Green Hat*

Michael Arlen's Rare Way --Iris, Napier, Venice

The Story. Near Sutton Marie, in England, there was a great ash tree, very old and Smelling of fairies and moonlight. Forking away from that tree there were two roads. Iris March and Napier Harpenden went there often as they grew up together, and they said goodbye there when Sir Maurice Harpenden parted them young because the March line was poor and running down. They said goodbye and took their two ways.

Napier, whose face was that of an acolyte, took the way of old England and the gentry. It led him to Venice Pollen, of the lion-cub head and bursting, boyish spirit.

Iris, whose face was white and slender beneath tiger-tawny curls, who was a March and was therefore never let off anything by Fate, took the way that was left her, courageously, defiantly.

Boy Fenwick, her first husband, flung himself out of the window on their wedding night, and Iris told people he had died "for Purity." As people will, as she intended they should, they fastened the impurity upon Iris. Boy Fenwick's known chasteness bore them out and Iris went about her life in a manner that seemed to bear them out. She married again, lost her baby, drove her second husband away by murmuring Napier's name in her dreams, then took men here and there, in disdain, in anguish, in hunger and longing.

Just before Napier and Venice married, Iris and Napier met again. That was a fateful dawn. When Napier and Venice went through Paris the next Winter, Iris lay there in a nursing home near death with another still-born baby and septic poisoning.

But Venice was no coward. She fought on their side when Iris and Napier were for running off together. At a scene at Sutton Marie, Iris faced Sir Maurice Harpenden and loosed her hate upon him for the hell he had sent her through in the name of old England and the gentry. Venice came in at the end of the outburst and played up like the grand sport she was. It was Napier who showed badly. He must have the woman he loved a woman respected by her friends. So he went for his father, too, and he blurted out the truth about Boy Fenwick's suicide--that Boy Fenwick had been unclean, not Iris.

Her one secret, redeeming virtue thus exposed and vitiated, Iris could not take Napier from Venice after that. She escaped him by telling him that Venice was with child, went into the night with her mad roadster, steered straight for the old ash tree at the crossroads, ended the whole thing in a hideous, heroic smash.

The Significance. Many think of Michael Arlen's writing as "a delicious sewer." Others feel that he strains palpably at cleverness. Neither criticism is wholly just. Arlen's "decadence" need hardly be called sewerish for it is quite sincere, never vulgar, anything but reprehensible to fair minds. Arlen's "cleverness"; is indisputable, save by the very dull; and it is beside the point that his people are wholly impossible as well as wholly charming. They are created by a sensitive person possessed of a gorgeous sense of the ridiculous, a rare way with words, and a perception half dissolute, half profound.

The Author. As one might imagine, Michael Arlen is no Englishman. He plays, dines, dances and drinks with the blither young spirits of Mayfair--the social "Mugs" as he has called them. But he is not of, them. Born on the Danube in Bulgaria, of Armenian parents, he was taken to Manchester, as an infant, educated in schools of the "plebs" and in Switzerland. He became a journalist in London, knew poverty and loneliness.

New Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion: THE HOME-MAKER--Dorothy Canfield--Harcourt Brace ($2.00). Wearily Lester Knapp lay down at night, and in the morning roused up wearier. He hated his job in the dry-goods store, and was a failure at it. His wife scrubbed the floor, harangued the children, cooked the food, ate her heart out. On the day Knapp lost his position he came home to find his house on fire; he climbed up on the icy roof, praying that he would slip. He did. Down to the pavement he fell, injured his spine, with resulting paralysis of the legs. The next week Mrs. Knapp went to the store, got a job in the cloak-and-suit department, worked to the top until she was making three times as much as her husband ever did. He, though not adept at darning socks, made the children happy because he understood their minds and did not fuss if they tore their rompers. But one night he found he could use his legs, and once more Tragedy bared its teeth at him. He would have to go out and work again, his wife would have to come back to her cage. Deliberately he unlaced his shoes and sat down in his wheeled chair. All this goes to prove that a woman's place is not always in the home. Mrs. Canfield has many facts ranged at her fingertips like ivory keys; for every fact she has a sympathy, musical, quick. Upon this subtle instrument a fugue is played.

WINGS -- Ethel M. Kelley -- Knopf ($2.00). The caricature of a complacent male reviewing, through the smoke of his cigarette, his many loves . . . ladies, who for desire of his smug lips are hanging by the neck from his shoestrings, plunging to death from the bridge of his nose, smothering themselves in his pockets. Such a caricature is Jasper Hutchinson. Also, he is a genius, and resembles a Greek god; possibly the Greek god Priapus.* The story of his devastating parade through the, lives of many women begins with the last--the little debutante whom he is to marry. Drinking the honey of his vows, she once cries out: "Oh, whom have you said these things to before?" Comes his suave reply:"To no one but you, believe me." Miss Kelley devotes the rest of this cleverly and some-times brilliantly written book to giving him the lie.

Walter F. White His Novel is Overdrawn?

Walter F. White is a slight, light-haired, blue-eyed, soft-voiced young man, clever, wide-awake, efficient. He writes with skill and force. He has just published his first novel, The Fire in the Flint.* It is a story of the oppression of the Negro race in the South, a story of melodramatic intensity and some bitterness. Walter White knows whereof he writes. He is a Negro. He was graduated from Atlanta University in 1916 and has done graduate work in Economics and Sociology at the College of the City of New York. For a time he was in business; then he left to become Assistant Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. I have known Mr. White for some time and admire him greatly. I recommend his novel to you, although you will find it tinged with irony that is perhaps overdrawn ; but how should I know ? Surely, his problem is one that makes for feeling, and it is hard to expect a man to put it on paper with fine balance. That he has made many investigations of conditions in Southern towns, I know. His light color makes it possible for him to proceed in many cases without interference, where a man who was obviously a Negro would fail. He has, however, very nearly been killed several times, has exposed himself to great risks for the sake of his job, and is a fearless, clear-headed propagandist for the tolerance that he knows is the right of his race, in the sight of God. That his feeling is not a calm one can be shown by a quotation from an article of his in the New York Evening Post some time ago: "It would probably surprise many to know how often lynching mobs are composed to a considerable extent of men (and women) who would be ordinarily classed as good citizens. Does this always mean that some particularly horrible crime has stirred them to deeds unthinkable in calmer and more dispassionate moments? By no means. The spirit of mob violence has degenerated, if such a thing can degenerate, lower than the point at which it starts, to a stage where the most trivial incident can pierce the wall of soap-bubble thickness which divides law from anarchy in many States of the South. As H. L. Mencken declared in one of his essays, lynching takes the place of the merry-go-round, and offers a periodic relief from the tension of drab existence in Southern towns." This is pretty strong meat. I know nothing of conditions in the South. Mr. White should. Certainly he writes of them with power. J. F.

--THE GREEN HAT--Michael Arlen--Doran ($2.00). * Priapus--the god of fertility.

* THE FIRE IN THE FLINT--Walter F. White--Knopf (12.50).