This Side of Purgatory

SOFT ANSWERS--Richard Aldington-- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Buried under the inexhaustible manna of contemporary material, satirists appear but rarely in literature today. One of these rare literary birds, as proved in his Death of a Hero and The Colonel's Daughter, is Author Aldington. Though he served in the War, he has never disavowed conscientious objections to large parts of the human race.

Six novelettes make up his latest scourge. Mostly they belabor comic futilities, backgrounded by that darker "murderous destructiveness which makes people go on destroying themselves when they've nothing better to destroy." Most guileless, most amusing, is the tale of Oswald, "the compleat bachelor," who longs only for a continuance of slippered ease and financial assistance from his dominating aunt. An overdraft at the bank sends him to her for help. She, concerned that he is not advancing in a "career," gives him hark-from-the-tomb. To pacify her, Oswald, to his own horror, suggests that he become a literary man. Desperately he begins to twiddle with pen & ink, and on the strength of this activity his aunt palms him off as a literary genius on Julia. But Julia soon discovers that Oswald's only genius is to loaf, even in the marriage bed. She takes some lovers on the sly. Oswald discovers her infidelity, goes to complain to his aunt. All he gets from her is hark-from-the-tomb again, for telling on his wife. She assures poor Oswald that some men are born to be cuckolds and that he is eminently one of them. Other stories are of "A Gentleman of England," who, if he was not perfect, "it was not for lack of thinking so"; of Jeremy Gibber, who, by mixing clam-like silences with psychological moments rose to be a leader of ecclesiastical thought; and "Last Straws," a powerful story of post-War aches &; pains.

The Author-- At 15 Englishman Aldington (born 1892) had made up his mind that writing was the life for him, married a writer [Imagist Poetess Hilda ("H. D.'') Doolittle] to make doubly sure. But the War made a soldier of him, left him shell-shocked for nine years. This interim he filled up with separating from his wife, writing verse, translating some 20 volumes from French, Italian, Latin. Greek. Now, recovered, he spends as much time as possible in France and Italy, thrives on writing books about human vanities more, shocking than war's shells.

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