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The Author— Pierre Loving, 37, cosmopolitan Manhattanite, has lived much abroad. He knows intimately his left-wing Paris, Berlin, Vienna. Keen on his subject, thorough, Loving visited every spot where Baudelaire is known or supposed to have been, made many a minor find exciting to scholars. Then he settled down on the Riviera to write his book, but never missed a chance of watching Suzanne Lenglen play tennis, of dancing with her. Well-known as a critic, he has also written a play, The Stick-Up. He is now at work on a long critical study of Baudelaire's work, which Publishers Brewer & Warren modestly announce will be "a somewhat fresh interpretation."
U. S. Horror
SANCTUARY—William Faulkner—Cape & Smith ($2.50).
A favorite question on Shakespeare examinations is ''Distinguish between horror and terror." Sanctuary is compact of both. The horrors of any ghost story pale beside the ghastly realism of this chronicle.
A silly girl, a typical college "teaser," sneaks away from her Southern co-ed institution for a party with a would-be sophisticated boyfriend. He gets drunk, runs out of liquor, insists on going to a lonely country bootlegger's he knows about. Almost there, he wrecks his car and the two find themselves stranded at dusk at the bootlegger's, among five hard men, one hard woman. The boy gets drunk again, the girl is terrified but cannot get away. This typical cinema situation does not turn out like a cinema. For one horror-filled night the girl escapes her fate. Next day the boy comes to. ignominiously deserts her. Then the gang's gunman shoots one of his pals to get her, gets her, takes her away with him to a dive in Memphis.
When the dead man's body is found and the head bootlegger is arrested for murder, a decent, intelligent but ineffectual lawyer comes to his defense. When he finds out about the girl he tracks her to Memphis, but by then her nightmare is too much for her, she is its prisoner. The lawyer thinks he has persuaded her to appear as his star witness. But the prosecution finds her too. When she appears at the trial her perjured testimony condemns the innocent defendant. That night a mob takes the prisoner from the jail, burns him alive. The girl's father tries to make the best of an unspeakable business by taking her abroad, trying to patch up a hopelessly smashed life. The lawyer washes his hands of Justice, retires to failure and his shrewish wife.
Months later, the gunman-murderer is arrested and hanged for a job he never did.
When you have read the book you will see what Author Faulkner thinks of the inviolability of sanctuary. The intended hero is the decent, ineffectual lawyer. But all heroism is swamped by the massed villainy that weighs down these pages. Outspoken to an almost medical degree, Sanctuary should be let alone by the censors because no one but a pathological reader will be sadistically aroused.
The Author— William Faulkner, 34, small, dark, of a distinguished Southern family (Great-grandfather William Faulk ner wrote the once famed romantic novel, The White Rose of Memphis'), lives in Oxford, Miss. During the War he served as lieutenant in the Canadian Flying Corps, crashed once, hurt his foot. Other books: Soldier's Pay, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury.
Graves Goes On