(3 of 4)
INNOCENT BIRDS—T. F. Powys— Knopf ($2.50). Readers will wonder whether Author Powys could have been aware of the U. S. interpretation that might be put upon his title. Probably not; Author Powys is, though an ironist, himself an innocent. Yet U. S. slang was never more expressive than on this accidental occasion. The scene is the English croft of Madder; the story, a frail, obscure network of the sex impulses, superstitions and avarice of incredibly primitive creatures. There is Mr. Bugby, who buys "The Silent Woman" because of the sinister coincidence that successive keepers of that tavern were speedily widowed. There is Maud Chick, an imbecile girl longing to have a baby, whom Mr. Bugby avoids after one experience; and Polly Wimple, prim Miss Pettifer's maid whom he does not avoid, to her great cost. A cormorant, far from the sea, that flaps and roosts arbitrarily at dusk whenever anything especially morbid or malicious is about to take place, is an apt metaphor for a shadowy flight of the author's imagination which is inconsequential beside other of his masterly stories (The Left Leg, Black Bryony, Mr. Tasker's Gods).
On Going White
FLIGHT—Walter White—Knopf ($2.50). The foremost Negro novelist shows light-colored Negresses that "going white" is not worth the candle. The education of auburn-haired Mimi Daquin by her wistfully intelligent father is a lesson in race tolerance and dignity. Her free-love child and disillusionment by an educated lover teach moral courage to young theorists and at the same time demonstrate to white readers that sex morals are not so innocently casual among Negroes as Mr. Sherwood Anderson and other people think. Even Harlem, so-called cultural capital of the Negro, is not above scandalmongering. Mimi leaves it to become a downtown modiste, a white girl. Her looks and ability soon bring success and a suitor, a white, amiable young financier whose importunity will not hear honest Mimi's tragic secret. They marry. He never knows. But in the end she flees for the warmth and color of her own kind. The author's style and inspiration being rather conventional, interest in his book will depend largely upon the reader's concern with racial problems.
"Most Blatant"