(3 of 5)
A middle-aged New Englander goes to Palm Beach to visit the widow of his millionaire employer. He finds her changed for the worse, her children fiendish. She wants him to marry her, to protect her from them and from her own bad habits. Vengefully he agrees.
A top-flight gold digger, nearly on her uppers, makes a desperate set at the man of her schemes, succeeds in breaking his engagement, almost lands him. But backgammon ruins her, saves him.
A careful young banker-snob, sent to manage the firm's Palm Beach branch, makes a "success" at the expense of everything.
Author Hergesheimer, somewhat socially-minded but far from panaceatic, tells his tales and lets it go at that. But the most casual reader will see that the suave surface of these stories covers a satirical intention that amounts at times to savage contempt.
Stanley
BULA MATARI—Stanley, Conqueror of a Continent—Jacob Wassermann—Liveright ($3).
To questioning friends, how-nowing him for choosing so buried a biographical subject as Henry Morton Stanley. Author Wassermann retorted: "Stanley's triumphs were gained when I was an adolescent; the whole world was talking of him then; he was the hero of the lads of my generation; his name was a trumpet-call; his mere existence stirred us as a child is stirred by a fairy-tale." Able Novelist Wassermann, better at spinning new fairytales than at retelling old ones, fails to bring to life the hero of his adolescence, but his book will serve to remind the world of many a forgotten fact about a onetime world-figure.
Sir Henry Morton Stanley's real name was John Rowlands. Born (probably illegitimate) in North Wales about 1841. he spent most of his hard childhood in a workhouse, ran away at 15 and shipped as a cabinboy to the U. S. He got a job in New Orleans, was adopted by Merchant Henry Stanley, who died without leaving him a penny. During the Civil War young Stanley made the curious record of serving in both the Confederate and Union Armies. the Union Navy. Captured (as a Confederate) at Shiloh, he was offered freedom if he would enlist in the Union Army. He enlisted, came down with dysentery, was discharged as unfit for further service, and ended the war in the Navy. Discovering a gift for journalism, he put it to work, finally took the eye of James Gordon Bennett, then No.1 U. S. newspaperman, editor of the New York Herald.
When pious, eccentric Explorer David Livingstone vanished into Africa's interior and nothing was heard of him for over three years, he was regarded as "lost"; his disappearance became a newsworthy fact. Most resoundingly newsworthy fact, thought Editor Bennett, would be Livingstone's "discovery." He picked Stanley for the job, gave him carte blanche, sent him to Africa by a circuitous route. It took Stanley two years, cost him 23 bouts of tropical fever, cost Bennett a pretty penny, but Stanley got his man. Every continent chuckled over his famed greeting. Said Stanley: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone refused to be taken home in newspaper triumph, preferred to stay in Africa, but he gave Stanley letters to prove his feat.