.

It's Not Done--William C. Bullitt ($2). Reviewed in this issue.

Afternoon--Susan Ertz ($2). Reviewed in this issue.

Lolly Willowes--Sylvia Townsend Warner ($2). A decayed gentlewoman's discovery of Satan.

Light and Pleasant

The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-65 (Edited by Alexander Blacker Kerr)-- Cleone Knox ($2.50). A mettlesome Irish nymph's intimacies.

All the Sad Young Men--F. Scott Fitzgerald ($2). Stories of resignation on this side of paradise.

The High Adventure--Jeffery Farnol ($2). The modern Dumas-Dickens at his buoyant best.

The facilities of TIME'S book department are at its readers' disposal. To order the above, or any other books, inclose a check or cash with a note to the Book Editor making plain to whom you wish your purchases sent.

*IT'S NOT DONE--William C. Bullitt--Harcourt Bract ($2).