(2 of 3)
The Author. Until the appearance
of Peter Whiffle, Carl Van Vechten was chiefly known as a cosmopolitan whose main interests were music and cats. Previous appearances in print include The Tiger in the House, Interpreters, Music and Bad Manners and the inimitable Peter Whiffle.
*THK BLIND BOW-BOY—Carl Van Vechten—Knopf ($2.50).
Good Books
The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion.
THE BACK SEAT—G. B. Stern— Knopf ($2.00). Robert Carruthers occupied it—he was the little pig who stayed at home making ornamental shelves while Leonora, his wife, one of the brightest stars of the British stage, informed interviewers how sincerely she yearned for the simple, homey existence her public would never really allow her. But when she got her chance at true domesticity—and her daughter, Faith, as the result of Robert's mild engineering, made a howling success of a part supposedly written for Leonora—she found the back seat a little too hard for her temperament and returned to the stage. A slight, amusing comedy.
GREY TOWERS — Anonymous — Covici-McGee ($2.00). Joan Burroughs wanted to teach, really teach. She got a job at the University of Chicago. And that, according to her, is the last thing she should have done to satisfy her pedagogic yearnings. All the professors, she found, were sexually predatory. Their wives drank cocktails, were migratory almost every night. The authorities demanded that the faculty—presumably in its soberer moments—confine itself to research laboratories. Even the student body was regarded not as boys and girls to be taught, but as a corpus vile, a collection of human guinea pigs tolerated for experimental purposes. Disillusioned, Joan left the campus, marched to the altar, departed for the fireside. The book is a passionate polemic against present university conditions, and (although the authoress does not realize it) against coeducation. Falsetto in spots, it is always too passionate to be more than stimulating.
RAW MATERIAL—Dorothy Canfield —Harcourt ($2.00). "In this un- related, unorganized bundle of facts," says Dorothy Canfield, "I give you just the sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary characters, or episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the novels you are writing in your own heads. I have treated you just as though you were that other self in me who is my best reader. I have given you the fare I like best." The reader expects "joltings"—especially after reading the publisher's blurb, stating that the author has attempted a "new form, not a short story, but raw material." The fact of the matter is that this is a book of short stories and is nothing if not art.
Ben Hecht
He Is the Terrible Child of Chicago