Hail Storm

MOTHER AND SON--Remain Holland (translated by Van Wyck Brooks)-- Henry Holt ($2.50). "They came there, they set fire to everything. . . . We ran away. Whenever we stopped, we could hear their feet galloping behind us. They were coming like a steam roller, the whole sky was black with them. Like a hail storm coming up. . . . We ran and ran." To this, the way people scampered away from the terror of the German invasion, Author Rolland, pacifist, finds a parallel in the way people let themselves be driven by the hail storm of their emotions.

He makes images of the War in the minds of his characters, Annette, Sylvie, Marc, Germain. "War could not frighten Annette. 'Everything is war,' she thought, 'war under a mask ... I am not afraid to meet you face to face.'" She finds in 1914 that the crisis she must meet is complicated by the fact that Marc, her illegitimate son, is old enough not to feel the need for maternal intimacy. She goes away from Paris to teach in a country academy, leaving Marc in the city with her sister, Sylvie. She becomes involved in a friendship between Germain de Chavannes and a young German prisoner. At great risk, she unites these two, helping the German to escape to Switzerland. In so doing she increases the hostility between herself and her son. In the end she succeeds in making him understand her position. Marc goes to see his father, detests him, comes back to Annette.

The Soul Enchanted, a tetralogy of which this is Volume III, is author Rolland's effort to study a woman as he studied a man in his ten-volume Jean-Christophe. In Annette and Sylvie (Vol. I), the heroine, Annette, has her illegitimate son by Roger Brissot. In Summer (VoL II) she continues her emotional development, with three men, none of whom is quite the right one. Presumably, happiness awaits her in Vol. IV, now being prepared. Author Rolland, feminist as well as pacifist, is anxious to make Annette self-sufficient, Woman triumphant. With his gathering years, however, his writing shows a less continuous alertness to the boundary which divides emotion from sentimentality

The Author. An intense idealist Remain Rolland retired from gay Paris to austere seclusion when his early marriage ended disastrously. He compiled biographies of famous men, a history of opera, novels, plays, screeds on pacifism. In 1914 he appeared in Geneva to work for the Red Cross, to enrage "La Patrie" by excoriating "La guerre" in open letters to other pacifists. Still, at 61, a flayer of warriors, he includes a savage portrait of "Tiger" Clemenceau in Mother and Son.

Clown

THE BEHIND LEGS OF THE 'ORSE

Ellis Parker Butler--Houghton

Mifflin ($2). In all Author Butler's stories, the same character appears, a congenital clown less dapper, less hilarious, but more flexible and homely than Charlie Chaplin, capering and shuffling through brief roles. In The Behind Legs Of The 'Orse he is a pathecomic little Frenchy, an actor who has learned all about percherons and cab-hacks so that he may bring a higher art to his impersonation of the hindquarters of a vaudeville turn, and who learns his ineptitude by seeing himself in the movies. In Red Sand and Pickety Rough, he is a longshoreman who has written 17 volumes of local information with which to answer all the questions visitors might ask him if he satisfied his ambition to be president of the town council. In other stories he is a young lover, a little boy, a king who gives up fighting to go trout fishing. The role varies in everything except the appeal which Mr. Butler, onetime head of the Authors' League, has been able to impart to all his 27 works, including the famed Pigs is Pigs (1906).

Springboard

SPRINGBOARD--Robert Wolf -- A. & C. Boni ($2). College youths planning to bestow their autobiographies on the world should read this first novel. It might persuade them to stay their hands, like Mr. Wolf, until twelve years after graduation. Brought up in Chicago and Cleveland, then exposed to Harvard, the War, Cambridge, editorial work on the Freeman, and marriage (to able Writer Genevieve Taggard), Author Wolf now has perspective on sensitive adolescence; fairness toward well-meaning, well-to-do parents; moderation about Liberal doctrines. Also he has had time to learn to write with delicate restraint and a high degree of accurate humanity. Reviewers are calling the progress of Brian Hart the most notable portrait of a young man since This Side of Paradise (1920) by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.