Twilighter

LIMITS AND RENEWALS--Rudyard Kipling--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Like a hoary ground hog looking for a shadow, Rudyard Kipling has again ventured from his Sussex lair. But either his spring is late or Mr. Kipling has passed to disembodied immortality and the twilight of the gods. No shadow falls. This first new fiction volume of Kipling in six years, a collection of 14 stories, 19 verses, conveys chiefly an aged emptiness. The stories are, of course, masterfully told, but they are not masterpieces.

A sample story is "Dayspring Mishandled." of how Manallace, "a darkish, slow northerner" meted out justice to an affected and bellied person called Alured Castorley. They had worked together at a Fictional Supply Syndicate until Castorley inherited some money and withdrew from hack work to follow "Literature." Chaucer was his prey; soon all the world recognized Castorley as a Chaucerian authority. Manallace remained a hack. During the War they were thrown together again. Castorley said something about the woman Manallace loved, which inspired in Manallace a smoldering anger. Years later, when Castorley had become so prominent as an author on "our Dan" that the slightest jiggle might pitch him into knighthood, a fragment of a hitherto unknown "Canterbury Tale" turns up in New York. Castorley is of course consulted. The lines he proclaims undoubtedly authentic: "Plangent as doom, my dear boy--look."

Ah Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe peyne

Daiespringe mishandeelt cometh not agayne.

"The freshness, the fun, the humanity, the fragrance of it all, cries itself as Dan Chaucer's work."

Castorley's words are printed all over the world. He becomes Sir Alured Castorley. Manallace grins, remains silent, helps Sir Alured prepare his major opus. Manallace's devilish plan has worked. Every single word of the Chaucer fragment was --you've guessed it--his very own.

Of the 19 verses, most noteworthy is a gibe at Hollywood/- and cinema, entitled "Naaman's Song." Excerpt:

. . . here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin

In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin. . . .

And here is mock of faith and truth, for children to behold;

And every door of ancient dirt reopened to the old;

With every word that taints the speech, and show that weakens thought;

And Israel watcheth over each, and-- doth not watch for nought.

Oliver Twist at Sea

BOY--James Hanley--Knopf ($2.50).

Hardly 13, Arthur Fearon, a puny, whimpering, pinch-faced Liverpool schoolboy, is brutally forced to work by a drunken father. His first job, bailing bilge water out of a filthy ship and chipping salt from the boilers, so sickens him that he crawls on to a tramp steamer, escapes as a stowaway. His life on the freighter is grim with the obscenities of shipmates from cook to bo's'n. Here is not the sea of Conrad, romantic with austerities, but a sea which has beaten its devotees into a coarse ritual. "What kind of world was it into which he had flung himself? All men sailing at sea seemed to be obsessed with boys." Larkin, an officer, his own friend, warned him against the sea. "You must either give in or break away. In my 20-odd years at sea I have been "disarmed and stripped naked by her. ... It eats into the heart, it reduces the brain to a sort of pulp." At Alexandria, still only 13. Fearon watches a cancan dance, fascinated, repulsed, wavering. His return a day later results in his catching syphilis. He would drown himself, but he is too weak to leap overboard. The end comes when the captain himself, sympathetic, smothers him in his great coat.

The Author. James Hanley, latest White Hope of the intelligentsia, was born in Dublin in 1901, went to sea at the same age as his hero. 13. In 1916 he joined the army, returning to the sea after the War. Onetime stoker, cook, butcher, clerk, post man. Author Hanley knows the proletariat of which he writes. His writing induces nausea in some readers--Hugh Walpole leading the hue & cry with a public shriek of horror--but causes in others a vehement banner-waving. Among the banner men are Thomas Edward Shaw (Col. Lawrence), Richard Aldington, John Cowper Powys. Laboriously punting upstream Author Hanley owes much of the success of his early efforts to the wake of Richard Aldington and Poet Robert Graves in his country. John Dos Passes and William Faulkner in the U. S.

Horsepower Humanized

BEHEMOTH--Eric Hodgins and F. Alexander Magoun--Doubleday, Doran($3.50).

This is a humanized history of power, culminating in today's giant-jowled 214,000 h. p. turbo-alternators, sleek, 34-wheeled million-pound locomotives, 70,000-ton steamers, dynamic colossi of all sorts, not to mention the minutiae of 35 million automobiles. (Of all the power generated in the U. S., 75% comes from gasoline engines, most of them driving automobiles. Giant power stations contribute only 5% to the total.) Solicitous as a Teutonic guide conducting tourists through a museum of Naturwisenschaften, Authors Hodgins & Magoun speak in terms a child could comprehend, lead the simple by the hand through labyrinths of invention & discovery.

Good legends come from the groping faith of the powerseekers: in 1829 the South Carolina Railway turned hopefully to sail power to drive its locomotives, found it impossible, however, "to cross a railway conductor with a haddock fisherman." The trainmen, unskilled in reef points and weather main braces gave up when the first engine mast cracked after reaching a speed of 12 or 13 m. p. h. In 1824, one George Stephenson--improver of locomotives--went before the House of Lords to plead for a charter authorizing the use of steam locomotives in England. The Lords thundered a denial. What would become of foxhunting? A frothy Lord asked the engineer how fast his locomotive would go. Stephenson, off his guard, guessed 12 m. p. h. Horrified, the Lords vetoed the plea. "England must be kept safe for travelers and serene for foxes."

Self-consciously unlearned, Messrs. Hodgins & Magoun avoid the philosophical pros & cons of the Machine Civilization. If, as they say, the economic pronouncements of Dr. Julius Klein often make them long for a world of spinning wheels, yet the medievalism of Ralph Adams Cram and others is just as likely "to drive them, sobbing, into the arms of Mr. Charles M. Schwab." They would, however, prefer to correct one false impression: that the power-seekers are materialists. For, "of the two great media of power, steam and electricity, one is imponderable and both are invisible." If the book has a fault it is this very emphasis on the poetic simplicity of inventors and the almost accidental zest with which they chance on millenium-making secrets. If these things be, it would come as no surprise to hear some day that Joe Cook, tampering with a circular saw, has accidentally solved the riddle of utilizing the gravitational pull of the moon and been given a research pension by General Electric.

/- Kipling's The Light That Failed was produced by Parliament with Percy Marmont as Dick Helder, in 1923. Poet Kipling visited Hollywood during the filming but had nothing to do with the direction. Without Benefit of Clery was produced by Pathe in 1921 from a script on which Kipling was consulted in England.

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