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The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:
UNITY—J, D. Beresford—Bobbs Merrill ($2.50). Katherine was a poet; Louise was adept at watercolor painting; Emily played the violin. Katherine Louise Emily Willoughby had to reconcile the talents, passions, ambitions of these people. So she adopted the accurate sobriquet, Unity, and spent her life trying to make it fit. She married a man, Brian Jessup, who went in swimming drunk, at midnight, in Sidney, Australia. She married an automaton, Michael Lord Mowbray, of whom she felt she was unworthy because he could not understand her. But only Adrian Gore, the man with the grey eyes, could give her Unity. This book is the elegant elaboration of a somewhat frayed psychological formula. It fails to convince because the author attempts to show how a human doll works by manufacturing instead of analyzing one. It does not fail to interest because Mr. Beresford is a capable craftsman.
GREEN THURSDAY—Julia Peterkin— Knopf ($2.50). Author Peterkin is a lady of quality who lives on a great and isolated plantation in South Carolina. The people who serve her, the people who are her neighbors, the people she watches over, are black. In this book she writes about them. No wild crapshooters are they, no barrelhouse kings, cakewalk princes, or skull-faced witch-men. They are Negroes who pick cotton, plough fields, raise pickaninnies.
There is old Maum Hannah, squatter, who asked the Lord what to do when a white-trash gentleman built a house on her land and was going to make her tear down her cabin—who got a sign from the Lord, and burnt that house to white fine ashes, such as fell out of her corncob pipe when she prayed. There is Killdee who ploughed on Green Thursday—Ascension Day—the day Jesus went back to God, wherefore he expected to be scourged, and was, for that night his little girl, Baby Rose, was burnt to death in the cookfire. After that Killdee hated God. Vengeance was all right, but it didn't seem square to burn a baby.
Most of the stories are about Killdee, his wife, Rose, and Missie, the little changeling with the pointed chin, the curving lips, the delicate bluish bloom on black cheeks, who came to stay with them. The blacks live so near the earth their roots go down into it like the roots of trees. Mrs. Peterkin understands these twisted roots, their fumbling, struggling, grappling, and the secret chemistries that work in them— sorrow and wonder, sweetness and regret, life and love and death.
A Wandering Figure
Why Not Write a Novel, Mr. Bercovici?