FICTION

Yesterday's Yeast

Feeling perhaps that his days grow fewer while his ideas multiply, Mr. Mr. Wells, the great educator, addresses himself more and more directly to his fellowmen. This time* the particular parties addressed are such British aristocrats as may have retained sufficient energy and money to be of use in remaking the world.

The address begins as a novel and ends as a tract, the recent general strike in England developing from a background into a thesis. The reader is left with an impression of Mr. Wells as a very sincere and vigorously intelligent man who has grown impatient and tedious.

The book is mostly conversational and falls into the conversational pitfalls of protraction, repetition and ranting. But for a long time it is good conversation--high, wide and exciting.

A Mr. Sempack is the Wellsian spokesman, an angular, hairy length of finely developed humanity who shambles about among the guests of a pretty Mrs. Cynthia Rylands on the Italian Riviera, talking calmly, kindly, but grimly and incessantly about the World State that science will eventually create. A sophisticated ineffectual from the U. S., a Mr. Plantagenet-Buchan, assists the great man by neatly defining as "meanwhiling" the occupation of all people, himself included, who are not consciously accelerating the World State's arrival. A timid Tory, and a British Fascist; a beautiful Lady Catherine; some tennis and bridge players including a Puppy Clarges (female) ; and Cynthia's intensely inarticulate husband, Philip, are the audience to whom the deplorable nature of "meanwhiling" is revealed with varying effects.

Cynthia Rylands is with child. Her discoveries, first of Philip and Puppy Clarges in the bath house, then of Lady Catherine kissing Mr. Sempack, necessitate for her a courageously thoughtful analysis of love, sex and the creative application of energy. Assisted by Mr. Sempack, Cynthia and Philip convert Philip's defection into a beginning of wisdom for her, of action for him. They are closer than ever when he goes to London to correct the capitalistic errors of his collier-uncle.

With Mr. Sempack looming near, Philip turns socialist, improves his diction and spelling, begins writing adult ("real") letters to Cynthia, reporting the strike and his own evolution from an amiable parasite into a social thinker. Cynthia writes back and in addition keeps a 'journal. The reader is denied, or spared, very little that they think or feel, with the result that the World State, though it must be nearer with potent young Philip on its side, remains vague in outline and seems to belong only to the Rylands', Mr. Sempack and Author Wells.

The Significance of a new Wells book nowadays is somewhat the same as one more cake of yeast in a maturing batch of beer. To the enormous public that reads him, Mr. Wells long since imparted the whole quality, if not the whole quantity, of his fine ferment. Meanwhile might have started up a great fizzing two decades ago when Mr. Wells was building time-machines and worlds beyond the Milky Way.

Now, with its hisses, slanging and slam-banging at British politics, at the U. S., Communism, Fascism and nearly everything not strictly Wellsian, it seems like brainy petulance nagging at society to hurry up and become Men Like Gods without further delay. Some of the old bubbling fancy is there, and some of the sense of life welling up from primordial springs into the clear atmosphere of intellect, as in The Outline of History. But Guide Wells to Utopia has grown cranky. He snarls as well as chaffs at a world with the gout.

NON-FICTION

"Damnable Experiences"

CANNIBAL NIGHTS--Captain H. E. Raabe--Pay son & Clarke ($3). Luncheon comrades of Captain Raabe in Jersey City, N. J., have at last overcome his reluctance to "write up" some of the things that happened to him in and after 1874 when, a lad of 13, he shipped before the mast of a Yankee clipper to Australia and was shanghaied thence into the South Sea islands by pirate-traders. Captain Raabe apologizes for his literary shortcomings but hopes that his absolutely true story "may prove worthwhile to those with robust enough stomachs to appreciate the damnable experiences I lived through. . . ."

The reader needs robust nerves as well as a stomach. Not two pages have elapsed before the 13-year-old Raabe, with quantities of ale exhilarating his Viking blood, is slashing and skewering tremendous opponents in a barroom cutlass duel. In another two pages he is actually pumping a windlass to the tune of "Sixteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest." A whole pirate crew then goes rum crazy and fights with bottles. Whereupon a gigantic waterspout, which is the devilish eye of a "white squall," which is something that makes a typhoon seem a trifle, hits the ship squarely.

Soon after his 15th birthday, Mr. Raabe becomes an officer and the cutthroat crew cries, "Hip, hip, for our second mate!"

Love turns up in the mysterious person of an island girl, who dives off the ship immediately after boarding it, to save our hero by slitting the belly of a tiger shark with her ten-inch knife. But this love is wholly platonic and never interferes with the "damnable experiences" among cannibals, octopi, pirates and violent acts of God. After reading these 324 corpse-strewn pages the reader can scarcely believe that Captain Raabe lived through to cruise, as he does today, out of Flushing Bay in a tame little 40-foot yawl.

Theatre Instinct

THE THEATRE IN LIFE--Nicolas Evreinov--Brentano ($3.50). M. Evreinov's Russian ingenuity has excelled in such varied activities as circus performing, archaeology, law, novels, history and flute-playing, but his chief passion and reputation are in the theatre. This book, a more or less formal attempt to enunciate a philosophy, elaborates Shakespeare's dictum about all the world being a stage. Poet Robert Burns would have been interested, for M. Evreinov touches also on the problem of seeing oneself as seen by others. "The Theatre of Oneself," says M. Evreinov, is conducted by every human being in all those acts wherein the human being is distinguishable from lower animals. Whatever one does--brushing hair, walking with poise, eating neatly --is "theatrical" if self-consciousness enters the process. It is an ingenious thesis, cleverly spun. And, not surprisingly, it is spun too far. Biologists and psychologists, after learning that "theatricalness" is a peculiarly human attribute, will be puzzled to hear that the strutting of cock birds, the romping of dogs and even the protective coloration of plants, are not functions of the instincts of sex, combat, self-preservation, etc. but are, according to theatrical M. Evreinov, expressions of a hitherto unnoticed "theatre" instinct, deepest of all.

*MEANWHILE-- H. G. Wells-- Doran ($2.50).