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ible. It is a satire on present day fame. It is a story of people who, through some twist of fate or personal magnetism, arrive at great notoriety, to whom those on the fringes of society flock, whose liquor the sycophants drink, and who fall into ruin and neglect when the inevitable scandal attacks them. Fitzgerald has told, really, the story of a modern Cagliostro, and told it amazingly well. That I do not always know what he means, is perhaps my fault. Whether you like "The Great Gatsby" or not, whether you understand it or not, you at least cannot deny its vitality.

More Wrangling over Wrangel

STEF

TEFANSSON'S books always have a tang of controversy as well as adventure. His newest volume is no exception; in fact, it is the liveliest of the lot. Here he tells the true story of the settlement on Wrangel Island, of the death of the settlers, and of the manners and actions of the famous Ada Blackjack. "The Adventure of Wrangel Island" (Macmillan) has a multiple appeal. To those who enjoy To those who enjoy stories of hardship and conquest it will prove a story of dramatic incident and pathetic heroism. To those who enjoy detective stories, it will offer a problem in the unwinding of truths not clear at first glance; for the facts were apparently mistold in many of our prominent papers last year. To those interested in international politics, it gives a study of the movements of nations in the obtaining of new lands. To those who know Mr. Stefansson's vivid narratives of old, it gives, I think, the most of all. Can I say more?

Two other travel books I read this month and found only mildly interest

ing. "Unknown Tribes, Uncharted Seas" (Appleton) is a somewhat vivid narrative by Lady Richmond Brown who tells how she regained health by travel. Carveth Wells's "Six Years in the Malay Jungle" (Doubleday, Page) makes one wonder just a trifle, in spite of many interesting facts, how a man could spend so many years in a jungle and come out with so little sense of romance. However, don't let me keep you away from the books if you care for the ordinary travel story.

New England and the South

of Alice Brown's "The Mysteries of Ann" (Macmillan) lead one to believe that she has turned from realistic fiction of New England to the writing of detective stories. Quite the contrary, she has never penned a shrewder, more deft, or more captivating study of New England character than in this short novel which seems to me technically a masterpiece. She is writing, of course, of insanity in a mild form; but she does so with humor and a delicious sense of the ridiculous. What an absurd and charming play "The Mysteries of Ann" would make. The story of how Ann confused life with a story in her own mind, and how life turned out just like that, is fascinating and even thrilling. The comic New England sheriff has never been done with better wit. For several hours' reading there is nothing to beat this.

THE advertisements

James Boyd, whose "Drums" (Scribner) has already received much critical acclaim, writes curiously like Thomas Boyd, to whom he bears no relation other than that his books are published by the same firm. "Drums" is the story of Johnny Fraser of North Caro

lina and the American Revolution. Johnny is a youngster of bravery and charm. Mr. Boyd writes with great attention to atmospheric detail and with an uncanny sense of dialects. Still, for all that, there is something missing. I suspect that this Boyd will some day be considered one of our best; yet he lacks poetry and fire, and that curious quality of romance that one finds in others of his generation, in Sidney Howard, for example, or Louis Bromfield or Robert Nathan or Cyril Hume or, among his elders, Joseph Hergesheimer. Mr. Boyd is solid. He is worthwhile. I don't think he is exactly dull; but he is, without a shadow of a doubt, weighty.

Literary Genius et al.

ARY AUSTIN'S articles on gen

Mius, which ran, most of them, in

this magazine, have now been published under the title "Everyman's Genius" (Bobbs-Merrill). For the craftsman of any sort who wishes to understand the workings of the subconscious mind and the ways to which it may be put to serve the conscious, here is a book as necessary as an arithmetic. Mrs. Austin's claims are difficult ones to state, and she has accomplished the seemingly impossible. Her theory is that every man is possessed of genius if only he knows how to use it. One of the most interesting parts of the volume as it stands, and new to me, is the collection of data she has made on the methods of work of various geniuses in one line or another, from Bill Robinson, the buck and wing dancer, to Wilfred Lewis, the inventor. All of them testify in one way or another to the accomplishment of their best work through the use of the sub

conscious mind. With my own classes in composition, I have always used Mrs. Austin's theories. I find that after one or two talks on the use of the subconscious, the writing tends to become expressive of the students and to gain in power and force. In directing a young actor I once used Mrs. Austin's method, quite unknown to him; the resulting performance was the best he had ever given. Many people will find something strange in this theory and in this book; but to me it is thoroughly understandable, and vitally important.

"Principles of Literary Criticism" by I. A. Richards (Harcourt, Brace) is an excellent text on this much discussed subject. Mr. Richards not only advances his own critical theories, he analyzes, too, the history of æsthetics in a clear and understanding way. With this volume, Spingarn's "Literary Criticism in the Renaissance", and W. C. Brownell's brochure, "Criticism", the library of the potential critic or the student of reviews should be adequate.

A good book, too, is Ernest Boyd's "Studies from Ten Literatures" (Scribner), a discussion of leading contemporary figures in the various European countries. Mr. Boyd is informed on a variety of subjects and writes with amazing facility. As a literary journalist he is unexcelled, and his books occasionally rise above journalism to a high level of thought and entertainment. This is one of his best efforts.

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poems of grace and dramatic power, and lyrics of beauty. The preface by Charles Hanson Towne, from one friend to another, is warm with sentiment and understanding. Welsh, as we knew him, was a gentle person with a host of friends. His dramatic criticisms were kindly and his poetry, for the most part, concerned with the joy of living. Occasionally, however, as in "The Floorwalker", there is a note of quiet irony. The title poem has majesty and authority. It rings true throughout and the final stanza is memorable:

And yet the souls that Azrael brings
Across the dark and cold,
Look up beneath these folded wings,
And find them lined with gold.

Marion Strobel, like Aline Kilmer, finds moods and incidents in the ordinary life of woman to capture in lyric and dramatic stanza. "Once in a Blue Moon" (Harcourt, Brace) is her first published volume, although she has long been known to magazine readers both as a lyrist and as the associate editor of Harriet Monroe's "Poetry". It seems to me that she is at her best in careless songs, in her verses to her tiny daughter. In the sonnet form she becomes a trifle impressed with the movement of her own lines. There is just a trace of pompousness; but her gift is unmistakable. like especially:

This is a place of ease: Beauty has come to rest,

"Pastoral", I

Color is gentle in the trees,

The willow leaves look

Timidly down, more timidly back from the brook.

Beauty has come to rest:
Sweet as a sleepy-bell

The breeze swings within the close-pressed
Shadows, and the sun

Falls in little sprays, to be picked by anyone!

Unflaggingly Pleasant

HARLES S. BROOKS is one of the ty

ists, yet I think he is not often given his due by the critics. Perhaps that is because so many of our popular essayists live in and about New York City, and have columns or other means of self expression. This remark is not meant as a criticism of them; for columns are useful things for any man to

own.

Brooks is, after all, a trifle too pleasant, but that is a happy fault and easily forgiven. "Like Summer's Cloud" (Harcourt, Brace) is as a whole, I think, his best collection of essays. "On Playing the Trombone" and "Once there was a Furnace Boy" are excellent pieces, containing much wise observation and delicate humor. So are many others in the book; there could be few better companions for the essay lover on a summer's day than this volume. It has charm, wit, and wisdom, and shows Mr. Brooks's gift for the nice phrase a growing, not a lessening one.

– J. F.

A SHELF OF RECENT BOOKS

A HOMER OF THE LOGGING

CAMPS

By Percy MacKaye

HE author of "Paul Bunyan"

THE

-

own James Stevens, born in Iowa and raised in the spacious outdoors of the great west - well merits to be known, by this epical work, as the prose Homer of that American mythology which has sprung gigantically into being from the campfires of our vast timberlands during the last half century.

From generations of forest lore, whose dim origins are lost in dateless times and distant lands, from countless minor tales and anecdotes, he has builded a major native epic, through the cloud capped contours of which emerge a few enormous forms, centring in one mythic Colossus - Paul Bunyan, the logger-dreamer of "Real America".

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The ancient demigods of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" with their battles, with their battles, intrigues, feasts, and voyages in a still uncharted world- were not more heroically indigenous to the imaginations of the Greeks than these grotesquer titans of forest fairy lore have been to the day dreams of a million American lumberjacks, who are even now but just rubbing their eyes to stare with dumb yearning after their departing heroes-passing away forever before the "evil inventions" of "Ford Fordsen", the genius of modernity.

For Mr. Stevens's acknowledgments to anecdotal sources of his form of the legend, the reader is referred to his introduction. A very worthwhile comparison with this preface and its

cited material may be had in the foreword of Esther Shephard to her own significant volume "Paul Bunyan"— an admirably conscientious setting down, from the lips of lumbermen in their own speech, of those extravagant logging tales, many of which James Stevens has embodied in his work.

A comparison of the two books will reveal Mr. Stevens's method as an artist and the excellence of his style, vitally plastic and fecund with imaginative insight and observation. His epic is told in a fluent and vivid prose, simple, powerful, clear and un-selfconscious, which shows him to be an accomplished master of his medium, a native writer likely to rank very high in future works.

The only regrets of this reviewer are, first, that Mr. Stevens has allowed (in the book's later chapters) certain transient journalistic allusions to invade his folk theme in a work else permanent as true literature; and secondly, that he has not more often permitted his own spirited prose to cite the native speech modes of his woodsmen, of which he shows such imaginative, first hand knowledge as in this volcanic eruption of Paul Bunyan at the outset of his fight with Hels Helsen, the Big Swede:

"By the blazing sands of the hot high hills of hell, and by the stink and steam of the low swamp water, how in the name of the holy old mackinaw, how in the names of the whistling old, roaring old, jumping old, bald-headed, blue-bellied jeem cris and the dod durned dod do you figure you're wearing any shining crown of supreme authority in this man's camp? Say!!"

"Aye tank so", said Hels Helsen calmly. "Suffering old saints and bleary-eyed fathers!"

"Yah, aye tank so."

Volumes might be written (and probably will be) on the ethnic sources of the Paul Bunyan legend. The principle of its childlike humoresques is the dislocation of size values. Here are lineal traces of Gulliver and Gargantua; of Thor's boastings in the Elder Edda; of "Beowulf" and the "Grimm's Tales" giants; of Münchhausen and Hercules.

A wild blend of the Babylonian with the Canuck might be discovered in that preposterous "Babe, the Blue Ox, who measured forty-two axhandles and a plug of chewing tobacco between the horns". An analogous blue cattle beast of other sex and less grandiose dimensions was tracked, though never corralled, by this reviewer, on his travels in the Kentucky Mountains, lured by an old fiddler's snatch, which sang as follows:

I had an old blue cow and her name were
Luck;

Ary time I milked her she run over the cup.
I fed her on coren, oats and hay;
And milked her twenty-five times a day.

But the reader must turn without fail to Mr. Stevens's volume for the delectable wonders of Babe and his master, Paul Bunyan, with their superlative associates, Johnny Inkslinger, Hels Helsen, "The Bull of the Woods", Hot Biscuit Slim, Pea Soup Shorty, Sourdough Sam, Jonah Wiles, "the legless logger", and the impossible others.

In prose narrative Mr. Stevens has written an unforgetable poem: the epic of a vast overgrown dreamer - America who has laid waste his dominion in the blind exuberance of his own dreams of "Work - Work - Work". In the humorous-pathetic legend of this dreamer of the woods the imaginative folk cultures of the world, which we have darkly stamped out in our immigrant-teeming cities, have interbred

and happily flowered from the wild timberlands to splendid native stature in this book of James Stevens.

Paul Bunyan. By James Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf.

Paul Bunyan. By Esther Shephard. Seattle: McNeil Press.

MARRIAGE BY THE BOOK

By Kathleen Norris

T is with a lightsome touch indeed that George Gibbs handles his awful theme. The Beatrice and Benedick whose married tiffs compose his book are simple folk, reminding one of nothing so much as Meg and her John in "Little Women". Beatrice pouts when Benedick's Aunt Imogen is too much considered, in their early married life, and Benedick does not admire Beatrice's Uncle William to excess. From these Freudian deeps of dissimilarity they proceed, sometimes almost with tears, through the sewing on of buttons, the unwelcome action of relatives, the arrival of a "man-child, in the doctor's black bag", to the moment when Beatrice decides that the house is godless, and takes Benedick to church with her, on page 237. Later, the athletic parson beats Benedick at golf. This evidently settles any theological doubts Benedick has ever had. By this time Benedick and Beatrice have two babies, and while the husband "knows that his wife will never again lead their paths very far afield", Beatrice has fortunately reached the conclusion that "Benedick is a much nicer sort of person than any of the gay married men who used to make love to her".

So that some four years after marriage, by the exercise of tact and adaptability and reason, everything is

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