Prohibition in Prosody & Prose

CASANOVA JONES--Joseph Anthony-- Century ($2).

THE FUTURE OF DRINKING--Gilbert Seldes--Little, Brown ($2).

Anti-Prohibitionists may think it significant when publishers venture books making jokes about Prohibition. Such signs of the times are Casanova Jones, narrative satirical poem, and The Future of Drinking, satirical essay.

Hero Casanova Jones, "a gentleman sober, a gentleman blotto," is a Prohibition agent whose wife runs a speakeasy. Beautiful but thick Annabel Cloy imagines herself a poet, and is overjoyed when Casanova, pretending to be a publisher, says he will print her Poems of Passion, is enraged when she discovers his duplicity. From this out, the plot becomes more and more revue-worthy. In the end Casanova, in a vain attempt to regain Annabel's affections, goes deliberately to jail by selling liquor on the street. His example becomes popular:

. . . the rebels, they stormed, like a salesman's convention, Every jail in the land that was worthy of mention, Till only a person of power and pull Could get into prison--the prisons were full,

When things reached this pass, Prohibition left politics and became a harmless religion. The prisons emptied. Joy returned to the land.

Casanova Jones is profusely illustrated by Artist Willy Pogany.

Not Prohibition proper but drinking is the subject of Author Gilbert Seldes' delicately quizzical examination. Prohibition, however, comes in for a few glancing blows. Says Seldes: the Dry who proposed putting to death all U. S. drinkers made "the first intelligent suggestion, the first mature and unsentimental proposal . . . since Prohibition came into being."

U. S. drinkers, says Seldes, had forgotten how to drink long before it became illegal to remember. Now "professional" drinkers have become as fanatical as Drys. "Until we learn how to drink at home with considerably more technical skill and social grace than we now possess, we will need the saloon as much as ever." Says Seldes: 100,000 speakeasies flourish in the U. S., not to satisfy the national taste for liquor but "our pride and a childish illusion of wickedness, a 'tawdry romanticism." No friend to Prohibition, Moderate Drinker Seldes believes in freedom to drink when you want to, to refuse a drink when you want to. "[The drinker] knows that drunkenness is a great pleasure. All he asks is that it be allowed to remain one."

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