Ductless Patter*

Benjamin Franklin's Great-Grandniece Is "Up" on Science

The Story. Dark, slender Gita Cartaret of Atlantic City had "a sound endocrine constitution." She wore her hair not shingled but shorn, wore mannish clothes (from B. V. D.'s out) and repulsed all male attention with a temperamental corselet of ice triplex. The reason Gita abhorred men and wanted to be one, was merely psychological. Fast friends of her brutal, gambling father had attempted her when young. Also, her mother had had a grievous cohabitation.

A glib female novelist, with all the patter on "dear old Dr. Freud" and "the sub" (meaning subconscious mind), gets Gita in hand, lures her into feminine flimsies. In time Gita can bear to take walks, even shake hands, with a male novelist, Eustace Bylant. Eustace is admirably veneered, intellectual, a good talker, no carnalite. Seeing that if she lives with him she can escape other male companionship, Gita proposes--not exactly marriage, of course: a ceremony for talk's sake, but after that just a joint roof and dining table.

Love, according to this book, in women, is simply "an over-secretion of hormones in interstitial cells adjacent to the Graafian follicles; stimulation induced by powerful photographic image of someone of the opposite sex on the mental lens." So remembering that Gita is soundly hormonious, Eustace, who loves her, accepts, and waits for his image to get photographed.

But he can not wait forever. And, unfortunately for him, there is a double exposure that blots him out of the picture. One night he creeps into the dark room where Gita is developing her image of Surgeon Geoffrey Pelham. Eustace falls back on the fallacy that passion breeds passion. Taking him for a burglar she pinks his shoulder with a Colt. That brings Surgeon Geoffrey into the house pretty often and he in turn brings Gita's endocrines into their own. One night while he rows her through the moonlit salt marshes she has to admit it. Compunction for Eustace is hardly in order, and as for the girl that wants Geoffrey, --well, she forfeits her claim by chasing Gita. all over the lawns and shrubbery of the old manor house in a roadster with murder in its bright lights.

Significance. For 33 years Mrs. Atherton has whacked out novels. She has no charm, no human touch, no style, not even a way with words. But she has always had brains, hard and vigorous, if not very subtle, and has always exhibited and admired intelligent forcefulness. Deliver her from Average People! Two years ago, at the age of 64, examining life as she does for "strong" ideas whether pleasant or unpleasant, she fastened upon glandular rejuvenation and wrote that gold mine in pseudoclinical vulgate, Black Oxen. Now comes the ductless glands, another "strong" idea and similarly demonstrated, if you care for that sort of thing.

The Author. Gertrude Horn, great-grandniece of Benjamin Franklin, was born in San Francisco. She married and was widowed young ("one of the most important incidents of my school life"). She wrote travel books with the aid of a geography and claims the introduction to fiction of San Francisco's social life. It is her pride and habit to be "up" on things, especially international politics and psychology, which she discusses in a manner highly stimulating to the notables that throng her Manhattan apartment-salon. At the moment she is traveling in England where she has long been regarded as a great American novelist, especially for Senator North (1900), The Conqueror (1902), Perch of the Devil (1914).

The Powys Gloom

Skin for Skin--Llewellyn Powys --Harcourt, Brace ($2.00). The three literary brothers Powys all gnaw without cease at the mouldering bones of old mortality. Llewelyn ("Lulu"), whose journal this book is, has best reason: for 16 years his lungs have harbored ghostly, blood-demanding tubercles. Yet Llewelyn is the cheeriest, takes himself least tragically. He lays life's grim intimacies bravely to heart: a fish taken unawares and frozen fast in black pond ice; a drunken quarryman who compares plowing the deep soil to sailing the sea; a wounded white-breasted hawk staked out for torture by African children; a band of bearded woodcutters hupging a fire that flames scarlet among Alpine snows. The genius of the family, Theodore F. Powys, appears in the journal, now plunged in abysmal moroseness, now making "his sardonic, dry quips, his double-tongued chirpings, jumping this way and that like crickets in a hot hayfield," always sniffing and listening around metaphysical corners for God. John Cowper Powys now and again casts his sterile chill. And there are other Powyses--a wisp of a mother, a "lovely seagull" sister, a rustic brother who dwells in "the divine oblivion of cider and ditch-digging, of making bulls leap cows, and bringing foals into the world."

Oriental

Five Oriental Tales--Comte de Gobineau--Viking Press ($2.50). Conflicts of immense critical import have been waged as to whether or not Philosopher Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, (1816-62), was or was not a touring precursor of Nietzsche, which great Nordic, together with Composer Wagner, "discovered" Gobineau and made for him in Germany a reputation which he did not live to enjoy in his native France. These conflicts having somewhat subsided, in favor of Gobineau, there is space for attention to his neglected fiction. A fierce individualism dominates. Characters are wild, exotic types, not invented but recreated out of deep understanding and sympathy for people Gobineau came to know in his wide travels as a diplomat. The Dancing Girl of Shamahka involves the racial pride of Tartars suckled in a dizzy nest among Caucasian crags. The Illustrious Magician: wifely devotion, the burning quest of gaunt dervish and the dilemma of a thorougbred Mussulman. The Love of Kandahar: Romeo and Juliet among the haughty, feudmaking Afghans. They are keen-edged tales, scabbarded in language of bygone elegance, glinting fine irony.

*The Crystal Cup--Gertrude Atherton-- Boni & Liveright ($2.00).