Dutch Love*

JENNY HEYSTEN'S CAREER--Jo Van Ammers-Kuller--Dutton ($2.50).

The "high well-born Gentleman Jonkheer N; Maes van Herwerden,'' handsome but conventional young blood of the staid and doughty aristocracy of Holland, had sufficient social elasticity to become engaged to an actress, but not enough to carry the engagement through the first jealous suspicion of misconduct. Jenny Heysten knew that she loved him more than the two lovers who followed, but she found solace in her genius, which flourished or failed as her emotional life varied. When Jonkheer Nico returned, however, and saw her in an ingenue part, her seeming innocence recaptured him. Once more he tried to bridge the social gap between them. He had broadened while abroad and might have been successful, but the joy of acting had so gripped Jenny's introvertive nature that she could not fight herself free from theatricality. For many difficult months she played to him, consciously and unconsciously, to hide her hardness. She even deserted the stage and sought to fit herself into his circumscribed, stiff circle. But memory of past adulation, fancies of future triumphs were too strong. When an influenza epidemic crippled her old company, she temporarily returned. Nico discovered this the evening he contracted the disease. With fever-bright intuition he understood her history, her strange, wavering duplicity. He left for a hospital bed, bitter, dizzy with illness. The story, which has moved ponderously through a silver-grey atmosphere, ends on the unanswered question of Jenny's future.

Staidly, solemnly written, this book is impressive. Jenny, whose entry into stage life is told in The House of Joy, develops into a clear character, engaging yet unpleasant, selfish, pathetic in her talents and her indecision. Nico through his consistency attains a sort of prosaic greatness. The main worth of the book, however, is the contrast between two splendidly portrayed environments: the Dutch home, the Dutch stage. The conflict is a familiar theme but the detailed, vigorous painting of the scenes transforms the commonplace material.

The Author. Jo Van Ammers-Kueller, foremost Dutch novelist, was born in Delft (famed for ceramics and Painter Jan Van Delft Vermeer) of a family of doctors and lawyers. Her early writings awoke parental anxiety. At 20 she married, discontinued writing until her two sons were in school. When her husband became director of the Leyden gas works she began to write again. Charming, accomplished linguist, learned in stage lore, she wrote plays, novels, about actresses. Visiting the U. S. in 1925 she saw enough to write of U. S. family life in Tantalus. Other books in translation: The House of Joy, The Rebel Generation.

Shepherds in Sackcloth

SHEPHERDS IN SACKCLOTH -- Sheila Kaye-Smith--Harper ($2.50).

In a Sussex village of 500 souls preached old Mr. Bennet, kindly, impatient, strong in a high-church, almost Catholic faith. His life was almost over, his generation already gone. Tragedy was to beset his last two years in St. Thomas-a-Becket's in Delmonden: tragedy wrought not suddenly or heroically, but proceeding by slow steps, inevitable as time. Four newcomers bring it about unwittingly. The tolerant old Bishop is replaced by a new one, stickler for modern ecclesiastical convention. The old squire, dead, is followed by a vain village Lady Bountiful, not without wrinkles--Mrs. Millington. She brings with her a niece, Theresa, redhaired, unruly, wild as gorse and just as innocent, who finds a young Protestant preacher good, falls in love with him, is caught kissing. Then, while on vacation at Brighton with the unsuspecting Bennets, Theresa spends a night with her preacher who, revolted at his sin, quits her for more Godly things. Theresa dies with child at the Bennets' home. Angry, sorrowful Mrs. Millington blames Mr. Bennet, writes to the new Bishop accusing Bennet of immorality and, for good measure, of paganistic practices. Thus marked for episcopal suspicion, the old priest is forced to give up his custom of reserving the sacrament for the sick; loses his wife from exposure in her effort to follow the letter of the episcopal rules; finally must let depart without the sacrament his last good sheep, Mrs. Iggulsden, who, unlike the other villagers, really wanted the bread of life from her preacher and not just "tabioca pudding.'' So he dies, an old shepherd in sackcloth, having cheated one of his flock at the behest of the Bishop, his own shepherd, who proceeds triumphant.

The Author. Sheila Kaye-Smith (the Kaye is her mother's maiden name, added to prevent confusion with a next-door Smith) has been writing since 1908, has produced 16 novels, mostly about Sussex life. She writes quietly, sympathetically, with now and again a splinter of irony.

Drunks

PARTIES--Carl Van Vechten--Knopf ($2.50).

A very specialized kind of party is the chief ingredient in Author Carl Van Vechten's latest omelette au fromage. The scene is supposed to be Manhattan, the characters a motley gang who are supposed to live by and for .liquor. But the scene is really in Never-Never Land, the characters really Peter Pans (or Whiffles) who just will not grow up. A wildly burlesque aqua-vitae-tint of where some of our wild young people have got to, Parties has its points. These will emerge.

Hero David Westlake is the biggest drunk of the lot. For some inexplicable reason (not adequately conveyed by Author Van Vechten) everybody loves him, including his wife Rilda, and Best Friend Hamish whose wife David seduces, and Bootlegger Don, and Roy Fern, dope fiend and probable "pansy." The story opens in medias res: that is, everybody is very drunk. The story continues and ends without once hitting a false note of sobriety. David and his wife Rilda are in love but never see each other except at "parties"--i. e., drunk. They rise about noon, amble in to their private bar, where already some of their cronies have fore-gathered. They proceed to drink as much and as fast as they can. Usually Rosalie invites David to dinner--without Rilda; Rilda invariably comes too. Almost invariably the evening ends in Harlem.

Hero David begins to be heartily sick of this routine about the same time as the reader. In a lucid interval of drunkenness, he decides to follow the gleam abroad. Hardly is he ensconced on his liner when he is drunk again, and stays that way. Occasionally he finds himself in Paris, occasionally in London; as he is always in a bar or a bedroom, he finds his way about.

Eventually David reappears in his Manhattan haunts, where everything is going on much as before. Says he: "Hamish and I will get drunk as usual this afternoon, and ... we shall somehow manage to arrive at Rosalie's in time for dinner where, of course, we shall meet Rilda and . . . despite the fact that we have purchased tickets to see Zimbule O'Grady in Buttered Toast, we shall spend most of the evening at Donald's and end up in Harlem. That is the life of our times in words of two syllables. I am not bitter about it. I accept it as the best we can do."

An air of traveled grandeur, an air of knowing the right names, permeates Author Van Vechten's pages. He mentions many foreign bars, restaurants, dishes. When one of his characters stoops to a second-hand wisecrack (e.g., "I must have that man") the partner in dialog invariably rejoins, "There's music to that." At times Author Van Vechten puts on almost too much grandeur. Greatly daring, he tries to use the subjunctive correctly, fails.*

The Author. Carl Van Vechten, 50, was born in Cedar Rapids, la., has firmly established himself as one of Manhattan's exotics, tall, paunchy, epigrammatic, with prominent teeth. Onetime music critic, onetime dramatic critic, since 1914 he has free-lanced and written novels. He is a collector of first editions, bindings, newspaper clippings, postcards, book jackets. He has "one major super- stition'': to have the witness to his contracts a prominent and appropriate person. Some of the witnesses: Hugh Walpole, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, Charlie Chaplin. Witness for the Parties contract was Mary Louise ("Texas") Guinan.

Other books: Peter Whiffle, The Blind Bow-Boy, The Tattooed Countess, Firecrackers, Red, Excavations.

Apologetic Essays

THE TENDER REALIST--L. Wardlaw Miles--Holt ($2).

This book contains nine essays by a onetime (1919-26) headmaster of Gilman Country School, now collegiate professor of English at the College of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. From them one might gather that the function of the Tender Realist was apologetically to put forth generalities of which he was not very confident concerning subjects-- Sophistication, Loneliness, Glory, Sleep and the like--on which he was not specially erudite, in a style which he admits is not brilliant and with the expectation of boring most of his readers. But if one surmounts the apologies that cumber every essay one finds that the author has covered considerable ground, dusted some truths that needed rubbing up, and thought through, independently and intelligently, to a general doctrine of acceptance and affirmation.

Maurois at the Front

THE SILENCE OF COLONEL BRAMBLE-- Andre Maurois-- Appleton ($2.50).

The title has a properly whimsical suggestion, but there could be no adequate heading for this humoristic beauty. There is no story told, no thesis to be tagged, no unity except the reader's inner satisfaction, which swells with each chapter. Compounded of his War service notes into his first published work, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble established Author Maurois' genius. A French interpreter is living with a group of staff officers behind the Front; the death of one of the group, the wounding and return of the Frenchman, is about all the story. The rest is digression and meandering conversations, distributed amiably over all topics and contributed to by all the men, except, for the better part, the Colonel, who plays his gramophone, maintains an even tenor which eventually brings him a general's commission.

There is considerable character sketching by the way, both individual and national. The Englishman's view of the world as a well-organized collection of sports, the Flemish peasant's more commercial conception, and other attitudes are gently ridiculed yet quietly admired. Anecdotes of various hues enrich the talk, and occasional humorous incidents: an overlooked hero obtaining his Military Cross at last through trench feet; the puzzling sickness of 1,000 goats required by the Hindu troops for obscure religious observances. The War, which grumbles quite genially in the background, only three times intrudes shockingly in the sphere of friendship and gentility. The book rambles unashamed wherever the notes of the author take it, always with agile wit and literary grace.

Frustrated Elizabethan

ROBERT PECKHAM--Maurice Baring-- Knopf ($2.50).

Sir Robert Peckham, imaginary English nobleman of Queen Elizabeth's day, walks through unreal adventures with incredible calm. Giving up the woman he loves, he marries out of honor a woman who takes him out of jealousy. She does her best to break his life. What she leaves is fractured by a religious quarrel with his father. Ultimately, his wife dead, his brother (her lover) hung, his true love renounced forever, his Catholic faith forbidden in the land, he retires to Rome to ruminate in sanctity on the hopelessness of life, and finally to die. Unperturbed, Sir Robert tells the story himself, with the assistance of an Italian scholar and the kindly encouragement of the author.

Author Baring, British diplomat, airman, journalist, dramatist, polite poet, and expert on Russia (his father was Lord Revelstoke of Baring Brothers, bankers), has at 56 a faith unbroken in abstract romance. Producer of more than 50 books, he has certainly done better than this, his most recent. Some of his others: Orpheus in Mayfair, Tinker's Leave, C, The Coat without Seam.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

*E. g.: "It also must be remembered that if Rosalie were a poor hostess, her guests, at least, were sometimes amusing."

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