Apple Pie, Red Pepper

The Story is told by a small boy whose name is the book's* title. Because his father is a sot, and he thinks people suspect him of knowing a lot about how Mitch Miller (the subject of a novel Author Masters published in 1920) got killed, Kit O'Brien leaves Petersburg, 111., with two of his friends. Hungry, they steal apple pie. His friends get caught, but Kit proceeds, Huck Finn fashion, down the Illinois River into the Mississippi. There on a houseboat he finds Miss Siddons, an impoverished ac tress with a disfigured face, living with a madman. When Kit dis covers that she too is an outcast from Petersburg, he obligingly takes her back there. Expecting to be arrested for the pie episode, he goes to the house of George Montgomery, who takes him in and hides him. Soon the sheriff comes. In a ludicrous trial, Kit is ac quitted to the great discomfiture of ogreish District Attorney Sprinkle Kit's companions in theft get a pardon from the governor. Miss Siddons' madman reappears and is packed off to the asylum. Miss Siddons has her face fixed, her reputation mends slowly.

The Significance would be greater if Author Masters had not tried to pack so much significance into a brilliantly told, well constructed boy-story. Like red pepper, alle gory should not be sprinkled so thickly that the reader sneezes. Author Masters brings a little too much of the technique of his poetry to novel-writing, but since his poetry is largely grim and biting realism, this treatment does not dam age his work irreparably.

The Author. The shrewd, pitiless accents of Edgar Lee Masters, who was born in Garnett, Kan., in 1869, were heard in Chicago long before he turned professional poet. He was a trial lawyer with side interests in Democratic politics. Writing poetry was another sideline. His friend, Publisher William Marion Reedy of Reedy's Mirror, refused several of his contributions, but accepted from one "Lester Ford" some subjective epitaphs on imaginary dwellers in an imaginary Illinois town called Spoon River. This "joke" was the beginning of the Spoon River Anthology. But before Spoon River waxed famous, Poet Masters adopted another pseudonym, "Elmer Chubb," and contributed to Reedy's Mirror many fine-sounding sonnets chanting the praises of William Jennings Bryan, the Anti-Saloon League and Mary Garden. When critics took the Spoon River Anthology (1915) seriously, Poet Masters began to take himself so; to write with purpose about "the American small town in general." --

Saddest Story

THE GOOD SOLDIER--Ford Madox Ford--A. & C. Boni ($2.50). "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Thus Dowell begins to bound the quadrangle which had for its corners himself, his wife, Edward Ashburnham, Leonora Ashburnham. Nine years before the telling, these four lived at Nauheim so that Florence Dowell and Edward Ashburnham could take the cure. These two now have a liaison. Dowell loses his wife, Ashburnham loses his moral fibre. After Ashburnham's suicide, his wife remarries; after Dowell's wife dies, he wants to marry Nancy, Leonora's ward. Instead, he, a good soldier through much domestic war, watches her go mad.

From the huddled mass of characters and the complicated pattern of the plot, Author Ford draws a strong book; a book close to all married lives. Adeptly following the cumulative, remote method of Joseph Conrad, his collaborator on other novels, he gently penetrates every motive, suggests every emotion.

The Good Soldier is now published for the first time in the U. S. Critics have found it to be Author Ford's most powerful fiction outside his post-War trilogy, Some Do Not, No More Parades, and A Man Could Stand Up.

NON-FICTION

Chopin

The Man sat in front of a piano in Vienna. His narrow dexterous fingers sank into the keys of the instrument as if sowing in neat rows the seed of a miraculous music. Like a galaxy of flowers the notes bloomed invisibly in the close greenhouse air of the concert hall; drifted and swirled like petals under the hot chandeliers. They blew upwards in a fountain of chords; they showered down, fell in a bright silent heap. Listeners cheered.

That was the occasion of Frederic Chopin's first concert. Three years later in Paris, a figure of fashion with white gloves to emphasize his pointed hands, he rode through the Bois de Boulogne in a cabriolet. To late suppers in his rooms, each lady would bring a flower, at the most perfect of which, Chopin, frozen into a temperamental abstraction, would sit for a long time staring.

In a house in Valdemosa he lived with George Sand. She wrote: "It is poetry, it is solitude, it is everything that is most enchanting under the sky; and what sky! what country! We are in a dream of happiness." Chopin wrote: "The three most celebrated doctors of the island came together for a consultation. One sniffed . . . another tapped . . . the third listened while I expectorated. They treated me like an animal, and the first said I would die, the second said I was about to die, the third said I was already dead. But I go on living as I have always lived."

In 1849, in a room through whose wide windows a soft autumn wind stirred the curtains, Frederic Chopin lay on his bed and coughed. Friends gathered to gaze at his haggard face, to watch him, still clinging to empty and conscious eccentricities, scribble notes: "As this earth will smother me, I conjure you to have my body opened so I may not be buried alive."

The Book* aims, like Andre Maurois' Ariel, and by the same means, to give genius a human shape. In a theatrical but none the less effective style it outlines the life of a delicate young man of extreme refinement, attending rather to the dates on which he commenced his amours than to those on which he composed his mazurkas. Nothing is added to biographical data. Persons who liked the De Pourtales life of Franz Liszt, L'Homme d'Amour (TIME, Jan. 31), may find in this a less rhapsodic concentration, a more balanced treatment.

Polite Facts

THE NATURE OF MAN--George A. Dorsey--Harper ($1). In a short preface to this small book, Author Dorsey, of Why We Behave Like Human Beings, says: "This book . . . aims especially to introduce you to the important known facts of human nature and to such biologic hypotheses as can be made to work." Concerned only with the facts of the case, Author Dorsey politely performs introductions to Visceral, Genetic, Somatic, Social, Cultural Behaviour in successive chapters. The book does not argue, it states. Its aim, the aim of the "Things-to-Know Series" to which it belongs,! is to inform. It is a sound book, a sensible series.

*POLONAISE, THE LIFE OF CHOPIN--Guy de Pourtales--Holt ($3).

t Other titles in this series: The Stream of Life by Julian S. Huxley; Age of the Earth by Arthur Holmes; Science of Today by Sir Oliver Lodge; The Genius of Shakespeare by G. B. Harrison; A History of England by David Somervell.

*KIT O'BRIEN--Edgar Lee Masters--Boni & Liveright ($2.50).