G. B. S. & E. T.

ELLEN TERRY AND BERNARD SHAW, A CORRESPONDENCE--Putnam ($5).

George Bernard Shaw is old now (75) and Ellen Terry is dead (since 1928); but they were young once. These letters, a record of an amazingly tender affair of the heart, bear witness to their protracted youth. Published not only with Shaw's permission but with his connivance, the book has a foreword by Shaw, numerous explanatory notes. The story the letters tell was a queer affair.

When Shaw was 36 and a music critic in London, Ellen Alicia Terry, 44, was Britain's No. 1 Actress, playing in the company of Britain's No. i Actor, Henry

Irving. Actress Terry first indirectly wrote to Critic Shaw about the musical prospects of a protege of hers. The correspondence continued, grew more & more intimate, but Bernard and Ellen did not meet for eight years. By that time Shaw had married and the romantic bloom had apparently withered. They did not see much of each other afterwards, though Ellen Terry later played the lead in one of Shaw's plays (Captain Brassbound's Conversion). Says Shaw: "She was always a little shy in speaking to me; for talking, hampered by material circumstances, is awkward and unsatisfactory after the perfect freedom of writing between people who can write." This paper love-affair was the symbol of a sincere affection, but the endearments they used might be misconstrued. Shaw says both exaggerated--he from ingrained Irish chivalry, she from stage convention. He called her "dearest and beautifullest," "dearest love"; she called him "sweet-heart," "my beautiful," tried to get him to call her "Nellen," but he wouldn't. Once Shaw wrote to her: "Dearest Love: send me one throb of your heart whilst it is still tender with illness. It will be hard again on Monday; so be quick, quick, quick." Once Ellen Terry wrote to him: "Dear fellow, Goodbye. On each of your fingers', goodbye, and on the end of your little nose, good-bye." As their intimacy progressed they wondered how and when they would meet. They had seen each other in public, at a distance. They just missed meeting several times: once when Ellen Terry knew Shaw was at a conference with Henry Irving she decided to walk in on them, got as far as the door, lost her nerve and went away. When they finally did meet it was under the stage at a play of Shaw's; apparently it was not a very satisfactory encounter.

In his capacity as interfering person and amateur solicitor Shaw wrote Ellen Terry reams of good advice, never tired of trying to persuade her to forsake Shakespeare and Henry Irving (who, Shaw thought, was wasting her talents) and cast in her lot with a really good playwright, one George Bernard Shaw. But she stuck to Irving about as long as he needed her. Shaw admired her loyalty, never ceased to upbraid her wrongheadedness. Loud in his Brobdingnagian denunciations of Henry Irving, Shaw did not resent the fact that Ellen Terry had "many enduring friendships, some transient fancies, and five domestic partnerships of which two were not legalized."

Ellen Terry's letters to Shaw, hardly ever as long, as funny, as well-turned as his, are surprisingly human, touchingly wise. They serve as an excellent foil to the Shavian epistolary brilliance. And she brought out in the "inhuman" Shaw a side his readers and audiences have not often seen, a side of him which was uppermost when he wrote this last tribute to her memory: "She became a legend in her old age; but of that I have nothing to say; for we did not meet, and, except for a few broken letters, did not write; and she never was old to me. Let those who may complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love."

One of Those Lamps

THE WAVES -- Virginia Woolf -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Like all professions, literature is roomy at the top. To that top few women have aspired; fewer still in their own lifetime have arrived. This generation has had its fair share of authoresses who were first-class writers: the late Elinor Wylie and Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willa Gather, Colette, Virginia Woolf. Of this little list Virginia Woolf stands preeminent. Never a popular writer, always dangerously clever, she writes not as one enameling teacups but as one embroidering a theme; her theme is life.

The Waves, most ambitious, least tea-cuppy of Virginia Woolf's books, like most of her books is startlingly original in method. As a kind of prolog you are treated to a description of dawn over the English coast; this scene comes in again a little later, when the sun has risen--and so on, till night has fallen again. The story proper is written entirely in direct discourse which is really soliloquy, shading sometimes into a kind of ghostly dialog. Except for the inevitable "said Bernard" 's and "said Louis" 's there is not a word in it outside quotation marks. This may sound like boring reading, but Authoress Woolf knows her job: it is not boring. Into her soliloquies she has put everything you need to know about the characters; as you get used to this artfully artificial method you cease to notice its strangeness.

Six children, three boys and three girls, apparently not related (Authoress Woolf never makes this clear), live in a house on the coast. They are all about the same age, all do the same lessons together under the severe eye of the governess. They go away to school, for the first time the boys & girls separate. But now you begin to recognize them as individuals. Bernard is happy-go-lucky, lovable; Louis is cold, snobbish, ashamed of his Australian accent; Neville is shyly passionate. Jinny is an attractive little animal; Susan fierce, proud; Rhoda is ungainly, helpless, doomed to hopelessness. After school Bernard and Neville go to the University; Louis's fortunes need him in business. Jinny takes to London society like a duck to water; Rhoda hates it; Susan goes home to be a country girl. As the sun climbs through the heavens they all get older, see each other on rarer and rarer occasions. Susan marries, so does Bernard; Jinny is having too good a time, Neville is too homosexual; Louis and Rhoda are lovers for a while. When you hear Bernard's final speech they are all well along in middle-age; Rhoda has killed herself; the sun has set. The effect of The Waves is less like that of a novel than of an epic; the plane in which the whole narration moves is more like poetry than prose. To this effect the artificial method of the story, in which the characters are like heralds speaking, contributes perhaps as much as the cunningly-contrived sentences. Authoress Woolf does not write the kind of phrases that can be skipped: in The Waves hides many a half-submerged treasure which a skimming reader might miss. Now & then you strike pure poetry: ". . . like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster."

The Author-- When Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882, daughter to once-famed Sir Leslie Stephen, literary critic and freethinker, she was related to half the most scholarly families in England (some of them: Darwins, Symondses, Stracheys). When she grew up to be a tall, pale, Burne-Jonesy young lady, she and her sister Vanessa lived together in Bloomsbury. Around them soon collected the nucleus of the "Bloomsbury Group" of writers (Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey). In 1912 Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf; together they founded the Hogarth Press. Critics soon became respectfully aware of Virginia Woolf. Said they: ". . . Liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time. . . . Everything excites her, beggars and duchesses, snowflakes and dolphins. . . ." Passionately intelligent, with a long, drooping, intellectual face, large, heavy-lidded, straining eyes, Virginia Woolf looks as if she were peering out from a borderland where great wits remember their kinship to madness. Other books: The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Monday or Tuesday, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own.

Short Faulkners

THESE THIRTEEN--William Faulkner-- Cape & Smith ($2.50).* Sensation of the year in U. S. fiction has certainly been Author William Faulkner. His nightmare novel Sanctuary (TIME, Feb. 16) sent many a critical wig flying on the green, many a reader hurrying to get Faulkner's earlier books (Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying). Of these 13 short stories (his first collection) some are new; none will much help or hurt his still controversial reputation. Some of the plots:

A reckless Southerner turned British airman fights a picayune guerilla warfare with his superior officer for the favors of a cocotte. He comes out ahead, then a Taube gets him.

A wandering file of soldiers plunge through a shallow crater, find themselves in a chalk cavern surrounded by Senegalese skeletons, long dead by gas.

The tough cook of a freighter goes nearly crazy when his pearly-eyed protege gives him the slip in Naples and succeeds in losing his innocence.

Faulkner's severest critics have never denied his ability to write; his blindest praisers have never asserted his optimism. This is the way he writes about writing: "And so, being momentary, it can be preserved and prolonged only on paper; a picture, a few written words that any match, a minute and harmless flame that any child can engender, can obliterate in an instant. A one-inch sliver of sulphur-tipped wood is longer than memory or grief: a flame no larger than a sixpence is fiercer than courage or despair."

Werewolf

THE WOLF IN THE GARDEN--Alfred H. Bill--Longmans ($2).* The little Hudson River town of "New Dortrecht," in the year 1792, was a peaceful & pleasant community until the arrival of the French emigre M. de Saint Loup, with his great wolfhound De Retz. Then in rapid succession came six terrible killings, tales of a giant timber wolf no dog would face. Young Robert Farrier disliked the Frenchman from the first, hated him when he turned out to be a rival for Felicity's fair hand. Felicity preferred Robert but her uncle was in trouble with the banks; Saint Loup's timely money bought her. Hate sharpened Robert's wits, but he was too much the child of 18th Century enlightenment to put two & two together till the shrewd old Rector, whose hobby was lycanthropy, added them for him. In time's nick they settled the werewolf's fate.

Author Bill has enjoyed writing for years, but kept his amateur standing longer than he liked. Never a denizen of Grub Street, he now enjoys his professionalism even more. The Wolf in the Garden, a frank thriller, is written with greater care, more distinction than writers on such subjects usually have at their disposal. Other books: Alas, Poor Yorick!, The Red Prior's Legacy.

Gold-Digger's Progress

RED-HEADED WOMAN--Katharine Brush --Farrar & Rinehart ($2)./-

When Gulliver on his travels encountered the Yahoos, he thought the red-headed females the worst of the lot. Gulliver's Travels, most savage of satires, could never have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. A few years ago, neither could Red-Headed Woman. But Authoress Brush's Yahoo has little in common with the Swift Yahoos except a coldly salacious temperament which Authoress Brush does not dwell on.

Lillian came from the wrong side of the tracks in a small Ohio town. She was pretty, she was scheming, her ambition was inordinate. Though she liked a good time she was careful about it. When she got the job of stenographer to the town's most eligible young man she felt her foot was on the ladder. It was. Before Bill knew what was happening to him Lillian had him in a shrewdly compromising mess, his adored young wife had divorced him, and in a daze he had married Lillian. In the uneven battle that followed between Lillian and local society both sides scored some notable victories; at times, in spite of everything, your sympathies are with the outrageous redhead. When Lillian saw she was making no headway, like a good general she changed her tactics, wheedled her way to Manhattan and went after a real millionaire. She got him. By the time you take leave of her you have the feeling there will be others later but that, like the Northwest Mounted Police, she will always get her man.

*Published Sept. 21. *Published Sept. 16. /-Published Oct. 3.

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