Aristocracy

CORONET--Manuel Komroff--Coward McCann ($3).

In Venice in the year 1600 a goldsmith gets two commissions: to make a coronet for the French Count de Senlis and to repair a silver whip for a Russian nobleman. The coronet is made, the whip repaired; they are carried off to France and Russia respectively. Around these two symbols of aristocracy an epic tale unfolds.

The scene shifts to France in 1812. The old Senlis tomb in the monastery is excavated by Gravedigger Jobey. He discovers the battered coronet, sells it to the blacksmith, who sells it to the jeweler. Young Andre Jobey enlists in the Army with a friend and they go to Russia under Napoleon. In the retreat from Moscow they meet a Russian officer, Burin, who has just lost his silver whip and is looking for it drunkenly through the snow. The whip has been picked up by somebody and given to Napoleon who passing through Senlis on his way to Paris, flings it into the jeweler's shop.

When the Russians arrive in Senlis in 1814, Burin, now a Count, is with the army. He recovers his long-lost whip, buys the coronet, takes them back to his estate in Russia. The Burin family fortunes gradually go from bad to worse. Nicholas, the last and one of the worst Burins, saves only the whip and the coronet from the wreck of the 1917 Revolution. He fights on against the Reds, is cornered in a Caucasian village and killed. The whip is buried with him. The coronet, stolen by one of his men and sold in Moscow, is bought by one of the rich Jobey brothers (descendants of the old gravedigger) and presented by him to his employe, young Count de Senlis, who wants to marry the daughter of a Chicago packer. The Count pretends the coronet is a family heirloom. The last you see of it is at the splendiferous wedding in Chicago: "After the ceremony the wedding guests crowded around it and gazed upon it with wonder and amazement."

Journalist

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS--H. M. Tomlinson--Harper ($2.50).

This is partly a novel, partly autobiography, partly an essay on modern civilization. Those who like loud talk, quick action, should not apply. Those who like good writing, quiet observations, had better read.

The tale begins in London, at a Thamesside dockyard where a cruiser is being launched. It is May, 1900; the Boer War is on. The first character in the book is Bolt, a loud dockyard foreman, a Kiplingesque sort of character, a type of England in her glory. At the end he is a doubtful, silent, bedridden old man. After the launching of the cruiser, the story shifts to the shop of philosophical Tobacconist Jones. In Jones's shop gathers a mixed crowd of intellects: Langham, the brilliant Radical politician, pro-Boer now, anti-German later; Talbot the East End vicar, gently skeptical of the ways of men, passionately curious about the ways of fungi; young Bolt, the old shipwright's son, who wants to be a teacher, a journalist, anything but the soldier's corpse he finally becomes.

The scene changes to Fleet Street; young Bolt has got a job on a newspaper, finds journalism's ways at first rich and strange. Then we go with his friend Maynard, a traveling correspondent, to Novobambia, fever-ridden jungle country whose mineral riches the chancellories of Europe are scheming to keep away from each other. Even out here the threat of war is heavy in the air. When Maynard comes home he is sent off to Ireland, which seems on the verge of rebellion; but when a shot is fired in a little Balkan town the journalists hurry home; war has broken.

Author Tomlinson's narrative of the fighting in France is bitter. On Armistice Day, while London is going mad outside the windows, he goes up to young Bolt's office, sits down alone, smokes a pipe, thinks of Charley Bolt who has been killed. The book ends with Tomlinson and Maynard revisiting the weedgrown battlefields of France, trying to avoid souvenir-collecting tourists, trying to see some hope for the future.

From time to time historical figures enter the book: Viscount Grey, Lord Balfour, Newspaperman Harmsworth (afterward Lord Northcliffe). Of Grey, Author Tomlinson makes one of his characters say: "I see nothing in him, nothing. If he were not so silent and stately, people would laugh. He is silent because if he spoke you would know him."

The Author. H. M. ("Tommy") Tomlinson, 56, is described by a friend (J. B. Priestley) as looking at first glance "like a rather hard-bitten city clerk. At a second glance, he looks like a gnome. . . ." He was born in London's East End, among the docks; was a sailor, newspaper correspondent, war correspondent, literary editor of the London Nation and Athenaeum. Other books: The Sea and the Jungle, Old Junk, Under the Red Ensign, Gallions Reach.

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