Compact Disgust*

AMERICA'S PRIMER--Morris L. Ernst-- Putnam ($2).

This is a tight, tart little diatribe upon Things That Are in the U. S. It is compact with disgust of a shrewd Manhattan lawyer who despises cultural inconsistencies and would like to destroy them. Superficially America's Primer resembles New Russia's Primer (TIME, May 4). But the Russia book was written especially for native schoolchildren. America's Primer is a phrase book for those discontented, restless, loosely anchored, ever-thinking, rarely-doing citizens of the larger U. S. communities who grope for but seldom encompass Reform. They are the folks who discuss what Colyumist Heywood Broun writes, who when abnormally excited vote for Socialist Norman Thomas, both good friends of Author Ernst.

Examples of Ernst disgust:

"A few of the people own most of the machines and the oil wells. The rest must work, starve or be supported by charity. And the great bulk work. Some few have learned the knack of living without work. They join the constant soup kitchen brigade. Many are too old or sick or maimed or insane. Nearly 100,000 people are in the almshouses, and more than 350,000 are in the state institutions for mental patients."

"One might imagine that labor was the essential contributor to wealth and that in consequence it would have a sort of first claim on the income of the land. This is scarcely the case. In 1930, with hard times on top of us, dividends and interest payments increased to 8 billions of dollars from 7 1/2billions in 1929. And meanwhile, wage payments which amounted to 45 billion dollars in 1929, decreased to 35 billion in 1930."

"Whenever the bankers, the employers and the workers have been excessively efficient misery spreads throughout the land."

"We allow Government to creep into our economic life only by the back door. We are afraid of regulation, primarily because our governments have been corrupt and ugly. Perhaps we keep the State ugly and dishonest as an excuse for turning it away more readily from the portals of business."

"For the first hundred years of this nation there was a free market in ideas sexual. Up to 1870 advertisements of contraceptives, and full discussion of sexual matters, appeared in all the leading papers of the land. After a hundred years the state held that nearly every discussion of sex was dangerous to the family, the youth, and hence to the State."

"The urge to be heard, to preach a gospel, to tell a tale, deluges us with new books every day."

In general the book is factually correct, no matter what the deductions. In one detail, however, the author's cocky memory tricked him. He refers to "a legend that a Mr. Astor, a cattle merchant, fed his stock great quantities of water just before he drove them to market. . . . His 'watered stock' made him rich." The trickster was the late unctuous, sniveling Daniel Drew, the cattle-watering one of the simplest and earliest of his many business rogueries.

The Author. Morris Leopold Ernst, 43 last fortnight, was born in Alabama, got his general education at Williams College, his law at New York University. He is swarthy, small and solidly built. Membership in the "Dr. John Roach Straton's Sunday Morning Bowling & Breakfast Club" has not prevented a gentle paunch. He is a swift thinker, an eager talker. To him, as to Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays. Liberals, workers, writers and bohemians look for championship & defense. Other books: (with others) To the Pure: History of Obscenity ; Censored: Private Life of the Movies (TIME, March 24, 1930).

Groper

ALBERT GROPE--F. O. Mann--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Novels in the autobiographical form which fail to describe carefully the hero's "awakening" (first woman) are now so rare that one in which this event does not even occur can be classed as a literary phenomenon. Albert Grope is a phenomenal book in other respects also. It deals in the mood and vernacular of Victorian fiction, with the humble upbringing and start in the world of a commercially enterprising but socially timid late-century Cockney Londoner. The hero, speaking in the first person, describes events preceding by 20 years his recording of them. But it takes a typically Victorian literary license to account for the difference between the groping timidities of Albert Grope and the caustic, scrupulous and sometimes slightly patronizing style of his more mature meditations. There are moments when Author Mann allows his hero's manner to become a little coy; but reverence for life, rather than a sly familiarity with its absurdities, makes itself felt on some of his 576 pages.

At the beginning of the book, Albert Grope is going to board school while his widowed mother chars, washes, mangles (irons). He gets a job with a butcher and is discharged. He gets a job with a second-hand bookdealer and out of his savings, when the dealer dies, sets up his own shop. Presently he branches into the advertising business and this sideline is so profitable that he soon has a factory and a fat income.

But he has almost no friends. He gets engaged to a girl who despises him; mingles in church socialities which turn out to be humiliating. He finally gets involved in a literary group of middle-aged ladies. One of these tries to marry him. He evades her and is planning to marry a younger and more amiable member of the circle when the narrative closes.

It is in the detailed, usually comic portraits of minor characters, and in a Dickensian wealth of incident that Author Mann most openly and ably copies the Victorians. Grope's second employer, the bookdealer, gives all his time to painting ridiculous pictures which he considers masterpieces; his garrulous wife infuriates him to such a degree that, on the night he dies, he likens her manner of getting into bed to that of an elephant; Grope's landlady, when he moves to finer lodgings, gives a banquet for him and makes her shy, beer-drinking husband give a speech. The tartness of Author Mann's style, his true sense of invention save the book from being purely an imitation and make it salty reading almost all the way.

The Author, like his hero, was born in South London, in 1885. A fellow of University College in London and a graduate of Oxford, he has taught English & History at Oxford and now, as Matthew Arnold did in 1851, holds an appointment as one of His Majesty's inspectors at the Board of Education. In 1924, he was lent by the Board of Education to investigate and report on the educational system of Egypt and the Sudan. Hitherto a better known educationalist than writer, he has published three volumes of verse; edited, in 1912, The Works of Thomas Deloney. Albert Grope is the September selection of the Book League of America.

Under the Greenwood Tree

THE BLANKET OF THE DARK--John Buchan--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

In the reign of lusty King Henry VIII, England was in sorry plight. The State was pillaging the Church. The Enclosures had made weedy grazing land where once stood pleasant farms. Sir Thomas More cried out: "In England the sheep are eating up the men!"

Into this misery, says Author Buchan, came a clerk of Oseney nearby Oxford. He was called Peter Pentecost, poor, humble, dispirited, and yet with a face and figure that any gypsy could tell were no churl's get.

It was not long before Peter Pentecost found that he was indeed no churl. He was the hidden son of the dead Duke of Buckingham whom King Harry had swept aside on his way to the throne. Peter suddenly found himself a man with a destiny. A group of ambitious, discontented nobles wanted to help him overthrow King Harry. Through his guardian, Brother Tobias, the Church also beckoned his aid. But the faction which turned out to be his unswerving support were the furtive, secret folk who had been driven to the greenwood by oppression.

Once Peter had King Harry alone and at his mercy in the forest, but he played his advantage badly, almost swung for it. He lost his chance at the throne and he lost the beauteous Sabine Beauforest. In so doing he gained his soul, a kingdom in the greenwood, and anonymity.

The Author has enriched his pages with painstaking scholarship, has attained some of the flavor of the historical novels of Scott and Stevenson. But only in the last chapters of The Blanket oj the Dark does his story drop its studious tempo, achieve the needed breathlessness of cloak-&-sword drama. Aged 55, John Buchan served in the War as London Times correspondent and as intelligence officer, has written a capable history of it. He lives at Oxford, serves as Member of Parliament besides writing and publishing. Says he: "I have to live on a very strict schedule. From Monday to Friday noon I put everything out of my head but poli tics and business . . ." Weekends he gardens and writes. His three ambitions: 1) to write a complete life of General Robert E. Lee; 2) "to make the best literature accessible to the poorest purse"; 3) to improve Anglo-American understanding.

Of his numerous adventure tales, Buchanites prefer: Greenmantle, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Witch Wood, Salute To Adventurers, The Courts Of The Morning.

*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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