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THE SEVEN SEAS

Czech Authors in General and Srámek in Particular-"T. D. E."The Frenchwoman Retaliates-America Through French Eyes Paul Morand-An Engineer Turns to Writing-Joseph Delteil The Proust Cycle — Legends of Proust and Montesquiou.

THE

HE war was responsible for the recognition of the Czechoslovakian peoples. The name "Czechoslovak❞ no longer has that unfamiliar ring of the days when dispatches began to appear in American newspapers recounting the exploits of Czechoslovak troops in Russia and Siberia. The existence of a wide and cosmopolitan Czech literature has been recognized with fortunate promptitude, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of modern pioneers like Joseph V. Sládek, who paid a two years' visit to the United States, one result of which was the translation of Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha" and Bret Harte's "California Stories" into the Czech language. Dr. Karel Capek's curiously powerful plays, “R. U. R." and "The Insect Play", also served to stimulate western interest in Czechoslovak literature.

Of living Czech authors, one of the most distinguished is Fráňa Srámek, whose volume of war stories, called "The Startled Soldier", was recently published. He is as yet little known to western readers, but I venture to predict an enthusiastic vogue for this writer's work if translation can do him justice. Srámek first published a volume of revolutionary poems, and all his subsequent work, whether novels, plays, or short stories, is marked by a strong lyrical vein. This is particularly effective in his short stories, in which the whimsical imagery of the style imparts a touch of roman

ticism even to quite realistic subject matter. At the same time he displays a remarkable subtlety in handling delicate psychological situations. In addition to "The Startled Soldier", he has written the following collections of short stories: "Piano and Violin", "Seven Sorrows", "Joy of Life", and "The Aspen". Of his novels, "The Silvery Wind" bears a close resemblance, both in style and subject matter, to James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

Srámek's masterpiece is "The Body", a boldly realistic novel of Prague life, in which the sensitive and pictorial qualities of his short stories are exhibited in their most artistic aspect. Altogether he may be regarded as the first to enrich narrative Czech prose with a personal diction and rhythm. His plays, the chief of which are "Summer", "The Moon Above the River", "The Bells", "The Weeping Satyr", and "The Judgment", are often animated by a lyrical spirit which impedes their dramatic effect; only "The Judgment" can be said to have achieved an unqualified theatrical

success.

An extraordinarily fantastic novel is "Trusts for the Destruction of Europe" by Ilja Ehrenburg (Williams Publishing Verlag, Berlin). The “D. E. Trust" is an undertaking supposed to be founded with the utmost secrecy

in 1925 and subsidized by American millionaires with the systematic destruction of Europe for its object. Beginning with the destruction of Germany by French tanks, this "novel of the future" goes on to describe the infection of the Russian population with bacilli, the starving out of England, the rapid diminution and final cessation of births in France (a bitterly satirical chapter, this), until nothing remains of Europe but a barren wilderness.

This weird story is told in a curiously matter of fact style which imparts a gruesome touch of realism to the book. The author has a trenchant wit and his pages are full of incidents amusing as well as startling. But the underlying satirical motif cannot escape the attention of the thoughtful reader. "T.D.E." is a book which will, I think, attract widespread attention if translated and published in English.

Throughout the years authors as different as Mary Borden and Thackeray, Anne Douglas Sedgwick and Laurence Sterne, have been presenting more or less accurate and more or less sympathetic pictures of France and its people to Anglo-Saxon readers. Now France retaliates, and though the retort is courteous it is none the less pointed.

In the near future we are promised a book by a French woman of title in which, by way of reply to Mary Borden's "Jane Our Stranger" with its description of Paris society as it appeared to a rich American woman, we are to be shown how American "social climbers" are regarded by Continental aristocrats.

Another view of that eternally fascinating subject, "the American woman" as seen through French eyes,

is presented us by Christiane Fournier in a lately published novel, "La Parabole d'Amour". Here we have a picture of a middle western coeducational university as it appeared to a girl who spent a number of months there, first as a student, later as instructress. It should be said at once that the portrait of the girl graduate as painted by Miss Fournier is not an attractive, therefore surely not a faithful one. Loys, the heroine of "La Parabole d'Amour", and her friends are hard, selfish, spoiled, and rather brainless little things ready to sacrifice much for the sake of "having a good time". The men in the story are more attractive, and the book contains some deftly drawn sketches of American scenery both in the middle west and in Virginia, where Loys pays a country house visit.

Other recent novels dealing with America by French authors are Maurice Dekobra's "Mon Cœur au Ralenti" and Pierre MacOrlan's "Les Pirates de l'Avenue de Rhum". The former presents a lively if somewhat highly colored picture of high and low life in New York; while "Les Pirates", written by a man who is probably acquainted with pirates and who certainly knows rum, reminds the reader of a chapter of Stevenson à la française. It is to be hoped however that neither will be taken too seriously by historians of the future.

Speaking of authors who really do study their subjects, one may mention Paul Morand and his forthcoming volume of short stories. Before writing his novel "Lewis et Irène", which is closely concerned with modern finance, Morand spent six months in one of the great banking houses in Paris mastering the intricate mysteries of foreign

exchange and stock market transactions. It may have been a recollection of this fact which caused one of his dear confrères to say of Morand the other day: "Poor fellow, he's looking badly lately and no wonder. His next book is called 'L'Europe Galante'. Just think what he must have gone through to get his facts!"

Before leaving the subject of exotism in recent French literature it is essential to speak of the wholly delightful volume entitled "L'Honorable Partie de Campagne" by Thomas Rancat. The author, an engineer who has lived several years in Japan, here makes his début as a professional man of letters. It is an altogether auspicious one. May he speedily abandon his steel bridges, dynamos, motors, or whatever form of mechanical contrivance he may deal in, and give us more of these charming pictures of a country and people very different from the conventional lay figures of Loti's "Madame Chrysanthème". The honorable O Tara San, aged two but with a hat, his honorable mother and her honorable friends, to say nothing of the station master, are remarkably vivid creations.

How many American readers of French are there who have discovered Joseph Delteil? If one can stomach Rabelais and can, in spite of a certain almost incredible coarseness of language, enjoy prose which is incandescent with highly colored and original metaphors, then one should read his "Sur le Fleuve Amour", "Les Cinq Sens", or better still, "Cholera". This author, who up till now has appeared as a modern of the moderns, a disciple of Freud at his most explicit, announces that he is about to present us with the first really adequate biography of Jeanne d'Arc! It is safe to predict that his book will be

something very different from the scholarly compilation of Anatole France or the panegyrics of more orthodox writers. The chapter which appeared not long ago in the "Nouvelle Revue Française" had in it, besides a certain naive realism, a dignity and tenderness which one would hardly have expected to find in Delteil. To have made Anatole France devout and Delteil pure is reason enough for pronouncing Joan a worker of miracles.

No French author in the past ten years has received more praise from foreign critics than Marcel Proust. The next volume of Proust's great cycle "A la Recherche du Temps. Perdu" will appear in June. As previously announced, it will be entitled "Albertine Disparu". We learned, in the fragment published by "The Criterion" last spring, that Albertine is killed by being thrown from her horse. The opening of the new volume goes on and shows us, with all of Proust's characteristic minuteness, the various reactions which this event arouses in the heart of the man who has loved her. But that is by no means all. One of Proust's favorite doctrines was the fragility of human sentiments, and we are not altogether surprised to find his hero taken up with a new intrigue. The latter is made the more piquant by the fact that the woman in the case is none other than Gilberte, his and our - old friend,

the daughter of Odette Swann. It would be unfair to the reader further to reveal the contents of the volume. We are assured, however, by those who have had the privilege of reading the text before publication, that this latest book is in every respect worthy of its predecessors.

Like Proust, Robert de Montes

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SEN

You win the love of men

Who look upon you as a soft

And indiscreetly reassuring minx.

You stand upon the street corner

Of their trysts and felonies.
Underneath your glance

Their disappointments grow less harsh

And assume a charmed, theatrical pose,
While their momentary victories

Feel an ardent ownership of life.

Again, to other men you seem

Obnoxious, cloying, and replete

With remedies that merely drug the wound.

To them, you wander through the sharp

And carnal vagaries of life,

And make the faces of men and women

Blind beneath your perfumed handkerchief.

Yet, you are none of the figures

Engraved upon you by the needs of men.
You stand, invincibly compassionate;
Disguised by frail, poetic mockeries;

Held up by an ephemeral erectness

Whose finely knitted lies

Are often better than the stripped

And grossly stooping honesties of life.

You wait for men to corrupt you

With their snivelings and heavy smiles,
But at your best you add

A quickly graceful, valiant compensation
To the underpaid and slowly wilting
Slaveries of minds and hearts.

IN THE BOOKMAN'S MAIL

THE EDITOR OF THE BOOKMAN:

To was your rather puzzled query, "How Sell, Why Buy?" which appeared in the March BOOKMAN a rhetorical question, or would a reply be permissible? It seems to me that there are some definite reasons why people buy one particular book instead of another very much like it in size and color", and also why publishers find advertising an effective means of selling their wares.

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Generally speaking, readers are of two types those to whom reading is as much a necessity as eating and sleeping, and who form their own literary judgments; and those admirable souls who read only the most talked of books. The laudable aim of these readers is to be "up" on literature, or else they are pursued with the American's great bogy, fear of missing something.

Individuals who comprise the first class differ widely in taste, of course. As you say, some booklovers buy Zane Grey's perennial novel as faithfully as they buy the Newsboy's Annual on New Year's Day, while others wait expectantly for new books of James Branch Cabell or of Aldous Huxley. But after all, every reader's list of favorite contemporary writers is comparatively short, and while some of these readers rely thereafter upon the "classics", a greater number are open to suggestion. point the ubiquitous book advertisement enters, and I really believe that advertisements even of books leave an impress on one's consciousness.

At this

I have selected, almost at random, several book advertisements from a weekly literary review. The writer whose book is announced in the following is virtually unknown, hence the reader is given an idea of the book by the method of comparison:

THE CONSTANT NYMPH By Margaret Kennedy As witty as May Sinclair at her best-fascinatingkeen!

If the reader is particularly fond of May Sinclair's books, he will indignantly read "The Constant Nymph" to verify his preconceived decision that Miss Kennedy is not as witty as May Sinclair. On the other hand, if he is addicted to Harold Bell Wright and has never heard of May Sinclair, it is an even chance that he will not be interested in "The Constant Nymph". But he certainly wouldn't have been, anyway, if the advertisement had not appeared, and there is a possibility that the title may attract him!

Many book publicity men are evidently adherents of the theory recently made, that no novel can be a best seller which does not introduce a woman and the suggestion of a love affair within the first fifty pages. People who are captivated by the effusions of Elinor Glyn, Robert W. Chambers, and the like, are gratifyingly responsive to such announcements as the following:

BUY IT-READ IT-LAUGH AND THR-I-ILL!

The very prolongated spelling of the last word gives an anticipatory shiver of excitement!

Now that Percy Marks's "The Plastic Age" is being serialized in the New York "Evening Journal", the following brief announcement is more than sufficient:

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MARTHA

BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE PLASTIC AGE" Percy Marks

The thousands of "Evening Journal" readers are unswerving in their loyalty, and 'Martha" will undoubtedly be a best seller in the most lucrative sense of the word.

Human beings, or at any rate, Americans, cannot resist the announcement of a bargain sale an announcement to which is appended the warning:

COME EARLY- The DEMAND for these stockings will far exceed the SUPPLY-NO MORE THAN SIX PAIRS TO ONE PERSON!

Consequently, advertisements like the following react with great effect upon those who read to be "up" on literature:

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Since advertising in this country has been raised to a stage of perfection wherein 'more than a million of us weekly" spend five cents to admire the artistic pictures of superb automobiles, browned biscuits, and several brands of toothpaste, each of which is the only way of avoiding frightful diseases of the teeth, small wonder that we cannot avoid the reading of book advertisements! As a result of years of travel in street cars, subways, and in motor cars, we have unconsciously acquired the habit of examining every spot of bright artificial color. One placard informs us that some enterprising American has invented an unfailing system of developing dimples where none have

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