The Nona*

Vigorous, Versatile Hilaire Belloc Muses as He Cruises

The Book. Story there is none in this book, unless it be the log of Author Belloc's ancient and well-beloved sloop Nona on an intermittent cruise around Britain from Holyhead to the Wash. It is a book pursuing "from thought to thought, from memory to memory such things as have occupied one human soul."

Outside Cardigan Bay, a world of wind puts, the sound in a furious boil, blasts the Nona's jib; as life and death wrangle under the sea-hummocks, Author Belloc ponders fear. He tells you of a day when he swung on a dizzy wire between two Italian outposts over an abyss in the Dolomites.

Sighting the Isle of Bardsey opens two lines of thought: one on one-man kingdoms, hermits, saints and the like; another on the history of words, including the word "cad." Originally, it was short for "cadet," and also meant an omnibus conductor. Mysteriously, it became "the most useful missile in the English language."

A fierce Welshman, who leaps to a balk on Pwllheli quay and with unintelligible but masterful oratory quells a growling knot of loungers, puts the Nona's skipper in mind of Mr. James W. Lowther, Speaker of the House of Commons from 1905 to 1921. At once, the Parliament appears, a herd of mouthing jacks-in-the-box, consummately managed by a genius of patience, memory, justice.

Splendid descriptions come out of Port Madoc, St. Patrick's Causeway, Fishguard Harbor, St. Brides Bay, White Horse Race, Wild Goose Race, where "a boat is taken up and pitched to Heaven and let drop again, twirled round like a teetotum, thrown over on her side, banged off sideways with great stunning blows on her cheekbone and blinded all the time with cataracts of spray, the while the air is filled with a huge, mocking laughter."

Not once in the book does Author Belloc offer an opinion. Convictions is the word. Like some brawny athlete of marvelous agility, his mind flashes everywhither in a sort of intellectual shadowboxing, delivering a continuous shower of solid, incisive blows: pre-history is rot; Marshal Lyautey's Morocco is "an astonishing affair;" the U. S. is a country foreign to England, and let Englishmen discover this; parliamentary activity is deplorable, save in aristocracies; the "Salaried League of Nations" at Geneva is a Tom Tiddler's Ground indeed.

He is a man for twisting the tail of a paradox. He is a spinner of many threads--history art, literature, sociology, politics, mystical lore and legend. Sometimes the weft of his spinning loosens, is overdrawn or finical. It is never weak; and beneath it, when the lesser threads tail off, runs a strongheld fibre of Roman Catholic faith, the strength of which is tested and demonstrated repeatedly in tangles with the pragmatic thought of modern science. Sharp scissors of scorn are employed to unravel more than one of these snarls. In the midst of keen reasoning, there suddenly come "blind spots." But it's all one. With a deep and candid believer, no man can quarrel long.

The Significance. Author Belloc will be best remembered for two things: vigorous versatility and a magnificent English prose style. The Cruise of the Nona brings both into constant play. And of the two, the latter--as Author Belloc would agree if his humility matches his fervor-- is the more important. Man being but an infirm creature, his convictions matter little, however brilliant and penetrating. But to couch convictions in beautiful words, to elaborate them faithfully beyond the perversive structures of Anglo-Saxon terseness, that is art, that is service.

The Author. Historian, military-theorist, economist, traveler, publicist, parliamentarian, humorist, philosopher, man of letters, parts, action and faith, Hilaire Belloc, 55, Oxford-educated son of a French barrister and a cultured Englishwoman, is (with his friend G. K. Chesterton) a leading British champion of Roman Catholocism.

Like many a foreign celebrity of fewer attainments, he has permitted himself to be blatantly touted in the U. S. by one Lee Keedick, Manhattan publicity agent, will soon cross the Atlantic for a lecture tour.

Abnormal

THE STORY OF A NOVEL--Maxim Gorky--Dial Press ($2.50). A married girl seeking more from life encounters a half-made creature from the imagination of the novelist who has sought to conquer her. The unreality of the creature, who is the thickness of paper and invisible standing sidewise, makes her tremble for the validity of her own existence. She is more friendly to the novelist.

A Sky Blue Life. An ugly, shy orphan youth with money falls into the hands of a barefoot carpenter with a devilish clever mania for astonishing people. The carpenter paints dragonfish on the youth's house and tries to marry him off to a wench with fat legs. Youth escapes carpenter at the expense of his reason, which later returns with a thud.

An Incident. A miser, who distrusts his socialist nephew, screams for joy out of the window when imperial troops rout the revolutionaries. A stray bullet catches him in the chin.

The Hermit. His incest with his lovely daughter seemed perfectly pure and natural to him. He had a genius for love. Robust, red-faced, scar- cheeked, with naked lids' over his dark eyes, Savel the sawyer settled in a cave after his acquittal, dedicated himself effectively to the needs of the love-starved peasantry, healing chiefly by the epithet "dearest," pronounced with a great compassion.

Author Gorky, Russian realist, feels beneath the surface of an episode for its obscure, its real causes. To him, reason is no sinew flexing and supporting life, but a scalpel for cutting into it. That he makes his most satisfactory discoveries among abnormal patients is not surprising in a man who experimented on himself as a boy by lying beneath freight trains.

* THE CRUISE OF THE NONA--Hilaire Belloc--Houghton Miffiin ($4.50).

Fall Lists

Included on the fall lists of U. S. publishers are the following books:

Fiction

THE CRYSTAL CUP--Gertrude Atherton--Boni, Liveright. Concerns a beautiful young woman with an aversion to marriage.

DARK LAUGHTER--Sherwood Anderson--Boni, Liveright. A love story in post-War Ohio.

CARAVAN--John Galsworthy--Scribner. Not a novel, but a collection of short stories, juxtaposing old and new.

THE KENWORTHYS--Margaret Wilson--Harper. Her first novel The Able McLaughlins, won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize.

MANHATTAN TRANSFER --John Dos Passes--Harper. A self-explanatory title.

SUSPENSE--Joseph Conrad--Double-day Page. An unfinished novel now running in The Saturday Review of Literature.

CHRISTINA ALBERTA'S FATHER -- H. G. Wells--Macmilian. A return to the non-prophesying vein of Kipps and Mr. Polly.

WANDERINGS--Robert Herrick--Harcourt Brace. Four short novels in one volume.

THE STROLLING SAINT--Rafael Sabatini--Houghton Mifflin. A story of Borgian days.

THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE --Willa Gather--Knopf.

ONE INCREASING PURPOSE--A. S. M. Hutchinson--Little, Brown.

POSSESSION -- Louis Bromfield -- Stokes. He continues with Lily Shane's cousin, from The Green Bay Tree.

FIRECRACKERS--Carl Van Vechten-- Knopf.

SUMMER -- Remain Rolland -- Holt. The second part of his Soul Enchanted.

THE ISLAND OF THE GREAT MOTHER --Gerhart Hauptmann--Huebsch.

BENONI--Knut Hamsum--Knopf.

THE EMIGRANTS--Johan Bojer--Century.

THE RELIC--Eca de Queiroz--Knopf. A tale of priest-ridden Portugal by the country's "outstanding novelist of the past 50 years."

Verse

WHAT'S O'CLOCK -- Amy Lowell -- Houghton Mifflin.

THE TORCH BEARERS--Alfred Noyes --Stokes.

CARAVAN.--Witter Bynner--Knopf.

WHEN I GREW UP TO MIDDLE AGE-- Struthers Burt--Scribners.

Non-Fiction

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD--Theodore C. Smith --Yale University Press. Prof. Smith had first access to all the diaries, correspondence and state papers of the assassinated President.

AARON BURR--Samuel H. Wandell and Meade Minnegerode--Putnam, 2 vols.

JOHN S. SARGENT: His LIFE AND WORK--William Howe Downes--Little Brown. Mr: Downes was for more than 30 years art critic of the Boston Evening Transcript.

CALVIN COOLIDGE -- William Allen White--Macmilian. This should be readable.

THE MAN MENCKEN--Isaac Gold-berg--Simon & Schuster. With footnotes by the subject.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS--Viscount Grey of Fallodon--Stokes. Easily the chief autobiography.