History & Argument

WHY BRITAIN IS AT WAR -- Harold Nicolson--Penguin (25-c-). Semi-propaganda for the literate: the British argument put with skill and fervor by a ringside spectator of British foreign policy since Versailles. The next Peace Conference will have a fighting chance of fairness, Nicolson thinks, only if a Final Treaty is negotiated between victor and vanquished at their leisure and at least a year after the Preliminary Treaty, or Diktat, is imposed. For implementing a future society of nations, he proposes (less convincingly) that all civil and military aircraft be operated by the "League."

POLITE ESSAYS--Ezra Pound--New Directions ($2.50). The casual but by no means languid prose of a great verse stylist. Sometimes crotchety, more often bright and sound, Ezra's remarks concern the works of Dante, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Harold Monro, Laurence Binyon ("The younger generation may have forgotten Binyon's sad youth, poisoned in the cradle by the abominable dogbiscuit of Milton's rhetoric.") Also his famous piece on "How to Read."

EUROPEAN JUNGLE -- Francis Yeats-Brown--Macrae Smith ($3). England's yogi-man (Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Yogi Explained} submits a hot-eyed appraisal of pre-war Europe. Yeats-Brown's arch-enemies are Communism, Atheism, Internationalism, Pacifism. Hitler, "a great man, whatever his failings . . . great in spirit," is favorably compared with Gandhi, T. E. Lawrence. France is "one of the most enjuive [Jewridden] countries in Europe . . . nothing but a dictatorship can save [the French]." Readers who must grant the author the courage of his two-thirds fascist convictions, supported by no little factual solidity, will nonetheless find the thinking itself often suspect, sometimes poisonous, only too typical of honest military mystics.

TO STEP ASIDE--Noel Coward--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Actors, writers, wistful perverts, celebrity-hounds, the occupants of cheap rooming houses, are the creatures of Noel Coward's seven stories. In detail, at times, almost indecently sharp-eyed and entertaining, as wholes they are poor in ratio to their seriousness, good in ratio to their snottiness. Best: misadventures of a gentle English celebrity who, lassoed into a Long Island week end of guaranteed peace & quiet, finds himself the agonized vortex of a Walpurgisnacht of corrupt artists, moneymen, scrimmaging Lesbians, carnivorous wives and dowagers. Their favorite adjective: "genuine."

JULIUS ROSENWALD--M. R. Werner--Harper ($3.50). Able Biographer Werner (Barnum, Bryan} here writes an "authorized" but exceedingly honest monument to the head of Sears, Roebuck. Rosenwald carefully gave away some $63,000,000; "he did not give it away in the form of high wages." As philanthropist and multimillionaire, he had delusions neither of sanctimony nor of grandeur, was one of the most modest of U. S. rich men.

THE STORY OF THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHERS-- George Catlin -- Whittlesey House ($5). A little background in these matters being widely desirable, Catlin's history is commendably addressed to laymen, gives in critical outline the best political thinking from Plato to Bertrand Russell, discovers a Grand Tradition from which fanaticism and specifically Hegelianism are excluded. Contemporaries Harold Laski and John Strachey, to say nothing of Adolf Hitler, do not come off so well under the author's analysis.

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