"Masterson"

"Masterson"*

Here is a novel-reader's novel, splashed with color, with consummate skill laid on. It begins in Abyssinia in afternoons hibiscus-red, rose-pink, iris-purple; in twilights of sapphire-matrix, gold lacquer, saffron fire, blood-scarlet; in sepia shadows of moonlight and, far and far away, star-spangled indigo of the lower sky. There, in a barbaric dawn, John Masterson, a normal middle-aged Englishman, ponders the news that he is heir to a fortune. Only a prayer-got sense of duty persuades him to accept it. Returning to London, he finds his fortune times and times bigger than expected. In fact it is millions and millions of pounds.

"Can," the reader breathlessly wonders, "can any author keep up such a gallop?"

Listen. Before Masterson has had time to buy a decent suit of clothes, the Piccadilly crowd jostles him next to the girl with the sauciest lips, the most bewitching eyes in all the world. And within 24 hours a fashionable stockbroker, seeking Masterson's vast account, invites him to dinner with the woman of those lips, those eyes.

But before the reader can quite be sure that this is all a glorious fiction, the exceedingly rich man marries the lady of desirable beauty and through the iridescent veils of their honeymoon they both come painfully to life, stumble ignorantly into knowledge.

Masterson, in his lovable, dutiful way takes on the responsibilities of a great gentleman. From his stables he sends forth winners. He enters politics, not lightly but dauntlessly, to contest a Communist-infested slum district, which he "almost wins. Reverently, always, he rejoices in the angel, his wife.

Meanwhile, Irene--she of the lips, the eyes--glitters in her uncounted jewels, and wiser men than Masterson perceive that the glitter is not all seraphic. Among them is the stockbroker, Masterson's friend, who used to kiss Irene in her maidenhood, a triviality which she has decided to conceal from Masterson. She regrets, however, lightly, the possibility that he might kiss her again.

Comes terrifically the storm on Masterson's yacht. For one brief hour all his self-doubting and humility are forgotten as he drives his yacht through the deadly seas. Power, command, cunning, endurance are his in the thunder and torrent. Proudly, happily weary, when dawn breaks upon conquered seas, he descends to the cabins. He would go to his wife. Outside her door he finds his Abyssinian servant, crouching, knife in hand.

"Whom wouldst thou slay? Thy master's friend, perchance? Thy master's wife?" asks Masterson. "Nay," says the servant.

"Nay. Not now, Ras. Now that thou art safe, that duty is for thee."

Masterson did not slay either her or him. A knife is clean. She, he told her, was filthy. . . . It was fortunate for Masterson that he did not become a murderer, for a few pages ahead there had been prepared for him another, sweeter woman, in whom at last, as they say in these books, his love-quest was to find harbor.

The Significance. Brilliant Gilbert Frankau, the author, intended, it would seem, to write a novel on a grand scale of deep British significance. Modern English landscape, modern London streets, horse-racing, prizefighting, tea parties, labor strikes, auctions, motoring--the story ventures thrillingly up and down the land. Perhaps most thrilling of all is the politics. No mean orator himself, Mr. Frankau introduces a fascinating Jewish playwright to wax eloquently Tory. Yet, in spite of all this, the author seems to have become so absorbed by John Masterson and his unfortunate bride that as the story proceeds he forgets sociology and all such. The result is simply an unforgettable story of a good man's education in riches, passion, love.

The Author. Gilbert Frankau conducts a political column in a London paper of two million circulation, the Sunday Pictorial. He is "one of the best ten after-dinner speakers in England." But he is primarily an experienced novelist of great technical skill and equally great popularity. Born 42 years ago, he was educated at Eton and later in the trenches. His wife is Aimee, daughter of the late Robert de Burgh.

Minx and Jack-Tar

THE FOURTH QUEEN--Isabel Paterson--Boni, Liveright ($2). Strapping Jack Montague--as virginally bashful a youth as ever scuttled galleons for Queen Elizabeth--looms while setting sail with the English fleet to obliterate the Spanish Armada. Authoress Paterson unsqueamishly relates that soon after embryo sailor Jack left port he "retched up his vitals"--a fair sample of the book's teeming archaisms.

Jack, having butchered seven Spaniards not possessed of gold earrings, splits the eighth with an ax and wrests from his ears the trophy demanded by a pert minx-in-waiting to the Queen, Kate More, "granddaughter of Sir Thomas More."**

Sir Thomas presumably rotates in his sepulchre during a lively scene wherein the Virgin Queen's bailiffs attempt to arrest Jack, knock him senseless, and are then set upon by Kate with such vigor that she is eventually overpowered in a state described as "mother naked."

Despite the title, Queen Elizabeth appears but fitfully in the text--surrounded by a muster roll of courtiers with the subsequently decapitated Essex at the head. The reader is inclined to "retch" at the Queen's paint-plastered face, stinking breath and blackened teeth--since he is never made to feel the rich tide of power that swelled in Bess.

Authoress Paterson proceeds in logical and conscientious style, preferring individually striking incidents to suspense. None should be deceived by the jacket blurb implying that this is a work of 'pure literature."

Panorama

THH GREAT VALLEY--Mary Johnston--Little, Brown ($2). Here is one of the biggest canvases of the year, a high and deep wilderness panorama, the Great Valley or Shenando Country--New Virginia, as they called it, whither John Selkirk came with his family to have the God of his Scotch fathers in peace. Historical fidelity and great narrative sweep are executive abilities of the author, who came to fame in 1900 with To Have and to Hold, and last year scored with another novel of early Virginia, The Slave Ship.

She reproduces the jolt and creaking of covered wagons carrying newcomers to the dangerous outposts of civilization; the ring of ax-bits in virgin timber; the dew and smells and fierce winters of country untrod by white feet until in 1715 Governor Spotswood stood on the Blue Ridge and looked off for miles and miles, seeking a barrier to close the colonies back door to the French. By John Selkirk's time, 1735, the Shawnee and Cherokee war bands had been driven west out of the Shenando, over the Endless or Allegheny Mountains; but within in his time they crept back, armed with French rifles, to bleat like lost sheep at a clearing's edge, snipe the deceived settler; stab and scalp him, burn his cabin, carry off his women and children; then roam and lurk and wait for more revenge. A moving narrative winds through the big picture--how John Selkirk's daughter went on still farther west, beyond the Great Valley, as next generation was bound to do, and the next, until white men understood the broad continent they were conquering, the continent that was making them into a new race.

NON-FICTION

Main Street Extended***

By publishing acumen a formidable pair of twins, originally Siamese, has been rudely torn asunder yet without great hurt to either. The first, as sensational as its title implies, still should find its way to every flat-topped rampart of Big Business and to the cluttered professorial desk, as well as to Red dens. It tells in figures the story of America's transition from post-Civil-War debtor nation to its present role of International Moneybags.

Dollar Diplomacy is a cool ana evidently adequate study of the camp-following and dirty-work attendant upon Main Street's overflow into all parts of the world, especially Latin America. It poses the sociological question: will backward nations develop their genius the more quickly if flooded with tractors and safety razors? The political question: how intimately associated are foreign investments and foreign revolutions? How big is the new American Empire? Is it missionaries, trading posts, gunboats, "spheres of influence," international broils? Or is it a Beneficent Main Street Girdling the Heathen World?

Author Robert W. Dunn is a Yale-bred member of the Workers' Party who has studied Communism on its native Russian tundra, and only last month had to be bailed out of duress vile in New Jersey for his participation in the Passaic garment-makers' strike. He collaborated with one Adrian Richt, German-Spanish statistician lately expelled from New York University for his refusal to submit to military training.

Author Nearing, widely known as a gently but firmly radical sociologist, a lecturer at the Rand School (Manhattan), is regarded by many as a U. S. counterpart of Bertrand Russell. Author Freeman, once publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union (defender of Scopes, Countess Cathcart, Mencken et al), is an editor of the New Masses (TIME, April 26).

Hoosier Briefs

THE HOME TOWN MIND--Duncan Aikman--Minion, Balch ($2.50). A series of Americana, earnest yet merry, biting yet full of human sympathy, these essays are good reading. They maintain--among a variety of briefs--that the_ encrusted home-town mind is driving its best sons to the metropolitan seats of disintegration; that U. S. journalism is but the cowardly nameless child of Greeley, Raymond, Watterson and their peers, an overgrown lout whose one desire is to sell his papers and buy lollipops; that Babbitt talks little and knows less about politics; that free speech is on the run and badly out of breath. . . . Duncan, Aikman is another of that forthright, well-spoken tribe, the Hoosiers of Indiana.

* MASTERSON--Gilbert Frankau--Harper ($2).

** Famed author of Utopia, Lord Chancellor of England, lawyer, wit, scholar, friend of Holbein, executed on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1535, beatified by Leo XIII in 1886.

*** AMERICAN FOREIGN INVESTMENTS--Robert W. Dunn--Viking (55).

DOLLAR DIPLOMACY--Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman--Viking (S:2.50).