Books: Passionate Painter

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(3 of 5)

A threatening oratorical paean to the youthful proletariat of the world, Author Gessner's vociferous but blank lines hymn the young hobos of the U. S., the mutineers of the British, Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon, the Anti-War Congress at Amsterdam, a Communist prison-camp in Nazi Germany, the glories of Soviet Russia. Soap-box Poet Gessner's nearest approach to poetry is in a description of the lines of abandoned ships in Southampton:

These subdued prows, beaten, facing the opposite row between which our tender hurries like a girl in a graveyard. . . .

Cavalier Novelist

GLORY — Francis Stuart — Macmillan ($2).

Whether or not realism is on the wane, romance is coming back. One of its most determined banner-bearers is the wild young Irish novelist, Francis Stuart. Few present-day writers have a more cavalier disregard for the facts of real life or a more impassioned determination to transmute them into romantic, mystical reality. Prolific, Author Stuart turns out his novels almost as fast as if they were pamphlets. Hence they have pamphleteering faults. Glory is typical. When its little galaxy of eccentrically orbited people first swim into view they seem both delightfully and illuminatingly human. But Author Stuart soon yanks them out into interstellar space where they cease to be anything but misty symbols, hardly visible to the naked eye. In spite of this disregard for verisimilitude, both of fact and grammar, sympathetic readers find him exciting, consider that he has the gist of the matter even though his manner needs mending.

Mairead lived with her puttering old father and a slatternly kitchenmaid on a broken-down Irish farm. She had immortal longings, but her job was to feed the chickens. She greatly admired Frank de Lacey, who had built himself a hut in the woods and went there to meditate, but she was not ready for so conventual a life. When Trans-Continental Aero-Routes bought 50 acres of the farm for an aerodrome, the world opened up for Mairead and her father. They blew in the cash on champagne and a Rolls-Royce. Mairead learned to fly. As pilot for General Porteous, Napoleonic head of the company, she flew him to China. When the General sprang his plot to conquer the world, Mairead became a temporary empress. She took a Chinese war lord as her lover, shot him when he tried to kill her beloved General. The world conquest a failure, she returned to Ireland, was happy to face a firing squad with her old friend de Lacey.

1933 Model

KARL AND THE 20TH CENTURY—Rudolf Brunngraber—Morrow ($2.50).