Stone-Thrower

GLASS HOUSES--Carleton Beals -- Lippincott ($3.50).

Twenty years ago Carleton Beals landed in Mexico City. He had "youth, a good physique, two university degrees," but no money, and his clothes were in rags. Since then he has witnessed four Mexican revolutions, once taught military English to Carranza's staff, lectured on Shakespeare to the women of Mexico City's American colony, was held incommunicado by a Mexican general for an unflattering article, is now the best informed and the most awkward living writer on Latin America.

Last week Carleton Beals told the story of the first ten years of his journalistic career. Main exhibits in Glass Houses are not Latin American politics, but the little-known expatriate life of Mexico City. By comparison with the post-War Bohemianism of Mexico City he describes, Greenwich Village during the same period seems as innocent as a kindergarten. Mexico City swarmed with shady refugees from Europe, was headquarters for big plotters like the fabulous Russian Borodin (alias Ginzberg), with whom Beals used to quarrel over Realpolitik and eugenics. Borodin, claims Beals, invited him to participate in a plot to recover a million dollars worth of Tsarist jewels which he had lost to a double-crossing German revolutionist in Haiti. Pugilist Jack Johnson, a favorite of the carousing Mexican generals, gave Beals a $20 donation to start a literary magazine. Mike Gold disappointed Beals by giving up poetry to become a Communist columnist. D. H. Lawrence, whose genius Beals admitted, disgusted him by his neurotic social behavior.

The last half of Beals's autobiography describes a three-year tour of Europe, his relations with Ambassador Morrow, the breaking off of Mexican-Soviet relations, challenges the truth of many a story told by Author Beals's fellow journalists. Typical is his version of how it happened that the Nicaraguan rebel Sandino was equipped with Russian rifles. They were manufactured, says Beals, in the U. S. for Kerensky, whose government fell before they could be shipped. The rifles were then shipped to Calles, who sent them on to Sandino merely as a spiteful way to pay off his grudge against the U. S.

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