Mr. Hazard's Maggot

MR. HODGE AND MR. HAZARD--Elinor Wylie--Knopf ($2.50). "When Mr. Hazard was forty years old, he decided to revisit England. . . ." Arriving there, he proceeded immediately to have an attack of influenza, during the course of which he stalked angrily about the town of London, frightening children with his dark and troubled eyes. Then, in May, he went to Gravelow and met the Huntings, Allegra and Penserosa, daughters, and Clara, their mother. These provided him with a momentary haven from the assaults of a world which he could not completely fathom, and which, by 1833 no longer admired his wise fancies & eccentric conceits as it had done before his belligerent sojourn in Greece. But his brief and comfortable enchantment was shattered by the arrival of Clara Hunting's sons, together with Mr. Hodge, their tutor. He, a teacher of mathematics, resented the untidy brilliance of Mr. Hazard; his resentment was effective. Mr. Hazard felt himself compelled to resume elsewhere his pursuit of peace, a pursuit always profitless in this dusty world for one like Mr. Hazard, who, fierce, bewildered, and alone, was not entirely its inhabitant.

Like all of Author Wylie's works, Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard exists entirely for its manner. Author Wylie is, it is true, writing again a history of the old battle waged by their alien companions upon those who are ill at ease in the world, sensitive, frightened and aloof. But what ever Author Wylie says, she says with flowers ; and often, the narrow white card, when it is finally discovered in the scented and elaborate bouquet of metaphors, has nothing written on it at all.

The Author, whose real name is at present Mrs. William Rose Benet, gained her literary reputation when she published, in 1921, a book of poems called Nets to Catch the Wind. After Black Armour, more poetry, she poured into a mold of prose the fluent and shining metal of her talent for metaphor. Jennifer Lorn was her first novel; The Orphan Angel and The Venetian Glass Nephew its successors. Author Wylie, her publishers announce with a show of pride, spent less than three months in writing her latest novel. This is an admission less damaging than it appears to be; Author Wylie thinks before she writes and is therefore capable of producing, with a minimum of scribblings and erasures, the single typewritten manuscript in which her works make their initial and dangerously modest appearance. A person as mercurial and far more alive than those whose faces peer in startled beauty from the blossomed branches of her writing, Author Wylie lives in Manhattan, venturing but seldom to go among the troops of esthetes who long to do her honor. Her library is stocked with the works of Shelley and with the accounts of antique murder trials; her closets contain dresses from Paris; she has had two husbands before Mr. Benet; the daughters of one of them are now grown up.