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John Corsey grew up the tensest little aristocrat of all, with passions to match his principles; to assault them; never to bend them, but eventually to break them, and break him. He was the kind of little boy who hides the humiliation of undeserved punishment. As a young man he seared in fire the hand with which he struck his friend. He rode at perilous water-jumps because he was afraid of them. He quit law because he could not find in it a way to make the world finer.
When he found Nina Michaud, she fulfilled his deepest nature, gave him freely a rich love that was a whole way of life. But his ancestors poisoned his happiness. The more Nina was his, the less inclined he was to introduce her to his mother. The old Corsey servants were enough to remind him that she was only a poor artist's daughter, that she lived in the wrong part of town, that Cor seys had never paraded — never thought of marrying! — their mistresses.
He was relieved when she went away — and stricken spiritually dead when, after he had married Mildred Ashley, he learned that Nina had gone away to bear his son. By then his marriage was a failure, though he did not know that it failed because he would have been revolted to find in a fellow aristocrat like Mildred the passion he sought in life. And by then Mildred too was carrying a son of his. They had to stay married.
And they stayed unfulfilled. Their son, Rush Corsey, was their one joint achievement and salvation, but the War took him. They both tried infidelity, but it was futile. John could not bring himself to it; what he needed was a life not a liaison. And Mildred soon lost her lover by having, in her honesty, to tell him she did not respect him.
When Nina Michaud came back to Chesterbridge—brimming with life, a celebrated sculptress, still single, with her grown son—she found them thus: John, the burntout editor of the Times, unbending before the new regime of upstart Jew manufacturers; Mildred, a proud, suffering, spent stranger in his house. John was able to make some amends to Nina. He abandoned his code to the extent of lying to get their Communist son out of jail. But neither Nina nor the boy really needed even that. They were self-sufficient. They loved him, thanked him and took their ways. John accepted an ambassadorship and invited Mildred to go with him, to live out their failure together.
The Significance. Mr. Bullitt's story is too crisp and close-packed for adequate retelling. It is set down with a force, sweep and wine-laden atmosphere quite its own. On these first credentials alone the author passes for as formidable and welcome a newcomer among U.S. novelists as has arrived in many a day— a writer with the wide stance of the old school, the bold tongue of the new, and the deep, unfaltering insight which is taught in no school but is the birthright of big human historians.
The Author. William Christian Bullitt is a 35-year-old Philadelphian who, after a brilliant career at Yale, reported abroad and at Washington for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. His abilities and connections obtained him a position in the U.S. State Department, which sent him to Paris attached to the Peace Commission. In 1919 he went on a special mission to Russia, causing a diplomatic ruction of international proportions when, upon his return, he divulged various Allied attitudes toward the Soviet regime. He left the State Department under something of a cloud. In 1921 he accepted the post of "managing editor" of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Married, he abides in his native city of brotherly love.
Hesitater
CYNTHIA CODENTRY—Ernest Pascal—Brentano ($2). The psychological network that entangles Cynthia Codentry and causes her retreat from metropolitan philanderings to the dumb worship of Dirt-Farmer Swedge of Long Island, all unravels to the old copybook line about him who hesitates. In his wisdom and mercy, Author Pascal makes manifest some reasons for Cynthia's hesitations — unnatural home life with her divorced actor-father; the enervating effect of life among rich school girls; a sophisticated girl's natural fear of being prematurely pigeonholed by life. But these extenuations do not suffice to save Cynthia from standing indicted for modernity's most prevalent shortcoming: emotional anemia induced by self-seeking and self-indulgence. The book is far too finely executed to be referred to solely as a moral essay. It is an intricate story sensitively told. Yet many readers will bethink themselves of many Cynthias and wonder if it is too late, or just timely, to pass the book along.
Wodehumor
HE RATHER ENJOYED IT—P. G. Wodehouse—Doran ($2). This is one of those books which, if read in a club car or dentist's waiting room, will cause people to glare at you, pretend to stare out the window and finally move away. Readers realizing that private mirth is a public nuisance will, unless malicious, arrange to meet Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge in some secluded spot. He is a rather large, angular young man with a napping yellow mackintosh, a piercing eye, a jumpy back collar-button and no economic roots in society save vigorous tendrils of loquacity with which he attaches, from dismayed friends, the trifling bits of capital necessary to promote such glittering projects as a trick-dog college; a serious-minded fistic behemoth; the abduction and restoration of his future wife's aunt's parrot; an occasional square meal. The Wodehumorous idiom that created Jeeves, Psmith and their fellows is more agile than ever. It teeters, like a clown on stacked tables, atop absurdities whose sickening crash never comes. It rides the handlebars of logic backwards, reaching its points with convulsing speed and accuracy. It convinces you that Funnyman Wodehouse must be the world's most amusing conversationalist or its sourest nervous wreck.
Nose