Forsyte Footnotes*
Forsyte Footnotes*
ON FORSYTE 'CHANGE--John Galsworthy--Scribners ($2.50).
If sincerity and earnestness were the keystone to artistic success, John Galsworthy would have built by now a triumphal arch. What he has made is a solid garden wall around a corner of Old England. The people who walk there are known to many as the Forsytes. This book of short stories Author Galsworthy calls "footnotes to the chronicles of the Forsyte family." As his reason for adding to the family saga he pleads that "it is hard to part suddenly and finally from those with whom one has lived so long."
These 19 footnotes begin in 1821, end with the Armistice. Only a student of The Forsyte Saga could untangle the relationships of the characters, but most of the stories will stand alone. The best: Revolt at Roger's (two children mutiny to save a beloved butler from dismissal) ; The Dromios (a London night-adventure of two brothers who understand each other without much speech) ; Soames and the Flag (a history of the War in one old Britisher's mind).
The Author. John Galsworthy, 63, read law at New College, Oxford, and was called to the bar, but disliked it; took to traveling and writing instead. So great is the fame of his Forsyte Saga that last spring a telephone exchange in Hacken sack, N. J. was named Galsworthy. He has a prejudice against cinematization, but his famed Old English (with Actor George Arliss) at last went Hollywood. Baldish, white-haired, with lined, long face, honest eyes, he looks his type: the mental and moral bulldog. He has written more than 50 novels, books of essays, plays. Some of them: The Man of Property, The Patrician, The Dark Flower, To Let, The White Monkey; (plays): Justice, The Fugitive, The Mob, The Skin Game.
Where Children Rule the Roost
GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA--Margaret Mead--Morrow ($3.50).*
Youthful Anthropologist Margaret Mead (Mrs. Reo Fortune), no bookworm theorist, believes in getting her data at first hand. Two years ago she published an account of primitive adolescence (Coming of Age in Samoa). Now she reports how children grow up among the Manus of the Admiralty Islands.
The Manus are isolated, unreformed by missionaries, almost uncontaminated by white men. They live in thatched huts set on piles in a lagoon. Children learn to swim, to use a boat, almost before they can walk. For six months Margaret Mead and her husband lived among the Manus, learnt their language, their tabus, took photographs, asked questions, saw as much as they were allowed. Anthropologist Mead's conclusion is that among the Manus only the children have a really good time. Children do exactly as they please; parent's may plead, they never discipline. But with marriage a hard life begins. The married couple have never seen each other till their wedding, rarely like each other. They have no house of their own, must work hard to pay back the marriage expenses. Divorce or separation is frequent. Mrs. Mead is reminded of the U. S.
"There is . . . a curious analogy between Manus society and America. Like America, Manus has not yet turned from the primary business of making a living to the less immediate interest of the conduct of life as an art. As in America, work is respected and industry and economic success is the measure of the man."
Love, even of the unromantic, pagan kind Mrs. Mead found in Samoa, is non-existent among the Manus. Children, like their father, who spoils them, are apt to despise their mother. They are callous about death, birth, the facts of life. Women get no joy out of marriage. Maturity and middle age mean constant debt and hard work. "Above the 35-year-olds comes a divided group--the failures still weak and dependent, and the successes who dare again to indulge in the violence of childhood, who stamp and scream at their debtors, and give way to uncontrolled hysterical rage when crossed."
Anthropologist Mead is no preacher, but her comparative study in anthropology is pointed, needs no extra sharpening.
The Author. Margaret Mead, 28, daughter of Economics Professor Edward Sherwood Mead (University of Pennsylvania), wife of British Anthropologist Reo Fortune, is Assistant Curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Between voyages of anthropological discovery she lives in Manhattan. She has no children.
Odyssey of a Woman
THE DEEPENING STREAM--Dorothy Canfield--Harcourt, Brace ($2).
Author Canfield bends the truism that woman's place is in the home to her own fell purpose. She seems to show that adult life and marriage are indistinguishable, scores many a point but fails to get full marks.
Matey, youngest daughter of a clever, ineffectual professor in a Midwestern college, suffers like her brother and sister from the constant but never recognized warfare between her father and mother. Francis pretends not to notice, Priscilla becomes a terrified invert, Matey says nothing but notices everything. When her father dies, Matey goes to Rustdorf, sleepy Hudson River town, to collect a legacy, meets her distant cousin Adrian, marries him and settles down. But both have lived in France ; when the War comes, both feel a duty to help. They take their children abroad, Adrian drives an ambulance, Matey helps her old friends. When they finally get home again to Rustdorf, middle age has nearly got them, but they are still happy. The Deepening Stream is a quiet book, meanders somewhat, is sometimes a little too limpidly pastoral to be believed, takes you nowhere in particular. But it was a pleasant trip.
The Author. Dorothy Canfield (Mrs. John R. Fisher) lives and writes on a Vermont farm but loves to go to France. Like her hero and heroine, she and her husband took their children to France during the War, did relief work till 1919. In 1921 Mrs. Fisher was appointed a member of Vermont's State Board of Education. She is one of the five judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Other books: The Brimming Cup, Rough-Hewn, Raw Material, The Home-Maker, Her Son's Wife.
Van Loon's van Rijn
R. v. R., THE LIFE AND TIMES or REMBRANDT VAN RIJN--Hendrik Willem Van Loon--Liveright ($5).
Hendrik Van Loon is plagued with large ideas. When he was eleven he started to write a Universal Encyclopedia of Historical Knowledge. A Dutchman, an escapist (says he: "Even today I know the 17th Century better than the 20th"), Van Loon long planned a life of Rembrandt, whom he considers greatest Dutchman of his time. This is it. Written in the form of the diary of Van Loon's mythical great-great-great-grandfather, an Amsterdam physician, great & good friend of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the book is a voluminous (570 pages), discursive, far-from-formal narrative in which Rembrandt is a major figure but the great-great-great-grandfather the hero.
Imaginary Dr. Van Loon met Painter van Rijn when Rembrandt's first wife, Saskia, took her last illness. Though she died the men became cronies. Rembrandt's popularity as a portrait-painter had gone; his artistic experiments, his unconventionality, his debts had roused the commercial conscience of the burghers against him. But Van Loon recognized his genius, liked his character, helped him when he could, gave him good advice when he thought he ought to: notably when he noticed the unmarried pregnancy of Rembrandt's housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels. In spite of all, Rembrandt died in bankruptcy, Van Loon was "killed" a few years later at the Battle of Kijkduin. Rembrandt's fame had evaporated, apparently forever.
The Author. Hendrik Willem Van Loon (pronounced "Van Loan") is fat and 48. Onetime newspaperman, onetime professor of history, he married his third wife after she had divorced her first husband, then left her for his second wife after his second wife had divorced her second husband; now lives with his second wife. While he was in Amsterdam getting material for this book he tried to raise money to pay Rembrandt's debts, rehabilitate the 300-year-old undischarged bankrupt. Other books: The Story of Mankind, Tolerance, America, The Story of the Bible. R. v. R. is the Literary Guild selection for October.
Prig's Progress
THIS PURE YOUNG MAN--Irving Fineman--Longmans, Green ($2).*
If you are a collector of prize novels, take a look at this one. It won Publisher Longmans, Green's competition and $7,500. Though the title sounds ironic, perhaps was so intended, it is not.
Roger and Harry grew up in the same small town, went to school and college together, were always friends. Harry was popular, ordinary, successful. Roger was unpopular, unsuccessful; otherwise quite like Harry. When they graduated from their Philadelphia college both entered the same architect's office. When the War came Harry enlisted, for no good reason; Roger stayed at home because he thought war was silly and architecture not, eventually married one of Harry's girls. He and Alice had a hard time, because Roger's architectural ideas were a little too pure to be successful, also because his mind was less than half on Alice. Finally, just after he had turned in his design for the Dobson Award, he was operated on for hernia, died under the anesthetic. Harry came home with the rest of the doughboys, married Alice, took over Roger's prize-winning design, made a fortune.
Author Fineman's sympathy, strangely but unmistakably, is with his hero Roger, whom an alienist would call an invert, the plain man a prig.
Mann's Dog
A MAN AND His DOG--Thomas Mann--Knopf ($2.50).
Few literary men since Shakespeare have dared to dislike dogs. Gentle Will never mentioned them without a sneer, but Thomas Mann has a dog of his own, likes him so much he has written a book about him.
Bashan, "a short-haired setter" with a broad hint of Airedale, is a dog of engaging but not heroic character. A great actor, he hates to be hurt. "If he happened to have scratched his belly a little in vaulting over the fence, or sprained his foot, I have been treated to an antique hero's chorus, a three-legged limping approach, an uncontrollable wailing and self-lamentation." Bashan pretends to be a mighty hunter before his lord, actually never kills any thing but field mice, though he thinks him self a ravening threat to rabbits. He once caught a pheasant by accident and had no idea what to do with it, was relieved when it went away. Best scene in the book: a description of two strange dogs meeting for the first time, "both with hangdog look, miserable and deeply em barrassed and both incapable of yielding an inch or of passing each other."
The Author. Thomas Mann, 55, is reputed Germany's most considerable liv ing novelist. In 1929 he won the Nobel Prize. He lives with his wife, six chil dren and Bashan in a villa on the outskirts of Munich. Other books: The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, Royal Highness, Children and Fools, Early Sorrow.
* 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 tmknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.
* Published Sept. 18.
* Published Sept. 24.
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