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BUT IT STILL GOES ON—Robert Graves —Cape & Smith ($3).
Year ago Poet Robert Graves of England said Goodbye To All That in one of the most successful autobiographies of the year. Now he returns to the subject, his title apologetically murmuring But It Still Goes On. Not really a sequel but a kind of scrapbook, it contains some scraps worth picking up.
In "Postscript to Goodbye To All That" Graves answers some of his critics, prints some of their contradictory letters, gives his own solution for war. Says he: it is impossible to legislate war out of existence, and not altogether desirable, for if it could be controlled it might be fun again. His suggested form of war "falls somewhere between a football match with large numbers of players on each side and an eighteenth-century battle." Rules: evenly matched forces (not more than 5,000 men a side), neutral umpires, short duration (two or three weeks). "The object of each army would be the capture of as many as possible of the enemy and of their company banners and regimental flags. . . . The agreed and standardized weapon would probably be a padded wicker helmet and a loin-protector. . . . I suggest that the first reformed war should be fought on Swedish territory— admirably suited to maneuver—between Italy and France, those two most gloryloving powers."
The rest of the book contains: three short stories, all readable, one Kiplingesque, one (about an intelligent madman) first-class; a notebook section with the first and last chapters of an autobiography of God; a three-act play of post-War morals and emotions, in which there are two suicides (one Lesbian, one oldfashioned hypocrite), one murder (of a homosexual husband), no arrests, and no solution in sight. Perhaps not meant to be acted, the play mulls over many an idea. Central theme: that the greatest calamity in history was not the late great War but an earlier, unperceived event, when "the bottom dropped out of things . . . when the last straw broke the back of reality, when the one unnecessary person too many was born, when population finally became unmanageable, when the proper people were finally swamped. Once they counted; now they no longer count."
Brave Girl
READER, I MARRIED HIM—Anne Green —Button ($2.50).
Anne Green's brother, Julian Green, writes his very Frenchy, careful, depressing novels in French; has to be translated for the benefit of U. S. left-wing-readers. Not so his cheerful sister. So sprightly, charming, unrealistic a novelist is she that her first novel (The Selbys} was a U. S. best-seller in spite of her brother's heavy reputation. Reader, I Married Him pushes sprightliness, charm, unrealism even further.