The Blind Bow-Boy*

A Plate of Literary Anti-pasto, Some Stale

The Story. Harold Prewett met his father for the first time at the age of 21. His mother had died in childbirth and that shock, and the disappointment occasioned by Harold's not being a girl, had so disappointed Papa that he turned over Harold to Aunt Sadi, who made rather a sissy of him as a boy. Conventional, ingenious, inexperienced, Harold was horrified to find that his father's plans for his future included neither a family reunion nor an entry into the paternal cloak and suit business, but that instead his father proposed flinging him into the waters of life to sink or swim alone, assisted by an unlimited income, a corrupt English butler named Drains and a tutor, Paul Moody, of good character but no moral sense.

Dropped into Paul Moody's circle of super-sophisticates, Harold found himself as bewildered and shocked as an innocent goldfish in a bowl of curacoa. He failed to enjoy the delicate odors of their elegant decadence, and fled into marriage with Alice Blake, whose idea of Heaven was a brand-new Park Avenue apartment. But on his honeymoon he discovered the horrible truth. Father hadn't really wanted him to be charmingly wicked but to disgust him with the pleasant sins of life by throwing them at his head--a plot of which Alice had been cognizant from the first. The honest people were rogues, the scandalous ones merely natural-- so he promptly went to the devil with supple Zimbule O'Grady and felt much better. In fact the tale ends with Harold on the way to becoming an out-and-out " roo."

The book, the jacket assures one, is not romance or realism, life or art, fantasy or satire. The author has sworn before a notary public that his only purpose in creating it was to amuse.

The Significance. Geranium trees and alabaster cups--pickled walnuts and plovers' eggs--Darius Milhaud and Ouida--a patchwork of curious names, objects, personages, vices--a plate of literary antipasto, some pleasant, some a little stale. Somewhat affected, somewhat precious, quite amusing, though not nearly as delightful as Peter Whiffle, The Blind Bow-Boy reviews a facile display of intellectual fireworks from under the lacquered eyelids of a superficial sophistication. The fireworks squib out, the performance is over. There were too many pinwheels near the close, perhaps, and the shadow of Ronald Firbank had a way of straying across the scene. But, nevertheless, the avowed purpose of the author has been adequately fulfilled.

The Critics. The New York World: " The Blind Bow-Boy marks to us a certain movement back to the conventional by Mr. Van Vechten. It is sometimes annoying but always readable and entertaining."

New York Evening Post: " Survivors of the Victorian age are not unlikely to echo their queen with a frigid: 'We are not amused'."

The New York Times: "The author . . . demonstrates a fondness for split infinitives. . . . Mr. Van Vechten ought to be able to give us a very much better novel than this rather tedious one."

New York Tribune: " Mr. Van Vechten supplements the work of Mrs. Emily Post [author of the Book of Etiquette] on certain points of etiquette and . . . the author of the Red Classified Telephone Directory on the subject of the location of shops."

The Author. Until the appearance

of Peter Whiffle, Carl Van Vechten was chiefly known as a cosmopolitan whose main interests were music and cats. Previous appearances in print include The Tiger in the House, Interpreters, Music and Bad Manners and the inimitable Peter Whiffle.

*THK BLIND BOW-BOY--Carl Van Vechten--Knopf ($2.50).

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion.

THE BACK SEAT--G. B. Stern-- Knopf ($2.00). Robert Carruthers occupied it--he was the little pig who stayed at home making ornamental shelves while Leonora, his wife, one of the brightest stars of the British stage, informed interviewers how sincerely she yearned for the simple, homey existence her public would never really allow her. But when she got her chance at true domesticity--and her daughter, Faith, as the result of Robert's mild engineering, made a howling success of a part supposedly written for Leonora--she found the back seat a little too hard for her temperament and returned to the stage. A slight, amusing comedy.

GREY TOWERS -- Anonymous -- Covici-McGee ($2.00). Joan Burroughs wanted to teach, really teach. She got a job at the University of Chicago. And that, according to her, is the last thing she should have done to satisfy her pedagogic yearnings. All the professors, she found, were sexually predatory. Their wives drank cocktails, were migratory almost every night. The authorities demanded that the faculty--presumably in its soberer moments--confine itself to research laboratories. Even the student body was regarded not as boys and girls to be taught, but as a corpus vile, a collection of human guinea pigs tolerated for experimental purposes. Disillusioned, Joan left the campus, marched to the altar, departed for the fireside. The book is a passionate polemic against present university conditions, and (although the authoress does not realize it) against coeducation. Falsetto in spots, it is always too passionate to be more than stimulating.

RAW MATERIAL--Dorothy Canfield --Harcourt ($2.00). "In this un- related, unorganized bundle of facts," says Dorothy Canfield, "I give you just the sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary characters, or episodes in a novel. I offer them to you for the novels you are writing in your own heads. I have treated you just as though you were that other self in me who is my best reader. I have given you the fare I like best." The reader expects "joltings"--especially after reading the publisher's blurb, stating that the author has attempted a "new form, not a short story, but raw material." The fact of the matter is that this is a book of short stories and is nothing if not art.

Ben Hecht

He Is the Terrible Child of Chicago

Ben Hecht is always about to embark upon a new enterprise. His dark eyes, nervous movements, ejaculatory speech, bitter mind, all suddenly are brought to bear upon the impossible and it is accomplished. He does too much. His plays just miss being brilliant. His novels suffer from a lack of taste which would undoubtedly be ironed out in a second writing. When he started to write a Rabelaisian fantasy in Fantazius Mallare he was only adolescent in his pornography and was consequently affected. His last book, a detective story, The Florentine Dagger, he claims to have written in ten hours. It's not a bad yarn. I am told, however, that, dictating as rapidly as one is able, it would scarcely be physically possible to accomplish this feat. I once dictated ten thousand words of a story in a week-end and have never been the same since. However, Ben Hecht's versatility and his energy are astounding! That's fortunate, for his life is lived to astonish. He must have an audience, no matter how contemptible to him.

In spite of the fact that Chicago is vociferously proud of this noisy genius, he was born in New York City and went to the high school of Racine, Wis. He has been a journalist for years. He was a correspondent in Berlin in 1918-19. His back-page feature stories for the Chicago Daily News were the best of their kind. They were the reactions of a rather peculiar brand of sentimentalist to the more simple and sordid phases of existence. They have been collected under the title A Thousand and One Nights in Chicago.

I remember seeing Hecht in his own house, a figure of some domesticity, with his wife and children; relating rapidly anecdotes gleaned from a rather grotesque variety of facts which he has gathered from years of constant, voracious, exotic reading. He was really a person of much charm. I looked forward to his first novel. Erik Dorn was a disappointment to me. It had passages of power; but its vulgarity and carelessness overbalanced them. Gargoyles I liked even less. Hecht is a brilliant, flaunting, ironic and not yet so very stable figure. What he does in the future seems to me partly to depend on how frank his flattering group of friends care to be with him. He has two signal faults: a too great facility and an overwhelming desire to appear to be wicked.

J. F.