FICTION

Stifling Sincerity

DREAM'S END--Thome Smith-- McBride ($2). A young poet meets two women. One of them, whose name is Scarlet, is a passionate lady who lolls about showing her teeth in a provocative manner while she wears clothes which are nothing if not voluptuous. The other, name of Hilda, is a radiant and ideal embodiment, with "something unearthly about her." David, the poet, finds that whereas Hilda realizes for him a dream of beauty, the lower depths of his nature are called to the surface by the warm, red lips of Scarlet. The conflict goes on until Hilda, who is married to rich and lecherous John Elliot, dies. Still tormented by the remembrance that for a moment he has yielded to the wiles of Scarlet, David dreams of Hilda. Finally he too dies, presumably to join her later.

It is possible for a sincere author to put so much intense feeling into a book that it becomes stuffy, stifling. Author Smith's sincerity is evident and creditable, but the conflicts in the minds of his characters, though perfectly imaginable, are poorly imagined. They have not been viewed with sufficient perspective to prevent their growing maudlin. The action is unbalanced. It wobbles off into a mist of emotion and disappears from sight. Author Smith's last book, Topper (1926), was in a happier, lighter, suburban vein to which his readers may well wish he would return.

Square Wheel

ORDEAL BY GLORY--James Marshall--McBride ($2). Had small-town John Hoyer married sex-appealing Agnes Paine instead of sweet, sympathetic Mary Borchard, he might never have become Governor. At his peak, however, when the architecture of his career has been executed to a nicety, he crumbles at a stroke of apoplexy.

Author Marshall has contrived a credible and moving history of an idealist who pursued other phantoms than those chased by big businessmen and shady politicians in the late years of the last century, but he has allowed his selective faculty to droop. There is divagation, fumbling with incidents and words. Force penetrates these defects; in spite of them the story progresses, with power but without smoothness, like an ore truck with one square wheel.

Mortal Fairyland

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN--Thomas Mann--Knopf (2 vol. $6). "An unassuming young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks' visit," Soon after his arrival, he perceives that his cigars have a flat taste. Before his three weeks are over, he has a bad cold. Before his return to Hamburg, to a world at war, he has spent seven years in a mortal fairyland.

In the sanatorium, a high and chilly retreat, the perspective of life changes. With death for a background, massive and eccentric as the high Alps, the caperings of man seem puny by comparison. The idiotic decadence, the absurdly microscopic preoccupations of humanity are emphasized by their isolation.

As Hans Castorp eats, sleeps, falls in love with Madame Chauchat, talks to his cousin Joachim, he reproduces in miniature man living in a community of death. The other dwellers on the magic mountain, likewise specializations of humanity in the large, significant and tiny, make irritable and oblivious motions in front of the backdrop of disaster.

At the end of the second volume Hans Castorp comes down in time to fight in the World War. He is scarcely conscious of the masque in which he has been an actor. Yet he is no longer a total blank as on his arrival. He has listened to Settembrini talking democratic politics. Peeperkorn, who has won Madame Chauchat and dominated Castorp with the rest, is the first to die.

In a sense all the persons of the story are symbols of certain ideas in the muddle that preceded the War. Peeperkorn personifies the strength, the glitter of royalty. What gives the metaphor power is the juxtaposition of death. Author Mann shows how men can adapt themselves to an environment of mortality by forgetting its existence. So countries squabble and chatter in the presence of catastrophe; so men, in the shadow of an enormous horror, pursue their silly and incongruous intrigues.

The Author displays an intellect profound, searching, inclusive, an artistry profound and subtle in all his works. These in translation have been Royal Highness, ironic comment on the life of kings; Death in Venice, three short stories; Buddenbrooks, monumental saga of the 19th Century. Son of a merchant, Herr Mann had to write secretly at first, functioning ostensibly as a life insurance salesman.

His appearance is more presentable than distinguished. Aged 52, he has a wife, six children. Ten years after publication, Buddenbrooks had gone through 50 editions. Its author remains, now as then, the follower of no master, the founder of no school, as important a writer as Germany possesses

NON-FICTION

Out to Texas

Sam Bass was born in Indiana, It was called his native home

And at the age of seventeen, Young Sam began to roam.

He first went out to Texas, A cowboy for to be.

And a kinder hearted fellow You'd scarcely ever see.

Charles Siringo, born in the County of Matagorda, Tex., in 1855, was a cowboy from seven on.* For 40 years he roamed about the West, either shooting at bandits with a large revolver or selling ice cream and cigars in his shop. He helped chase Billy the Kid, whose bloodthirst was of an extraordinary coolness. As a detective he functioned for several years at taming the Wild West. Now he functions at pumping Wild West atmosphere into the eager balloon of his reminiscences. The verses above, quoted reminiscently, describe an oldtime bandit. Also they describe the spirit of Author Siringo, indicate the rough-and-tumble, hardbitten, gun-toting memoir on saddle-leather that this book is

Glitter

THE GOLDEN COMPLEX--Lee Wilson Dodd--John Day ($1.75). Ably if without great acumen Author Dodd proposes the inferiority complex as an answer to the questions, "Why was Byron a poet?" "Why was Cain a murderer?" "Why was Francis of Assisi a saint?" Reminds Author Dodd: "Let me remind you of the former Kaiser's withered arm--the most dangerous deformity ever visited upon European civilization. 'They shall feel,' said Wilhelm to himself, 'that I am not a weakling!' Let me remind you of the late Theodore Roosevelt's rickety body. . . ."

The defect in Author Dodd's book is not in his arguments. It is merely that such arguments are unnecessary, that anyone is capable, with less rodomontade, of precisely the deductions which he achieves. In his efforts to gild the complex, Author Dodd uses a paint-pot full of diluted Freudism thinned with Adlerism. His paintbrush has a self-conscious smirk. Unable to accomplish his intended alchemy, he succeeds in imparting to the "golden" complex a wan and tell-tale glitter.

Flashlights

THE LAST VICTORIANS--Arthur A. Baumann--Lippincott ($5). At the close of the last century brilliant British politicians were as numerous as rabbits and, as to good conversation, as prolific. Author Baumann rescues bevies of these politicians from oblivion, restores them to public note. He heats over dinner-table talk which has been growing cool for 20 years, anecdotes which have been in the cake-box for two or three decades.

The articles are short, seven to thirty pages, commenting on statesmen and men of letters, sometimes criticizing their attitudes, more often merely turning a pocket flashlight on their manners, views, actions, idiosyncrasies.

Disraeli "divided his speech into two parts, the first dealing with Europe, the second treating of the Eastern possessions of the Sultan. After dismissing the absurd pretensions of Greece with a counsel of impatience, he stopped and put his hand into the inner pocket of his frock coat. He pulled out a tiny silver flask, deliberately unscrewed the top, took a pull at its contents, as deliberately replaced it, and turning to a grave and silent House said, 'And now, my Lords, I will ask you to accompany me into Asia.' "

Another gesture: "Lord Salisbury wiped his brow with the back of his hand. The familiar gesture at once put an audience of shy artisans at their ease. He dealt with the Balkan question. 'I have in my pocket,' said Lord Salisbury, 'a letter from the Sultan of Turkey which I will read to you,' and, fumbling in the breast pocket of his frock coat, he pulled out a bundle of letters from which he selected one, and said: 'The Sultan asks me to tell the People of England,' and then proceeded to read a few words. . . . Artisans, clerks . . . dock laborers gasped with excitement."

Of Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol: "The Master had sent me down the term before for some tipsy revel, with expressions of cold contempt. He now invited me to spend a part of the next long* at his Malvern Villa, an honor rarely extended. ... As a host nobody could have been more charming though his sherry was rather fiery, not to be allayed by his piping assurance that it was Amontillado."

The scholarly and courteous discourse of Author Baumann's papers has a cumulative effect. Onetime editor of the London Saturday Review, he is perhaps less brilliant than the men, his familiars, of whom he writes, but his dignity equals theirs. His scattered essays will add material to many a biography.

*RIATA AND SPURS--Charles A. Siringq-- Houghton Mifflin ($3),

*i. e. long vacation.