(2 of 3)
Christabel is one of those whose intelligence has raised her out of the realm of feeling. Her mind informs her of the emotion that should be hers at the moment. Only then does she proceed to experience it. When held at last, in the arms of the man who has resisted her longest, she thinks "I am dying of bliss . . . I am not disappointed. No, No! I'm not, I'm not." There is a certain bigness in a thoroughly resolute, deliberate hypocrite. Petty Christabel is not that. She actually believes in her own sweetness, sympathy, and understanding.
In laying bare the artist's mechanical simulation of emotion, the author has given a penetrating study of an inadequate subject. Gifted ironist, Anne Parrish (of The Perennial Bachelor) has allowed her irony to become too clever to be convincing.
New & Young
STRANGE FUGITIVE—Morley Callaghan —Scribners ($2.50).
"Harry Trotter, who had a good job as foreman in Pape's lumberyard, was determined everybody should understand he loved his wife. . . . Coming home from the yard at half past five o'clock Harry smelled a stew cooking as he climbed the stair of the duplex house, a dish he liked, and Vera cooked it with small round new potatoes, oodles of onions, peppers, spices.
" 'Stew, eh, Vera,' he said, going into the kitchen. She kissed him closing her eyes slowly. When she kissed him like that, closing her eyes, he felt that he had not known her very long and watched her moving around the kitchen. He sat down on a kitchen chair. She bent over the sink. . . ."
That is the work of an author, new and young,—Morley Callaghan of Canada. The house of Chas. Scribners Sons, alert for potential Ernest Hemingways, has given him a robust sendoff, published several of his short stories and the above-quoted novel.
Mr. Callaghan writes accurate, tightly packed and swiftly nailed dialogue. He tells his plot like a crack reporter. He tries to solve problems of motive by having his leading character, Harry Trotter, take strange and solitary walks into the night. For no good reason, Trotter leaves his wife, drifts into the bootlegging business. In his relations with gangsters and with other women, his mind takes jumps to his wife—her mannerisms, her legs. Finally, as he decides to go back to her. he is shot in a gang feud.
Mention
VARIETY or THINGS—Max Beerbohm— Knopf ($3).
Yet more civilized effervescence from the incomparable caricaturist.
DOSTOEVSKY—THE MAN AND His WORK —J. Meier-Graefe—Harcourt Brace ($6).
Scholarly analysis of genius that throve on excess of suffering.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY, THE WOMAN WHO CHANGED THE MIND OF A NATION—R. C. Dorr—Stokes ($5).
Life-story of the straightlaced, humorless, heroic woman who made woman's suffrage inevitable.
Persons
WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA (1928-29)— A. N. Marquis Co. ($8.50).