*North of 36

*North of 36

On Texas Plains Mr. Hough's Fillain Is Flayed Alive

The Story. Eighteen sixty-seven. Texas--immense, unorganized, full of cattle for which no profitable market could be found, cattle-rustlers, land-poor cow-barons and original sin. The Del Sol ranch--sole owner, Anastasie ("Taisie") Lockhart, redhaired, beautiful, 20-year-old orphan --her father, Burleson Lockhart, had been murdered some years previously. Broke like the rest of Texas, Taisie was at her wits' end. Her cow hands were faithful, but she couldn't carry on forever with no money to pay them. Enter the mysterious Dan McMasters, sheriff of Gonzales, son of Burleson Lockhart's best friend and a two-gunman. He brings news of a market "north of 36" --the railroad has come to Abilene-- the East is crying for cattle. Wealth lies waiting for any Texan who dares drive a herd some fifteen hundred miles through a country practically unmapped--savage as a rattlesnake. "Let's go!" said Taisie Lockhart.

The rest of the story is devoted to that wild adventure, the trek of Del Sol--cattle, men, horses, rifles, six-shooters, across uncharted plains to Abilene, on the trail of the North Star, The difficulties include Indians, stampedes, storms, the fording of rivers believed impossible to ford and, throughout, the complications of an ingeniously villainous plot. A trunk full of land-scrip proves a bone of contention and Taisie's own attractions very nearly wreck things at various times--for far too many people are anxious to marry her. The actions of McMasters often seem very strange--can it be that he is a traitor and in league with her enemies? Of course he isn't a traitor--and of course, in the end, he marries Taisie--the expedition is successful--the villain punished in an appropriately ghastly manner--in fact he is flayed alive-- and Taisie and Dan, one conjectures, settle down to raising the finest cattle and red-haired children in Texas.

The Significance. Few average readers will be able to summon up any sort of a yawn over North of 36, It has the usual appurtenances of "Western" fiction--but it has something more. The man who wrote it knew the country and people he wrote about as most "Western" writers do not;--conscientiousness, craftmanship and sincerity are evident throughout the novel. What faults there are are faults neither of intention nor laziness--you have the constant feeling that here is a book written as well as the particular author concerned could write it.

The Critics. The New York Herald: "Mr. Hough's wild West is unmitigatedly the real outdoors; its wildness is that of nature rather than of the stage or the film."

Public Ledger (Philadelphia): "An epic of the border. ... It is the sort of 'history' that men will read."

The New York Times: "It is chiefly in the spirit of romance that this tale of the northward trek of the cattle herds of the Southwest is written."

The Author. Emerson Hough, whose Oregon Trail novel, The Covered Wagon, was cinematized to great advantage this year, died in Chicago three months ago (TIME, May 5) aged 66. He was born in Newton, of pioneer parentage. He was a graduate of the University of Iowa and began his career as a lawyer in White Oaks, a cow-town "where undertakers were more in demand than lawyers." Later he settled in Chicago, practicing law and writing, in his spare time, for out-of-doors periodicals. The Mississippi Bubble made his first real success in the literary field--other books include The Story of the Cowboy, (praised by Theodore Roosevelt), The Man Next Door, The Girl at the Halfway House and The Covered Wagon, which, in its movie incarnation, gave him, perhaps, his widest audience.

Lewd!

A Publisher Is Indicted for a Little Phallic Ornament

Thomas Seltzer, publisher of A Young Girl's Diary and Casanova's Homecoming, was indicted by the Supreme Court Grand Jury (New York) for publication of obscene matter.

Casanova's Homecoming, by Arthur Schnitzler, deals with that celebrated scamp, charlatan and boudoir-athlete at a time when he could no longer conceal from himself the obvious fact that he was getting on in years, and that his attractions as a heartbreaker were on the wane. Nevertheless, he resolves to have one last fling with a lady named Marcolina, and, by means of rather disgraceful hoax, accomplishes his aims, and, as was always his custom, escapes all vengeance. The tale is well written--the author a distinguished international figure in the literary world-- but, except for its suave manner and its excellent visualization of one of the most corrupt and interesting characters of a corrupt and interesting time, unimportant. As for any inflammatory content--one can think off-hand of half-a-dozen recent popular and unindicted successes that far surpass it in "frankness"--it has no cheap tricks of titillation about it at all--and a review in. the New York Evening Post even complained of supposed expurgations in the English version. Dr. Carl Van Doren of Columbia University has declared the book to be "the most finished piece of writing published in the United States in 1921."

A Young Girl's Diary, anonymous, is not a novel, but the diary of an anonymous German fraulein a little before and after the age of puberty. As a pathological and psychological document it is of some importance--it should certainly impress on anybody who reads it the importance of proper sex education for the young-- but the average reader will find it extremely tedious--a tedium only occasionally relieved by passages of unconscious humor. "Excitement" in it is nil and it is difficult to imagine any one obtaining even a modicum of sensuous delight from its gray pages. The only other lesson it seems to teach is that life in the German family it describes must have been ineffably dull. A Young Girl's Diary has been approved by the Y. W. C. A., the Camp Fire Girls and Professor O'Shea of the .Education Department of the University of Wisconsin.

Freeman Tilden

He Denies That His Mr. Podd Is Mr. Ford

Reading West of the Water Tower has convinced me that warm weather and realism do not go together. The effort is like that of digesting pork chops after luncheon on the Fourth of July. What a relief, therefore, to pick up a book like Freeman Tilden's Mr. Podd. Call it what you like -- burlesque, satire, sociological tract--it still remains funny, genuinely funny, and I have an idea that many of us will go a long way to hear of and then to find a really funny book. Mr. Podd is apparently on the way to the best seller lists. Freeman Tilden himself is a serious, short, sturdy little man. He speaks with the clipped phrases and the unmistakable accent of New England. He has spent some years in England because he says that it is so comfortable to feel oneself secure among one's ancestors.

In the past Mr. Tilden has been known chiefly as a writer of business stories, which you will remember in The Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere. His one other novel, Khaki, appearing at the close of the War, was badly timed and made little impression. Mr. Podd is the story of a millionaire who starts an ideal Government on an island all his own. Naturally, one's first question to Mr. Tilden is: "Mr. Podd is Henry Ford?" To which he replies: "Mr. Podd is not a caricature of Ford, though the Peace Ship escapade had a lot to do with my writing the story. No--it's a composite picture of various business men I have known.

"I'm sorry to see the reviewers taking my book as propaganda. It wasn't intended for that. Propaganda on capitalism is the furtherest from my idea. It is an attempt to satirize these idealists who let their fanaticism carry them into the lunatic fringe. It is a rap, if you wish, at various so-called new thought movements; but, primarily, it was, for me, a technical problem. I tried to take the island that has been literary property for years, the island with its ideal Government, and give it a modern twist. I haven't even tried to be particularly original. I have simply tried to amuse.

"Sometimes I think," Mr. Tilden added, "that you've all forgotten how to laugh in New York!" Perhaps we only snicker and snigger. Who knows? At any rate, whatever may be our pet noise which denotes amusement, we shall probably bring it forth when we encounter Mr. Tilden's Mr. Podd, unless, perhaps, we are members of "the lunatic fringe."

J.F.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

EATING WITHOUT FEARS--G. F. Scotson-Clark--N. L. Brown ($1.50). "The best cooking is the tastiest, the most delicious "--" Good, well cooked food keeps one well, young and happy"--"Luncheon is a most serious matter." Subversive doctrines these, in this day of eat-and-run lunches, vegetarians, food-cranks. But the proof of the pudding's in the eating, and the proof of Mr. Scotson-Clark's aphorisms is the fact that in all his long and urbane career as a gourmet he has kept health, youth and figure without needing either exercises or doctors. This is a delightful book--suave, discursive, affable, entertaining -- with recipes for such pleasant-sounding dishes as "Uncle Edward's Curry," "Marrow on Toast,'' "Dutch Cordial," "Veal Cutlet a la Charlie Sadler" inserted now and then like plums in a pudding. The only trouble with it is it makes one so hungry.

THE DAY'S JOURNEY--W. B. Max-well--Doubleday Page ($2.00). The people at the golf club wondered what those two old bores, Wilfred Heber and Carrington Bird ever saw in each other. They were always quarreling --and always inseparable. Then the page turns back and we see them from boyhood on--friends in youth--then separated--then casually coming together again--the interwoven skeins of the two lives from youth to age. Oddities of temperament, accidents, wives interrupted the friendship--no theatrical Damon-and-Pythias sacrifices fell to the lot of either, exactly-- but the friendship endured. Why, precisely ? Neither could have defined all the reasons for it. Neither tried. But it was the root of their lives. An excellent novel, original in theme.

THE DIARY OF A DRUG FIEND-- Aleister Crowley--Dutton ($2.00). Sir Peter Pendragon, demobilized English ace, acquires the cocaine habit and a lady her friends term " Unlimited Lou " in the same large evening. They marry and proceed to Paris--varying cocaine with heroin when the first begins to pall--and, after a lurid continental honeymoon, return to England and sink into the nethermost hell of the drug-user. From this they are rescued by an extraordinary swami-plus-demigod, yclept King Laions, who removes them to the island of Telepylus--a sort of Marie Correllian Abbey of Theleme--where they are finally made to cure themselves. A gaudy, wholly incredible penny-dreadful.

*NORTH OF 36 -- Emerson Hough -- Appleton ($2.00).