NON-FICTION

100 Years Ago

FIGURES OF THE PAST--Josiah Quincy--Little, Brown ($4). These chronicles well bear periodic repub-lication.-Their author was as alert in his late seventies as he had been in his youth when, graduated by Harvard at 19 (class of 1821), he entered the front ranks of military, political and private society in "our somewhat stiff and exclusive city," Boston. He became a mayor of that city, like his father before him and his grandson later, but writing in his age, he found more meat in his youthful journals than in the official acts of his public career. Sunday, Sept. 16, 1821, for instance: "Dr. Porter preached all day. In the evening my father and myself went as usual to [onetime] President Adams's. There we found J. Q. Adams, and my father had a long discussion with the President and his son upon the hopes and benefits of peace."

Two years later, less in the role of dutiful son, he goes to "the racecourse on Long Island" (Jamaica) to see the world-challenging steed, Eclipse, race the Southern horse, Sir Henry, over no mere matter of furlongs but three four-mile heats, held half an hour apart. The crowd dwarfs even a modern world series throng, being estimated at 100,000. Shrewd hindsight permits the author to mark the event as foreshadowing a struggle that was to follow it in 40 years. It is the South against the North. Betting and feeling run high. Behind young Quincy sits the illustrious Congressional orator, John Randolph of Roanoke, pouting and shouting with grim intensity. If Sir Henry conquers, John Randolph will go to Europe on his winnings: Eclipse wins. John Randolph and the South are gallantly chagrined. Lafayette, with his Revolution limp, visits Boston and Bunker Hill, erect and vigorous at 70, with a most serviceable brown wig. As Governor Lincoln's aide, young Quincy rides beside the hero through an ovation "by bells, cannon and human lungs" from a transported citizenry which "was then homogeneous and American." In 20 tents on Boston Common, 1,200 persons dine together "like one family."

Colonel Huger of South Carolina tells the story of his attempt at rescuing Lafayette from prison in Austria. Daniel Webster orates, in public and at home. Andrew Jackson bristles into Boston. William Ellery Channing, founder of Unitarianism, preaches a sermon. John Quincy Adams and Josiah Quincy visit Joseph Smith, "the bourgeois Mohammed," at muddy Nauvpo, 111., being privileged to dispute with him in a strange dormitory and to view the prophet's dubious Pharaoh mummies and Mosaic manuscripts, (being told upon leaving, that it is customary to pay old Mother Smith $L25 for this honor).

FICTION

Selective Realism THE NINTH WAVE--Carl Van Doren--Harcourt, Brace ($2). With this, his first novel, Critic Van Doren has executed the suggestion of an admired friend that a novel might be written to show, in a not unusual man, those inner impulses, convictions, resolutions which determined the man's whole outward life; which were the roots of that man's feeling for drama in the world about him. The character's radical moments, said Critic Van Doren's friend, might be very few, but they would be far more revealing than catalogues of foods, dress, habits, minor actions. The writing could still be realistic, but selectively so and shaded by some real thought.

In deference to the notion and allegory of ocean waves rolling ashore in series of nine, Critic Van Doren showed nine uplifted points in the life of a Corn Belt village lad, Kent Morrow, beginning with a boyish horse race and ending with the king wave that brought him, as a small-college professor, the prize for historical research. Intermediate waves bear on their crests the first great expansion of Kent Morrow's intellectual horizon, the mastery of his first burning for a girl, his acceptance of the professorial treadmill, his discovery of love, of the pallor of words, of fatherhood, of loneliness, "the law of life." A tenth wave brings his grandson, starting a new series.

Critic Van Doren's friend should be moved as well as gratified. His theory was a tenuous one to demonstrate but demonstrated it stands, in ten chapters of warm, subtle humanity which are written, of course, beautifully.

Glory, Cockerely Corsair

THREE AMERICAN PLAYS--Max-well Anderson and Laurence Stallings--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). Without the unique physiognomy and other powers of Actor Louis Wolheim, What Price Glory as played by road companies was but a pallid ghost of its real self. Wherefore it is surprising that the authors, realizing this as they must have done, did not incorporate in this volume an in situ photograph of the creator of perhaps the greatest role in modern U. S. drama. The play and its readers deserved it; Actor Wolheim deserved it.

Readers can, however, somewhat remedy the oversight 'by recalling Mr. Wolheim's Captain Flagg as a block-chested hydrant of a man toward whose truculent jaw, from under brows heavy as thunder, spread a short beak beaten flattish and sideways by something even stronger than the oaths that snort out through it. They can conjure up a dirty, malicious, brute-humorous glint in Flagg's eye as he wrangles with Sergeant Quirt over the favor of the barwench Charmaine--the which scarcely yields precedence to the welter of death and mutilation even when dying Marines are lugged into the dugout and Quirt is squeez-sex-motifing the "juice" out of his pretty little "bee-sting."

The other two plays are better reading than seeing. Perhaps that is why their stage runs were brief. They contained too many vivid words, too many strong colors and personalities, to put across the footlights; yet the authors would not whittle their work because they knew it was rich. First Flight is a play about that "red bantam cockerel," Andrew Jackson in his youth. The Buccaneer is the bold, black-headed gentleman corsair, William Morgan, who sacked Panama, was knighted by Charles II. Risk

THE BAD SAMARITAN--Justin Sturm--Harper ($2). This is the not very serious story of a Nebraska farmboy who went to Chicago, strayed into a church, fell in love with a girl getting married there, distinguished himself as a clerk in a green turtleneck sweater, made his fortune, got the girl divorced from her selfish, golf-playing husband and then took her down the street to buy her some marbles. Silly? Yes, intentionally so, and now and then quite clever. The hero, a great fellow for fun and fantasy, encounters big business, supersalesmanship, high society. Amusing? Fairly, but with many long stretches so footless that they are positively embarrassing. Why published? Partly because hulking Author Sturm, lately a building contractor's assistant in (40)

Chicago, was a famed Yale foot bailer only a few years ago and the shock that his friends will nov receive seemed a good literary risk

For Buchanites

THE DANCING FLOOR--Johr Buchan--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50) Folk who last year read John McNab will welcome back that spirited, none too abstemious, salmon-poaching lawyer, Edward Seithern. He is now beheld seeking a heroine on an island in the Greek archipelago, to save her from sacrifice at the hands of peasants in the angry throes of atavistic nature worship. Of course it takes time to get him there from England, and indeed the best chapters are the early ones, wherein Mr. Seithern meets Vernon Mil burne, the hero proper, and hears his strange story: one night every year Vernon Milburne dreams of Something1 approaching him through a long series of rooms, always withholding its final and, Mr. Mil burne feels, its frightful revelation The weaving together of Vernon Milburne and Kore Arabin, tin exotic heroine, is ingenious, romantic but a touch unconvincing. The prospect of a "Seithern series" in what will excite Buchanites, in series to put beside the famed "Mannay series" (of which Green 'mantle was the highwater mark' by this immensely prolific citizen of old Oxford. To his hobbies o: mountaineering, fishing and deer stalking, Romancer Buchan has lately added the "new" psychology.

Mr. Windle

AN OLD MAN'S FOLLY--Floyi Dell--Doran ($2). Old Mr. Windle is a corset salesman in New England. He also has a partnership in a wallpaper business. Once at a milltown picnic, he has been a lover, almost. He spends his benevolent days watching the world, listening to soap-box orator; and lugging under his arm a cop; of Bacon's New Atlantis, which he never reads. He thinks a lo about his lyric Cousin Christopher who died too soon.

Old Mr. Windle greets the Wa with a gust of sudden courage. He himself scrambles up on a soap box, amid cheering Wobblies. The result is prison and a severe cold when the police resort to a fire hose. But it introduces Mr. Windle to the best circles of parlor socialism, where he meets Joe Fore, reporter, and Anne Elizabeth, little blonde priestess of pacifism. In his confused jail delirium, Old Mr. Windle confuses her with his mill town girl and recreates his Cousin Christopher in Joe. He abets free thinking and biology as the two youngsters progress from cool argument to warm embraces. Out side their happiness, he stands as a brave memorial to folk who must live vicariously.

Occasionally microscopic but consistently sure and kind, this human record is enhanced by a cool engaging analysis of the ideal of Pacifism from all those logics viewpoints that jarred so bitterly ten years ago.

*First edition, 1883; second, 1911; third, last fortnight.