Tag Archives: poem

The Literary Life

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/May 6, 1910

Half a dozen publishing houses which devote themselves entirely to printing the rejected manuscripts of amateur authors (always, of course, at the expense of the latter) seem to be flourishing mightily just now. Several of the most important of them make a specialty of bad poetry. How many books of ghastly doggerel they have put forth during the past year is beyond accurate computation, but the number probably exceeds 400. These books are always well printed and artistically bound, and no doubt the authors pay the bills willingly. The usual charge for printing such a volume is about $300, which leaves the publisher a profit of $100 or $150, but on occasion he will shade his price a bit.

Other publishing houses seem to prefer bad novels to bad poetry, probably because it is possible to charge the author more for the printing. The actual cost of setting up, printing and binding 1,000 copies of a novel of ordinary size is about $500, but the egotistic amateur who seeks to inflict his work upon the world usually has to pay $750 or $1,000. For that investment he gets the entire edition of his work. Very often, perhaps, he materially diminishes the net cost of it by forcing copies upon his friends and upon the booksellers of his town. But, despite that, there must be a huge cavity in his pocket-book at the end of his adventure.

Chasing The Poet

Some of these fool-chasing publishers do not trust to chance for the appearance of clients, but go after them in an organized and effective manner. Whenever the name of a new bard appears in the magazines, or even in the daily papers, they send him a cordial letter, praising his work effusively and suggesting that a whole book of it would delight the country’s cognoscenti. Nine times out of ten the beginner is so flattered by this suggestion that he immediately forwards a couple of pounds of manuscript to the publisher.

And then begins the effort to make him pay for the book. He is informed with delicacy that all poetry, even including such masterly stuff as he writes himself, is a dubious publishing venture, and that, in consequence, the publisher, before undertaking to give his effusions to the world, must think it over carefully. When this has soaked in, he receives a letter suggesting that the risks of the venture be shared. He asks how much his share will be. He receives in reply a long statement, showing that it will cost, let us say, $500 to print the book, and suggesting that he provide $300.

Then comes the final haggling. The poet is inflamed by the idea of printing a book; perhaps he has even announced its early appearance. The publisher now gives him his coup de gras by coming down to $250 — about $100 more than the book will actually cost. If it is at all possible for him to raise the money, the poet will do so, and his volume will be added to the thousands already in the boneyard of the Congressional Library.

Many American poets, it may be mentioned, seem able to raise the money. Poetry is no longer a vice of the penurious only, like Socialism and rushing the can. It has become, indeed, a sort of universal pestilence. There are dozens of opulent bards, male and female, and even a few who are actually millionaires.

The Amateur Novelist.

The amateur novelist is bagged in a manner much like that which suffices to ensnare the poet. If, by any chance, he gets a single short story into print, he is immediately in receipt of flattering letters from the lemon-squeezing publishers. If, on the contrary, his short stories are so bad that not even a 10-cent magazine will print them, and his novel manuscripts come back from the first-class publishers with distressing regularity — even then the lemon-squeezers strike his trail, soon or late.

In the literary weeklies they insert advertisements asking for manuscripts; by a thousand and one other devices they seek to get names and addresses of aspiring, but unsuccessful authors. Some of them even offer to buy such names and addresses, and many a publisher’s reader or magazine subeditor, doomed to read bad manuscripts for a living, ekes out his income by compiling and selling such lists.

Now and then, of course, one of these thrifty publishers nabs an author who is more than an amateur. The latter, for example, may be just emerging from a battle royal with his regular publisher, perhaps over royalties, and so he is quite ready to be convinced that he will make more by printing his book at his own expense, and taking all, instead of a small percentage, of the profit.

Poets are particularly susceptible to that sort of argument. The demand for poetry, even for first-class poetry, is very small, but it is usually difficult to convince an amateur poet, with flattering reviews before him, that his publisher’s meagre sales report is accurate. Nine times out of ten, he accuses the honorable man of swindling him and they part company in anger. He is then ripe for the lemon-squeezers.

Paying A Literary Debt.

The little Scandinavian countries have given us Ibsen and Bjornson, Brandes and Selma Lagerlof — the greatest of modern dramatists, one of the greatest of literary mad mullahs, a critic of the first rank and the foremost woman writer of the day. How have we paid up that literary debt? What contemporary English and American books have been done into Dano-Norwegian and Swedish? What English and American writers do the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians read?

A glance at a recent catalogue of the Gyldendal Publishing House, of Copenhagen, the principal establishment of its kind in Scandinavia, affords us a somewhat astonishing answer. Are the Danes reading Mark Twain, Howells, Henry James, Conrad, Moore and Meredith? Apparently not. The Americans who appear to be represented by translations are Robert Herrick, Frank Norris and Jack London! And the favorites among Englishmen seem to be Israel Zangwill and Conan Doyle, with H.G Welles and Thackeray as bad seconds!

There are no less than eight volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories on the Gyldendal list. Just before the name of Doyle stands that of Dickens. He is represented by but one book, “Oliver Twist.” The two lonesome American novels on the list are Herrick’s “The Memoirs of an American Citizen” (“En Amerikansk Borgers Erindringer”) and Norris’ “The Octopus” (“Polypen”). Supporting them is Jack London’s book of Klondike tales, under the title of “Fortaellinger fra Klondyke.” Two volumes of Zangwill’s Ghetto stories are also there — but no sign appears of “Huckleberry Finn.”

The publishers apply the high-sounding denomination of “Moderne Verdenslitteratur.” (“Modern World-Literature”) to the books of Herrick, London, Norris and Zangwill, and in the same list the works of Pierre Loti, Anatole France and Paul Bourget appear. On a separate sheet, devoted apparently to classics, and showing, among other books, the poems of Heine, there appears one volume of James Fenimore Cooper’s Indian fustian and Thackeray’s “Book of Snobs.” The latter, which becomes, in Danish, “Bogen om Snobberne,” has the honor of a special paragraph, in which it is praised as “a classical book” and “one of the best-known in English literature.” But how about “Vanity Fair,” “Pendennis” and “Henry Esmond?” Alas, they are not there! 

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Holy Writ

H.L. Mencken

The Smart Set/October 1923

ENOUGH good intentions are concealed in the “Riverside New Testament,” a translation “from the original Greek into the English of today” by the Rev. William G. Ballantine, D.D., LL.D. (Houghton), to pave all the avenues and side-streets of Hell from the Jonathan Edwards monument to the Boulevard of the Popes. It is the pious and laborious work of a divine now in his seventy-fifth year, and its laudable purpose is to clear Holy Writ of its howlers and archaisms, and so bring it within the understanding of the average American reader of today. Exactly the same purpose, I hope I may say without insolence, prompted me to make my own translations of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address into the American vulgate; my aim was to rescue both of these great papers from the Johnsonian English in which they were couched, and thus make them comprehensible to the great masses of the plain people, who had apparently forgotten the doctrines set forth in them, and were, in fact, tarring and lynching men who presumed to preach them. But my scheme failed, and for a simple reason. The plain people, hearing the Declaration in bald American, were outraged and alarmed by the ideas in it, and proceeded only to fresh assaults upon the fanatics who voiced them. So long as the Declaration had been mainly incomprehensible to them, so long as they had apprehended it, not as a statement of concrete ideas but as a mere series of highfalutin’ dithyrambs, they were able, when drunk enough, to stand it, but the moment they read it in the language of their everyday life they leaped as if stuck with pins. And not only the common people. I was also denounced by Gelehrten in all parts of the country, and one of them, Prof. Dr. Scott, of the University of Michigan, hastened to assure a group of visiting English professors that I was a low and contumelious fellow, and that my dissemination of notions in contempt of the Motherland was thus not to be taken gravely. It seems to me that Dr. Ballantine’s new version of the New Testament will come to grief in the same manner. What he hopes to accomplish by it, as he says, is to bring what he calls “divine truth” down to the grasp of persons who get “no meaning at all or a meaning that is mistaken” out of the Authorized Version—that is, down to the generality of Americans, lay and clerical. But I greatly fear that what he will achieve, if his translation is widely circulated, is rather the propagation of agnosticism. For when they are put into plain English some of the most venerated passages in the New Testament begin to seem banal and dubious, and others begin to seem silly, and yet others begin to seem downright idiotic. In the Authorized Version their imbecility is concealed by the extremely elevated and beautiful dialect in which they are set forth, but in the speech of everyday it is only too plain.

Worse, it appears to me that Dr. Ballantine often makes a mess of his work, even when he is most faithful to his purpose—that he often fails at his primary business of converting the archaicisms of the Authorized Version into phrases that even a Methodist clergyman should understand. I turn at random, for example, to Mark VIII, and encounter one of the most familiar and moving speeches of Jesus: “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” Dr. Ballantine seeks to improve this by changing nests into coverts and hath into has. What a botch, indeed! Nests is the natural, the inevitable word; it instantly conjures up a living image; it is absolutely simple and clear. But how many Christians in America, without resort to the dictionary, could give a sound definition of coverts? Certainly not five per cent. I doubt, in fact, that Dr. Ballantine himself could do it, for he uses the word in a very far-fetched sense. Covert means, primarily, cover for ground game—a shelter in a thicket or copse. The birds of the air do not resort to coverts; they resort to nests, as the estimable Matthew plainly says. I find many other such inept renderings without leaving the First Gospel. In Matthew V, 17, for example, there is the historic pronouncement: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” Dr. Ballantine converts the last clause into the incredibly clumsy and confusing: “I have not come to do away with them, but to fill them full.” To fill them full? What on earth does that mean? With what is he going to fill them? It would be hard to imagine any worse nonsense than that. But there is actually worse. In the fortieth verse of the same chapter —“And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat. . .”— the venerable translator changes coat into tunic! Will this help the morons —or simply stump them? In the next verse—“And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile . . .”—shall compel is changed to commandeer, which has been current English only since the Boer War and is still quite incomprehensible to millions. Finally, still remaining in Matthew, I come to the Lord’s Prayer in Chapter VI, the version read daily in the public schools of all the American states that are Christian, and familiar even to Congressmen, bishops and the inmates of houses of correction. Here, if you don’t know it, is the Authorized Version:

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

And here (omitting the doxology, which is not found in the oldest Greek MSS) is Dr. Ballantine’s horror:

Our Father in heaven, Thy name be kept holy; Thy kingdom come; Thy will prevail; As in heaven, so on earth,

Our bread for the coming day Give us today; And forgive us our failures, As we forgive those who fail toward us; And bring us not into trial, And save us from evil.

II

But this almost inconceivably fatuous effort to gild the lily is not the worst of Dr. Ballantine’s offendings; he is far more dangerous to the faith, I believe, when he achieves his avowed purpose—that is, when his version of the Greek original is actually clearer and better than the rendering of the King James Version. What misleads him here is a misapprehension of the nature of religious feeling. He seems to think that it is the product of an intellectual process, that it arises out of ideas; it really has its origin in a sense of mystery, a complete escape from ideas. It seizes upon the mind most powerfully, indeed, when the evidences of its objective truth are most vague and unconvincing—in brief, when it is apprehended, not as fact, but as poetry—the negation, or, at all events, the antithesis of fact. The success of Christianity in the world, as I have often argued, is due chiefly, if not wholly, to the incomparable beauty, as poetry, of its sacred books. It is hard to think of any other oriental religion that is not logically more plausible and persuasive, but not one of them has a sacred literature that is even remotely to be compared, for sheer gaudy loveliness, to that of the decadent Judaism which, alone among them, has enchanted the West. There are single Psalms that have ten times more beauty in them than the whole literature of Brahminism, ancient and modern; in the story of the Christ Child there is greater poetry than ever was heard of in Greece or Rome. It is this profound and disarming poetry, this irresistible evocation of the unattainable and ever to be desired, that gives Christianity its undiminished strength, despite the gradual destruction of all its so-called evidences. Poetry, I repeat, does not fetch a sentient man by convincing him; it fetches him by robbing him of the wish to be convinced—by lulling his critical faculties and setting him off upon an emotional debauch. Certainly there are few educated men left in the world who believe literally that Mary was got with child by God, or that the shepherds on the hills were guided to the manger by a dancing star, or that wise men came from the East to hail the new-born King in the manger at Bethlehem; nevertheless, that man must be a dull clod, indeed, who is not moved by the simple and charming story, and made to wish a bit wistfully that such things could really be. It is, of all stories ever devised by man, enormously the most beautiful. The Jews, when they invented it, conquered the whole Western world.

Now, poetry, as everyone knows, is a fragile flower, and will not bear transplanting—certainly not anatomizing. It cannot be reduced to plain propositions without losing everything that makes it what it is—without becoming, in fact, the very reverse of itself. Try the experiment with any poem you admire, even with “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” In prose all its bloom is gone; it becomes simply nonsense. This is true, of course, of great poetry as well as of poetry that is not great, as every attempt at a prose translation of the Odyssey bears witness. It is preeminently true of the vast body of poetry which makes up the sacred books of Christianity. Try it with any of the Psalms, with the Sermon on the Mount, with the story of the Nativity, with the roaring strophes of Revelation. The thing becomes, in the speech of everyday, a mere absurdity. It is not only not moving; it is even somewhat laughable. To get the savor of it one must have the archaic language that it stands in, with its curiously inverted syntax, its strange and often barbaric phrases, its mysterious and scarcely comprehended terms. In other words, to get the savor one must have the savor. Dr. Ballantine, in his translation, has squeezed it all out. His New Testament, ceasing to be a great poem, becomes nothing more than a series of improbable anecdotes. I cannot imagine it making any new believers, save perhaps among idiots; on the contrary, it will very likely unmake not a few old believers. This is saying that it fails of its central aim, certainly and disastrously—that all the piety of the learned and reverend translator has gone into an enterprise that will delight and prosper the devil. Seeking to make customers for theology, he has only succeeded in scaring off customers for poetry. I am convinced, indeed, that even a congregation of Presbyterians, if his banal prose were read to them aloud, would begin to cough, shuffle their feet and look at their watches.

Well, let us not heap opprobrium upon him. When he stands up to answer for his crime on the Judgment Morn, he will at least be able to say that he followed lofty precedent and thought himself in good company. The dock, indeed, will be full of holy men who sought to promote the faith by bringing the Bible to the multitude. A great folly. Poetry is always better heard than read—and it is best heard where the lights are dim and a certain spookiness prevails. Let the priests read it, with vows to protect them, and then tell simple folk what is suitable for simple folk to hear—above all, what is within the limits of their imagination, their sense of beauty. Whoever it was that translated the Bible into excellent French prose is chiefly responsible for the collapse of Christianity in France. Contrariwise, the men who put the Bible into archaic, sonorous and often unintelligible English gave Christianity a new lease of life wherever English is spoken. They did their work at a time of great theological blather and turmoil, when men of all sorts, even the least intelligent, were beginning to take a vast and unhealthy interest in exegetics and apologetics. They were far too shrewd to feed this disconcerting thirst for ideas with a Bible in plain English; it was deliberately artificial even when it was new. They thus dispersed the mob by appealing to its emotions, as a mother quiets a baby by crooning to it. The Bible that they produced was so unutterably beautiful that the great majority of men, in the face of it, could not fix their minds upon ideas. To this day it has enchanted the English-speaking peoples so effectively that, in the main, they remain Christians, at least sentimentally. Paine has assaulted them, Darwin and Huxley have assaulted them and a multitude of other merchants of facts have assaulted them, but they still remember the twenty-third Psalm when the doctor begins to shake his head, and they are still moved beyond compare (though not, alas, to acts!) by the Sermon on the Mount, and they still turn once a year from their sordid and degrading labors to immerse themselves unashamed in the story of the manger. It is not much, but it is something. I do not admire the general run of American Christians—Methodists, United Brethren, Baptists, and such vermin. But try to imagine what the average low-browed Methodist would be if he were not a Methodist but an atheist!

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to the same extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous. Its toyings with ideas, in the main, have been confined to its clergy, and they have commonly reduced the business to a harmless play of technicalities—the awful concepts of heaven and hell brought down to the level of a dispute of doctors in long gowns, eager only to dazzle other doctors. Its greatest theologians remain unknown to 99 per cent of its adherents; the great theologians of Protestantdom—Wesley, Billy Sunday and the like—are as vulgarly familiar as Babe Ruth. Rome, indeed, has not only preserved the original poetry in Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry—for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big-top by a Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone. Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

III

The autobiographies of Harry Kemp, Maxwell Bodenheim and other such daredevils of Greenwich Village take on a great obviousness and decorum when put beside the “Escapade” of Evelyn Scott (Seltzer), and even Frank Harris’ “My Life and Loves” loses something of its daring. For all these babbling males, in the end, fail to do what Mrs. Scott does: they never exhibit themselves in humiliating and degrading situations. In extremely naughty and even discreditable situations, yes—but never in the actual dust. Mrs. Scott is far more candid and courageous. The tale of her life in the backwoods of Brazil, a fugitive in company with another woman’s husband, is a tale of almost inconceivable privations and hardships—a tale with little more romance in it than an attack of cholera morbus or the morning visit of the garbage-man. Do not mistake me: it is not “lewd and lascivious” in the Comstockian sense. I can find little in it to bring a blush to the maiden cheek of a Tammany judge’s 30-year-old daughter. The escapade dealt with, of course, is primarily sexual, and the events include an obsterical episode that is certainly not smothered in euphemism, but there is nowhere the slightest sign of a desire to shock prudes. This should be said in fairness to the author, and in fairness no less to connoisseurs of pornography, who may be misled otherwise into buying the book with the loftiest expectations. Mrs. Scott aims, in fact, at higher game. She is trying to tell her story with a degree of frankness that even Frank Harris would probably balk at; she is trying to remember the days, not only when she sinned the sins that are in all autobiographies (particularly those by poets), but also the days when she was dirty and had no clean clothes, and the days when a cockroach in the stew was as familiar to her as a star in the heavens, and the days when—

But perhaps I had better halt here, for the line must be drawn somewhere. The important question is, what is the net effect of the book? Is it dignified despite its matter, or is it merely disgusting? Does it show any merit as a piece of writing, or is it only a mass of sordid scandal? It seems to me that the yes belongs in the first place both times. There is a lingering immaturity in parts of it, especially toward the end, and there are plenty of ambitious effects that fail to come off, but taking it as a whole it is a genuinely remarkable work, both as document and as literature. The reality of the thing is never in doubt for an instant. When the author postures, her posturing is naive and unashamed, and one takes it for exactly what it is. When her syllogisms—and she is often argumentative— are feeble and unsound, it is nevertheless obvious that they are honestly her own. When she admires herself, which is not infrequently, there is always some ground for suspecting that, after all, she may have been admirable. It is a picture of a bold and foolish soul in the altogether, and there are skill and daring in almost every stroke. What brilliant and revolting sketches of that unknown and god-forsaken wilderness! What savage character portraits of the people that come in and go out of the scene! The exotic fascination of the background, of course, has its part here; the story would be a great deal less terrible, one fancies, if it had been played out in sight of Sheridan square. But that background, remember, is not lugged in; it is as significant and inescapable as the dark forest in “Heart of Darkness”; without it, there might have been no story to tell. Mrs. Scott paints it with the utmost adeptness. It casts its sinister shadows over everything, even the inner life of the author herself. The book is something quite new. There is a quality not unlike glamor in it. It peters out in puerility, but there are moments when it is unmistakably distinguished.

The author, I confess, somewhat puzzles me. Her early book of poems I have not read, but two or three years ago she printed a very unusual novel, “The Narrow House,” and gave promise of becoming a novelist of importance. This “Narrow House” was full of the thing that is vaguely called atmosphere. Out of a lumbering and sordid story there gradually emerged an extraordinarily vivid impression of an indescribable thing: the influence of human beings upon one another—their capacity for radiating a desperate and unintelligible unhappiness. It was a very creditable first novel, and I waited for its successor with the utmost interest. But that successor, “Narcissus,” turned out to be flat and preposterous—a novel full of people who talked like characters in a bad Pinero play and inhabited what seemed to be separate vacuums. It was an irritating disappointment; Mrs. Scott appeared to be actually trying to imitate Gertrude Atherton, Edith Wharton or other such favorite novelists of the last generation. But “Escapade” certainly atones for that misstep. There is absolutely nothing imitative in it save the printing and binding. It is a book which, however it looks two or three years hence, will surely never get itself forgotten as an imitation. It is original in both conception and treatment, and it is original in a way that is extremely interesting. To do something that no one has ever done before is, after all, not hard, but to do something that has solid merit is a quite different story. It seems to me that the merit of “Escapade” is of that quality. It is a bomb thrown into a quiet street. It will give the professors of Nordic blond life and letters something to screech over.

Waldo Frank’s “Holiday” (Liveright) is another assault upon the High Church tradition in the national literature, but I find it, in the main, ineffective and unconvincing. Frank’s aim, obviously, is to rescue the novel from the formalism that has long cursed it—to rid it of its conventional garrulity and sobriety of manner, and get a touch of lyrical passion into it. That aim is one that is pursued with varying success by various other writers, among them, Dorothy Richardson, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and Mrs. Scott herself. But Frank, though he is bolder than any of them save Joyce, fails of his goal because his practical skill is not sufficient; he has made himself a formidable and fascinating ophicleide but he lacks the wind to blow it. Consider, for example, his first chapter. One of his main purposes here is to wash in a quick and vivid picture of a small Southern town—a dull, squalid, half-idiotic place, baking in the hot glare between the pines and the sea. He essays the business by piling up short and disconnected sentences—in brief, by trying to do it in flashes. But the effect intended is never actually achieved. The thing is jerky, stenographic, staccato, but it is not vivid at all. A Joseph Conrad, writing in the manner of a  conveyancer’s clerk, would get an effect a thousand times as brilliant; even an O. Henry or a Richard Harding Davis would do quite as well. Later on, when Mr. Frank yields to his lyrical impulses more ecstatically, he is far more successful. The device of putting the reveries of his characters into a sort of barbaric free verse is not at all bad; what is more, it is new, for though Joyce came close to it, he never actually did it. But that one device is not enough to save the story.

What ails the thing, at bottom, turning from its manner to its matter, is simply a gigantic incapacity for accurate observation. Whether or not Frank has ever lived in the South I do not know, but the Southerners that he here sets before us, both white and black, are so unreal that they cease to be human beings at all, and become mere apparitions in a cloud of smoke. I am myself somewhat gifted as a professor of Confederates, white and black, for I have lived among them all my life—in fact, I went to school with them, was dosed with ipecac in my nonage by one of them, used to play catty with them, have had several sad love affairs with their fair but inconstant females, and share their cynical view of Abraham Lincoln to this day. All I can say is that I have never encountered any such Southern colored youth as the one Frank hounds to an undeserved lynching, and that I have never heard of any Southern white woman who was even remotely like the gal he depicts as succumbing to the young Ethiop’s manly beauty, and even proposing to dance before him in the altogether. (Since Anderson’s “Many Marriages” all the novelists of the Village seem to be pulling off their undershirts.) Nor have I ever heard any Southerners, white or black, employ the phrases that Frank puts into the mouths of his characters. He actually makes them misuse the sub-Potomac pronoun, you-all! This is as bad as if a novelist writing of New York should manhandle the pronunciation, as in woild. Altogether, a somewhat depressing piece of goods. A  great earnestness is in it, but not much else. Frank would be improved, I suspect, if he could be set to writing editorials for the New York Times for thirty days and thirty nights.

“Geography and Plays,” by Gertrude Stein (Four Seas), is 419 pages of drivel. In the days before the war, when Miss Stein printed her “Tender Buttons,” there was at least some charm of novelty in her ponderous prancing. That was also the time of the first Freud uproar, and I remember putting in an amusing evening with a distinguished American poet, examining the Stein dithyrambs in the light of the new revelation. But Freud and the device of stringing meaningless phrases together are both now stale. “Geography and Plays” is dreadful stuff, indeed. Even more dreadful is the encomiastic preface by Sherwood Anderson. As one of the earliest and most faithful admirers of Anderson I can only say that I wish heartily that he would go back to the Middle West and resume the observation and limning of its yokels, a task for which he has singular talents. If he lingers in New York any longer and ingests any more of the bilge that passes for profound thinking among the inhabitants of its literary half-world he will presently become a downright Rosicrucian.

IV

Brief Notices

Memoirs of William Henry, Vol. III (1782-1790), edited by Alfred Spencer (Knopf)—The third volume of the most amusing memoirs printed in years—a tale altogether incomparable and indescribable. The naivete of Pepys is in it, and something of the scoundrelism of Casanova, and even something of the charm of Goldoni and Cellini.

An Outlaw’s Diary, by Cécile Tormay (McBride)—The exhilarating and edifying story of the triumph of democracy in Hungary. I commend it to all Liberals.

Idioms and Idiomatic Phrases, by Frank H. Vizetelly and Leander J. de Bekker (Funk)—An extremely useful reference book, well planned and very competently executed.

The Evolution of Hungary and Its Place in European History, by Count Paul Teleki (Macmillan)—A clear and admirable presentation of facts of which American professors of history know nothing and American editorial writers less. A book of genuine value, with a comprehensive bibliography appended.

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