Resurrection

Having elected to resurrect the people who saw the last century out,* Author Beer found that Painter Whistler had cracked out a title for him. "Mauve?" Whistler had mused. "Mauve is just pink trying1 to be purple." "

All summer long," the first chapter proceeds, "Bronson Alcott paced through Concord's placid loveliness, being Bronson Alcott still, still ready to let flow the wondrous volume of his stored inanity on any victim. . . . Louisa May Alcott was famous. Her bones ached; her voice had become hoarse and coarse. . . . She must nurse her mother and pay Pa's debts. . . . Alcott went beaming and rosy in the very best broadcloth and linen to lecture on Duty, Idealism and Emerson. . . . Duty's child was hard at work, writing 'moral pap for the young' in her own phrase, and paralysing a thumb by making three copies of a serial at once. . . . Notices mentioned that Louisa May Alcott was a type of the nation's pure and enlightened womanhood. . . ."

Orators caught up the phrase. From the World's Fair, the stage, current literature, the mouths of suffragettes, Author Beer sweeps together damaging evidence of the rise of the U. S. "Titaness," who now "drifts toward middle age without valour, charm or honor," after inventing "cheap cruelty and low social pressures."

A chapter called "Wasted Land" goes back to the last appearance of the Midwest's last purple people, the Dalton boys of Coffeyville, Kan. ... "A tall, harshly beautiful young man" (W. J. Bryan) comes out of Nebraska to be the Silver Knight; pallid Altgeld governs Illinois; Andrew Carnegie's detectives shoot strikers at Homestead, Pa.; solid Mark Hanna quietly bosses Cleveland; Coxey's army marches. . . . "California fruits and heiresses appeared seasonably in New York and were absorbed," but Frank Norris and Ambrose Bierce are supplied by the same place.

There is a chapter called "Depravity," in which Edgar Saltus hears someone mention Christianity and asks, "Has it appeared in America?" Saltus also called America the hypocrite of nations. . . . Anthony Comstock has only begun to be interesting; about 1895 he attacks dealers exhibiting boys' elastic breech clouts in their store. . . . Explorer Paul Du Chaillu topples backwards down the Brevoort steps upon hearing of a respectable actress. . . . Oscar Wilde, an "ugly lounger with a mouth full of decayed teeth and cheap rings on his hands," is read feverishly in the colleges but talks. host" of scientists and critics; one on U. S. magazines of the day-- mostly phrases they would or would not print; and "Figures of Earth," featuring Richard Harding Davis, young William Allen White, burly Governor Roosevelt, Nigromancer Rudyard Kipling and a number of others that happen into Author Beer's mind. It grows rather disconnected and epigrammatic, like the recital of a winter's scandal by some shrewd old dowager with a needlepoint tongue and fabulous memory. A great many people that are neither visibly here nor prominently there become vividly interesting through sheer garrulity and tart irony. One figure is made to loom, "a cold, ponderous groper," first social analyst and last libertarian, Professor William Graham ["Billy"] Sumner of Yale. Another is paled and diminished--R. L. Stevenson with an "ample, light intelligence" and "the theatrical manners of decayed Calvinism."

The Significance of such writing is about that of a salt gargle. It would make you sick if you swallowed it but small doses sharpen the taste, cleanse the palate of sentimental adhesions. Certain other social historians should read Mr. Beer carefully, especially Mr. Don Seitz whose job on the years 1870-80* is a miserable, lazy waste of good material.

The Author. Thomas Beer was born in Iowa only a year prior to the decade that was later to fascinate him. He brings to his task of recreation an astonishing clarity of presentation, indefatigable scholarship, rare detachment. His meat and drink are "that special kind of unconscious cynicism" which was so much more prevalent 30 years ago than is commonly supposed and which anticipated and evoked the mass "revolt" of today. He is, in short, "a connoisseur of absurdities." Yale taught him letters; Columbia, law. Before this he has published an able life of Novelist Stephen Crane, two novels (The Fair Rewards, Sandoval) and many a short story. A bachelor, he lives at Yonkers, N.Y.

FICTION

Neighborhood Metaphysics

Miss TIVERTON GOES OUT-- Anonymous--Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50). Juliet, the Alice-in-Wonderland member of a parvenu family, blunders through subtle tragedies until the omnipresent influence of next-door Miss Tiverton, the "real thing" personified, aids her sensitiveness to give her that sense of personal reality which is salvation. The flowering of Juliet is accompanied by intimate, memorable portraits: Angela, drifting through life in search of something upon which to "settle"; Leslie, reminiscent of "a whipped puppy and a grocer's assistant in his Sunday best"; Juliet's father who uses "men's words" and hates Miss Tiverton, who has never called. The anonymous author is presumably a charming sensitive lady with no nonsense about her. She understands neighborhood metaphysics. Rowdy

COUNT BRUGA -- Ben Hecht-- Boni & Liveright ($2). Author Hecht is a rowdy. Often he is also a wit; sometimes, a philosopher. He has lavished all three talents on this latest volume, and if you cannot stand rowdies, do not read it. If you can stand them, you are certain to double up now and again over the libidinous antics of Jules Ganz, alias the "Count" (for whom, it is said, Author Hecht's friend and playmate, Poet Maxwell Bodenheim, furnished a vague original).

Count Bruga's tragedy is experiencing crises of incontinence in public or crowded places. Now it is at an occult buffet supper--after stuffing his poet's paunch with other people's helpings, he addresses his advances to his hostess, an elderly madam. He lands in the street. . . . Again, his patron tenders him a banquet. He refuses to join in the consumption of bourgeois food and makes his repast on wine from the highboy. His ejection follows a violent attack of temperament during which bottles crash on servants' skulls and the refectory is strewn with pulverized objets d'art.

*THE MAUVE DECADE--Thomas Beer-Knopf ($3). *THE DREADFUL DECADE--Don C. Seitz-- Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).