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The Authors. Joseph P. Marquand fellow-townsman of Lord Timothy Dexter, took rank in U. S. letters with Black Cargo, a well-told tale of the slave trade. His present work, eked from scanty material, suffers slightly from padding but maintains a sardonic flavor well suited to the subject.
Don C. Seitz, retired journalist (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The New York World), is a gentleman of terse humor that is itself uncommon.
Stem to Gudgeon
CAPTAIN SALVATION—Frederick William Wallace—Minton, Balch & Co. ($2.00).
When dirty weather gathers in this book, as it does continually, the seas thunder, spurt, hurl, burst, cascade, career and cannonade. Poops lurch, hatches groan, bulwarks drown, spars shiver, tumults surge, canvas flogs, human limpets cling to wreckage with bleeding nails, battered limbs, frozen hands, grim resolve. It is a fast-sailing tale of clipper days, stoutly and thoroughly rigged from stem to gudgeon, commanded by a cultured swashbuckler from Nova Scotia, a hammer-fisted, hell-bent "bluenose" skipper, with Nietzschean ethics, Vulcanic muscles, the passions of Poseidon, the luck of Lucifer. When his clipper Aphrodite goes down off Patagonia, this skipper's redemption is made cinema-credible by a bleak, briny coast, driving rain, starvation and the steadfastness of a childhood sweetheart.
Soil
WILD GEESE—Martha Ostenso— Dodd, Mead ($2.00).
The bleak but fertile plains of Manitoba at dawn and dusk. Over them a short but beamy shag-pate, Caleb Gare, walking as though bent against a wind, whispering greedily to his black acres, caressing his blue-flowered flax in secret, eyeing his sows by lantern-light. In his cabin, a wife and children dulled and spavined by the cruel toil he holds them to with a miser's malice. Jude Gare, the one stalwart, deep-breasted daughter, who defies him, she having heard the wild geese honking down the high heavens. The night of Jude's escape, prairie fire drives Caleb to his beloved's bosom—the bottomless muskeg.
Of dirt-farm life some of us have learned aplenty, but this rendition, by a Norwegian girl from Minnesota, was awarded a $13,500 first-novel prize.
PRAIRIE—Walter J. Muilenberg— Viking Press ($2.50).
The same sort of thing, written with more sophistication than Wild Geese and more dramatic power, staged on the virgin soil of Kansas. Here the man conquers, despite an anemic wife and a son who deserts.
"Souls"
HERBS AND APPLES—Helen Hooven Santmyer—Houghton, Mifflin ($2.50). THE MISTY FLATS— Helen Woodbury—Little, Brown ($2.00).
Here are two tomboy daughters of two country doctors. Each grows up with a "soul." Each itches to write. Each goes to Greenwich Village to do so. Each gives it up and goes home. Both books are first novels, by Helens, and published in Boston. There ends the coincidence.
Author Santmyer taps a brimming current of village life in Ohio. The rarity and validity of Derrick Thornton's talent are deeply impressed. Her unachieved love is made a vital experience. Her rediscovery of life's universal imminence is compelling and beautiful. The book is richly written.