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THE PROGRESS OF JULIUS—Daphne du Maurier—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Julius Levy was bred in the gutters of a Paris suburb, son of a Jew huckster who choked his buxom wife to death one night when Julius found her in bed with the landlord's son. Julius and his father straggled off to Algiers. There, orphaned, Julius learned to steal, snuggle in the arms of a Negro laundress, consider the English a "race of fools." Presently, accompanied by a 14-year-old prostitute disguised as a boy, Julius was en route to London. In London he followed the success story formula. He worked as a baker's boy, bought out the bakery, turned it into a restaurant, opened another, built up his business until he had put "a chain around England." Meanwhile his prostitute died of consumption and Julius learned to like good living. He married a well-born Jewess named Rachel, had affairs with actresses until he was 50. After that his daughter, Gabriel, became his inamorata. When she fell in love, Julius, a lonely old man tasting the futility that in most aphorisms is indelibly associated with using selfish methods to become a millionaire, crept off to Paris to die. Granddaughter of the du Maurier who wrote Trilby, daughter of Actor Sir Gerald du Maurier, Daphne du Maurier writes with a great deal more solemnity and a good deal less charm than her grandfather, but she has aptitude and intelligence. The Progress of Julius, her third novel, is a florid 325-page portrait polished off with workmanlike aplomb.
Spongy Brother