Little Fellows' Big Man

THE STORY OF MY LIFE--Clarence Darrow--Scribner ($3.50).

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

"What is justice?" asks Criminal-Lawyer Darrow. Patient, he has stayed around some 74 years, but the answer has not come to him yet.

Though what justice may be he does not know, he has plenty of ideas and experience as to what injustice is. The sight of men being oppressed, and then suppressed when they have stepped into legal traps, was too painful for him to bear without protest. He makes no altruistic pretensions, says honestly: "It was really my lively imagination which put me in the other fellow's place and made me suffer with him; so I only relieved him to help myself."

Starting out as a small-town Ohio lawyer, in 1888 he moved to Chicago. There, after making a successful speech from the same platform as Single-Taxer Henry George, he was appointed special assessment attorney. Soon after he became general attorney of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Co. In 1894 came the great strike of the American Railway Union, headed by Eugene Debs. During the course of the strike Darrow, though still connected with the Northwestern, went over to the strikers. From then on he was busy with labor cases, strikes, condemnation, chancery and finally criminal cases. The criminal cases interested him most.

The Anthracite Coal Strike, Haywood Trial, McNamara Case, Loeb-Leopold Trial, Scopes Case brought Darrow fame; did not change his attitude toward the penal code. Much of his work was done with little pay and in the face of public opinion. But when he undertook a case nothing could stop him. He fought for his clients as for his own life.

Many years of practice made Darrow sadder if not wiser about the wagging of the world. Of meaning in life he finds none, expects to find none hereafter. Looking back over his career this famous lawyer, a hero to millions, gives his mature conclusion: "I am not sure of how much or how little I have really accomplished, if anything, for the fellow beings of my day."

Ventriloquacity

THESE RESTLESS HEADS--Branch Cabell --McBride ($2.50).

When James Branch Cabell published The Way of Echen, thereby putting his "final and finishing touch to the Biography of the life of Manuel," Cabellians every-where assumed that their author had wrapped his singing robes over his head and retired till kingdom come. Pending that happy advent, however, the creator of Poictesme must find means to ease his very restless head. To combine retirement with activity he now speaks his mind through a ventriloqual figure. Branch Cabell, sheared of his Christian name, is in all other respects his spit and image.

The main theme of his talk is the author's literary career, its rewards & punishments. On this subject he spares no sensibilities, not even his own, minces no words, without malice prepense. He does not hesitate to call a spade a dung-scoop or Pegasus a stallion. Among those writers who can damn the world's illusion with feint praise, Cabell holds, deserves to hold, high place.

Though "the beginning male author of today is but too often suggestive of a slightly crushed foetus with an insolvent mustache." Author Cabell takes his literary profession seriously. "Every writer of fiction comes among us. . . from out of a land in which he is God: he comes from a high ordaining of love and death and of all human affairs in this mote familiar land. . . ." For Cabell the land of Pictesme is his spirit's home. Neither the daily visits of his postman. Fearing fan mail from the outside world, nor the American flag that flaps before his summer writing-porch, in "that Viriginia summer resort which nowadays . . . is best known to my inattentiveness," can wean him from it.

Not even the night wind that moans about the aging author "imprisoned . . . in a small black and silver room between a typewriter and an unabridged dictionary" can scare him over to Aesred, the goddess of conformity. Still, "this pseudolyric nonsense . . . has become not quite the sort of nonsense to be regarded seriously by a responsible householder who lives in a common-sense world." Aging, Responsible-Householder Cabell finds that he must, though he cannot, put his shining people out of mind.

These Restless Heads is the February selection of the Literary Guild.

The Author-- Phi Beta Kappa coal-miner, society reporter (New York Herald), Genealogist James Branch Cabell has written some 18 volumes about the inhabitants of Poictesme. fairyland of his heart's desire, drawn in such mind's-eye detail that he has made maps of it. Born in Richmond, Va., in 1879 ne still does most of his writing there. The biographer of Manuel does not concern himself with ordinary life or contemporary affairs, feels that "Art is a criticism of life only in the sense that prison breaking is a criticism of the penitentiary." Mildly claustropho-biac. his desk faces a doorway; he cannot write unless he can look up and see an exit. His writing provides him a mental exit. These Restless Heads, concerned with Poictesme only in introspect, is his first book written over the decapitated signature Branch Cabell.

Blunderbess

LOADS OF LOVE -- Anne Parrish Harper ($2.50).

Bessie Plummer is so clumsy that whatever she does she puts her foot (size 8 1/2 EE) into it. When she eats a peach it drools down her blouse; from the top of her canapes the caviar always rolls off. She always ends her telegrams with "love," her letters with "loads of love."

To her New Hampshire camp Heart's Home, decorated with "moose heads in the hall, and Wagner in a tam-o'-shanter on the piano," she invites her young cousin Edward, who, delicate, is trying to write novels. She thinks Edward is in love with her, but cannot let well enough alone, invites artistic Katherine Ripley to share her summer fun. Katherine and Edward fall desperately in love. Bessie encourages them with picnics, ghost stories, "Nita, Juanita." But all the while Jenny Owen, a young country girl who helps out in the house, looks adoringly at Edward. He grows fond of her, so fond that Katherine in despair goes to live with her philosophical Aunt Caroline. Bessie cracks Edward up in an automobile accident. After Jenny has nursed him back to health he marries her.

Their life at Edward's Boston home is made miserable by Edward's doting mother, who jealously accuses Jenny of interfering with her son's novel-writing. Jenny is brokenhearted, runs back to Bessie; but Edward follows her. Bessie's goodwill overflows. She gets Edward a job in Philadelphia; has him, Jenny and the baby up to her camp in the summer. After a picnic she dumps a pitcher of water over Edward, forces him to go swimming with her in the icy lake. Racing to shore she gets there first, eats a dribbling pear while laughing at Edward's funny thrashings out in the water. Edward drowns.

Jenny shares her sorrow with Katherine for a time, finally goes back with her baby to Bessie's. Bessie has learned nothing, still suffers from elephantiasis of lovingkindness. Before this loving-kindness can do any more hurt, Authoress Parrish ends her clever novel in a hurry.

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