Business in the Bystreets--
Business in the Bystreets*
ANGEL PAVEMENT--J. B. Priestley-- Harper ($3).
Through the dingy parts of London, beloved of authors and others, pleasantly rambles this latest novel of J. B. Priestley. Characters and plot are both unexciting and vaguely familiar, but their simplicity is followed out with such a happy fertility of notions that one spends hour upon hour completely pleased. There is much reminiscent of Dombeys and Forsytes, but this book is content with a more humble standard of artistic verity, and if for that reason the thousands are less appreciative, the tens of thousands will be the more delighted.
Angel Pavement is a dock-tailed street shuffled in somewhere in E. C. 1 or E. C. 2, and one of the forgotten firms upon it is Twigg & Dersingham, Veneers and Inlays. Upon this languishing business bursts James Golspie, breezy and bumptious, fresh from the Baltic with the sole agency for foreign inlays and veneers procurable at a fabulous economy. In a day affairs are metamorphosed. Impressionable young Dersingham (Twigg is dead) makes a vague sort of manager out of Golspie, who scorns a partnership. Prosperity descends upon the stuffy office. Everyone is cheered, and if Smeeth, withered cashier, Lilian Matfield, condescending stenographer, or Turgis, scrawny young clerk, could any of them fatten they would do it.
Golspie proves to be a not unmixed blessing. His roaring conceit disturbs the office and is incompatible with Dersingham's public-school rationale. When Golspie's handsome daughter Lena appears she shows also that conscience does not run in the family, for she amuses herself at the expense of the lowly but amorous Turgis. Unable to see the fun, one night Turgis nearly strangles her, to his own and the reader's great surprise. For that evening he wallows in the melancholy of a murderer, and afterwards in (hat of a jobless man. Solace comes to him, however, in the unbeautiful Poppy Sellers, second-string stenographer.
Had his exit been later, it would have been less dramatic. Dersingham, suspicious of his ungentlemanly manager, has tried to purloin the Baltic agency for himself. But Golspie is too quick for him, and he manages so that Dersingham finds his firm caught in fatal advance contracts with prices of foreign stock raised prohibitively. At this juncture Golspie, with the resuscitated Lena, embarks for South America, while Miss Matfield, who had finally consented to a weekend trip with her tycoon, forlornly looks for him at Victoria station, waiting to be seduced. The book closes with glimpses of the Smeeth and Dersingham families, sitting about the collapsed business and hoping for a fall of manna, while Golspie floats vociferously down the Thames.
The Significance. Author Priestley writes freshly and smiles frequently. But his humor and facility engender their allied failings, and the book never bites through to reality. Lacking the sincere emotionalism of Dickens, he yet does not reach the labored truth of Galsworthy, though he has learned from both. Still his lively perceptions create a very readable and satisfying counterfeit of life. Accomplished craftsman, lie has an excellent understanding of the novelist's profession, a less imposing knowledge of the art.
The Author. John Boynton Priestley, born in Yorkshire in 1894, lived through the whole of the War in the Duke of Wellington's and Devon regiments and returned to England to marry and write. His output is varied and considerable, from white-collar journalism to green-visor scholarship, but he never wandered far or long from humorous subjects, publishing The English Comic Characters, Laughing, and even choosing George Meredith of the Comic Spirit for a contribution to English Men of Letters. He followed the big footprints of Max Beerbohm and the little ones of Shaw around the office of the Saturday Review as its regular essayist, and then produced The Good Companions, which sold 100,000 copies in England and almost as many more in the U. S. Now an anxious group of eyes, many of them feminine, awaits his next, while he amuses himself with amiable reflections and the less responsible games. He can put the march theme of Brahms' First Symphony into words, does so in this novel. Among his other books are: The Old Dark House, Brief Diversions, Open House.
Danse Macabre
THE DANCE OF YOUTH--Hermann Sudermann--Liveright ($2.50).
Unless German youth has been ill-served by the late great Author Sudermann (and by many another post-War German author) the young men & maidens beyond the Rhine are seeing life kaleidoscopically, topsy-turvy. The Dance of Youth which Sudermann describes is an unbeautiful, jazzy, galvanic foxtrot.
Annemarie ("Stumpy") Ludicke, 16, short, plump, Teutonically attractive, is the youngest daughter of a Berlin con- fectioner. Her elder sister Gudrun "leads her own life," comes in at all hours. Half-Brother Herbert, onetime War pilot, pretends to be a dentist's chauffeur but is actually a gigolo. Stumpy, in the quiet midst of so much mysterious sophistication, wants to get out into the world and have some for herself. Brother Herbert gets her a job as assistant to his dentist, sinister Dr. Shadow, who is accustomed to while away half-hours in the X-ray room with eager female patients. Stumpy, eager too, is initiated in her turn.
Stumpy falls in love, with Fritz, high-minded agricultural student who soon bids her an eternal and virginal farewell because he is poor. Then one of Dr. Shadow's rare male patients, solid, middle-aged Herr Gerberding, makes Stumpy an honorable proposal. Fluttered, she accepts. But Half-Brother Herbert discovers his sister can dance. Together they put on a show, in the second part of which Stumpy appears almost technically naked, and panics the crowd. It is too much for Student Fritz, who has been watching, glistening-eyed, from the darkened stalls; now he knows that Stumpy is a good girl. Stumpy, who can never say no, gives her respectable fiance the goby, marries impetuous Fritz.
The Dance of Youth (published in Germany in 1928) is Author Sudermann's last book. He died in Berlin two years ago, aged 71. Shortly after his death his publishers announced that Fran Sorge (translated as Dame Care) had reached the record German sale of 300,000. It is the September choice of the Book League of America.
Mr. Bennett's Bothers
JOURNAL OF THINGS NEW AND OLD-- Arnold Bennett--Doubleday, Doran ($2).
That hotel troubles, things eaten for meals, insomnia, should become important because Author Bennett records them, is very doubtful. Yet these extracts from his diaries are published, and in them one finds painstakingly described insomnia, things eaten for meals, hotel troubles. He does include other affairs: nighttime excursions on a stormy Lago di Garda, anecdotes of the provinces, occasional bits of undoubted beauty inattentively written. Here and there, too, are observations with a little meaning, amusing thoughts, with a few ill-assorted conclusions to leaven the unnourishing loaf. But in the main he lists what is, what is not, and this process being pointed to no end, no end is achieved. Artists of a photographic stripe are not prepossessing in their shirtsleeves. Lovers of the all-season Bennett will relish this book, but lovers of Katherine Mansfield will writhe.
Chinaboy Looks At London
THE MIRROR or KONG Ho--Ernest Bramah--Doubleday, Doran ($2).
Kong Ho, visiting London to study Occidental civilization, reports his inability to understand it in a series of flowery letters to his Venerable Sire in Yuen-ping. The English language, customs, institutions perplex him. There is no ancestor- worship, no dog-eating. The Underground confuses him, also Wordsworth: ". . . He had encountered a wild maiden in the woods, who had steadfastly persisted that she was one of a band of seven. . . . Though unable to cause their appearance, she had gone through a most precise examination at his hands without deviating in the least particular, whereupon, distrusting the outcome of the strife, the person who was relating the adventure had withdrawn breathless. . . . Those present approved of the solitary maiden's discreet stratagem." It is all very delightful, more literary, but not much heavier than Wallace Irwin's famed Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy. The reader is never quite certain which hemisphere is being satirized.
Book by an Actress
ACTORS--AND PEOPLE--Peggy Wood-- Appleton ($2.50).
Singer, dancer, actress, poet's wife (she is Mrs. John Van Alstyn Weaver), Peggy Wood here launches bravely forth on a group of character sketches of celebrities. She recounts her persistent pursuit and final tracking down of George Bernard Shaw at Stresa, and follows that with reminiscences of Emma Calve, "greatest of Carmens," under whom she studied. But shortly the book takes a turn, and in a much more natural fashion Actress Wood writes of the theatre she has known. The personality of different audiences, how certain characteristics appear on certain evenings--the lethargy of the dinner-filled ones, the hopelessness of the bronchial ones. Due honor is paid to Actors' Equity in adjusting matters for puzzled actresses, particularly in arranging satisfactorily for alien companies so that foreign salary scales should not upset Broadway. The final chapter is an approving discourse on the talkie, concluding with the optimistic thought that "the legitimate theatre will survive; it has survived so much before now that even inventions cannot kill it."
Leaves of Pampas
TALES FROM THE ARGENTINE--Waldo Frank, Editor--Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).
With this oddly grouped collection of seven strange tales, literature of the Argentine makes its bow to the U. S people under the watchful eye of Waldo Frank. Editor Frank explains his selections, places them historically, with a confusing foreword and clearer prefatory notes. After his explanations are read and forgotten the stories may speak for themselves, which they do in strenuous voices. Their unifying characteristic is a certain incoherence, which, in addition to violently poetic phrasing, makes it often difficult to tell what is happening. But though their literary quality fluctuates, their dramatic intensity seldom falters.
The first, "Laucha's Marriage" by Payro, is an amusing tale of the marital troubles of a gaucho, one of the cowboy- hobo-adventurers that are the famed type of the Argentine. These pampas ragamuffins vary from the romantic Douglas Fairbanks variety to the bloody, vengeful Facundo of actual life, brutally characterized in a sketch by Argentine's great man Sarmiento. Again, in "Death of a Gaucho," one of these wild plainsmen is a mad patriot, storming a hundred Royalist soldiers in the night and dying slowly of numberless swordcuts with a muttered "Vive la patria." This last story is fiercely harsh and colorful.
The remaining four are of lesser timber. "Holiday in Buenos Aires" describes that city in the sixties. "The Devil in Pago Chico" is the tale of a fire in the pampas grass. "Rosaura" is a cruelly sensitive story of a young girl's hopeless love and suicide, so feverish that it quivers between bright beauty and absurdity. The last of the seven, "The Return of Anaconda," carries a boa constrictor down the Parana River in a flood, has the jungle talking, raises the gooseflesh. All the stories are delicately translated by Anita Brenner, gain spice in the weird black-and-whites of Mordecai Gorelik.
The Editor. Waldo David Frank celebrated his forty-first birthday Aug. 25 by making more plans for presenting South American literature to the U. S. in small doses. Ten or more books of which this is the first, are to appear and bring the best from Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others, culled by him, edited by him. Since leaving Yale in 1911 with B.A., M.A. and Phi Beta Kappa key, he has applied his erratic literary ability to many matters. With the publication of Virgin Spain in 1926 his name as a Spanish authority was made, his interest in things Spanish determined. Since then he has lectured throughout South America, been received with great enthusiasm. Between times he has written books, essays, wrote a discerning preface to Plays of Moliere for the Modern Library.
*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.
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