Crazy Man

Crazy Man*

He Is an Idealist

The Story. Selma Thallinger, New York shopgirl, supplements her daily earnings by teaching every evening in the "Merry Grotto," an East Side dance-hall which provides partners for unattached men, under the guise of giving them "dancing lessons." According to the author, she is "innocent" in spite of the fact that she is the mistress of both Pete Ravanni, the proprietor, and Max Lisenco, his assistant. But she is discontent with this lot and decides to throw them both over. The very evening she does this, "Crazy Man" appears.

He is John Carley, ex-convict and professional thief, who decides, under the pressure of reading he has done in the prison library, to become "an intellectual Christ." He robs department stores in the day, and in the evening he gives away sealed envelopes containing one hundred dollar bills.

This evening, however, he craves a new experience. So he tries entering the Merry Grotto in workingman's clothes. He is thrown down the stairs by Ravanni, Lisenco and Mike Scolleri, a bruiser who runs the cloak room of the establishment. He comes back again, is again thrown out. This happens six times. As he mounts the stairs for a seventh time, he discovers that the defense has been worn out by his persistence. By this time he is an enthusiastically worshipped hero. Especially to Selma, who sees in him an ally to her own determinations.

Naturally enough, a love story ensues in which this curious idealist of the underworld plays opposite the shopgirl, who dimly feels something beyond the flesh, but who can understand clearly only when the flesh is speaking. They quarrel because she cannot comprehend his idealism. They separate. They rejoin again, and for a while it seems as if her way of living triumphs. But in the end it is Carley's ideal that wins. And when he is sent to an insane asylum as a criminal paranoic it is indicated that she understands his attitude. At any rate, she agrees to live as he directs her. And to visit him annually in his asylum.

The Significance. Obviously, the foundation on which this body is constructed is irony. The implication over and over again is that--perhaps --very possibly--relatively speaking, at least, "Crazy Man" is not totally insane. His lunacy is consistently idealistic. And for that reason, Crazy Man, the novel, more than once or twice during its 200-odd pages comes so close to the ridiculous as to border on the sublime. After all, Carley is a paranoic--whether or not he is an intellectual Christ. But for all that, it is an original, vivid novel. In detail, its realism fails occasionally-- especially in dialogue--but the total effect of its realism is good. It is not to be recommended to the Victorian-minded. Its subject, honestly treated, precludes that.

The Critics, The Literary Review. "A complete monomaniac, nothing really interests Bodenheim unless it relates somehow to his ruling intellectual passion. . . . Ultimately he can be no more than a minor though highly interesting literary phenomenon, but his flavor, acrid and pungent, is distinct and lasting."

New York Tribune: "The story is at once serious and sentimental and is saved only from downright banality and absurdity by its swift, fine, unusual limning of character, its philosophical digressions, and its descriptive certainty and distinction."

The Author. Maxwell Bodenheim was born in Natchez, Miss., in 1892. He has served in the Army, studied law, art His first writing was poetry (Advice, Minna and Myself, Introducing Irony). He has one other novel (Blackguard). He is at present associated with Ben Hecht (Chicago "bad man"--Time, Sept. 3) in editing the Chicago Literary Times.

Good Books

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

MAN AND MYSTERY IN ASIA--Ferdinand Ossendowski -- Dutton ($3.00). The Polish author-scientist-sportsman who has already interested the American people in his Beasts, Men, and Gods here narrates some of his earlier adventures on the same continent. Employed by the Tsar's government in investigating salt lakes, coal mines, gold deposits, Dr. Ossendowski was obliged to make long trips into the Kalunda and Bateni steppes, into the Altai Mountains, to the convict island of Sakhalin, into the extraordinary Ussurian country where the tropical tiger roams in the same forest as the reindeer and the northern goose and the Indian flamingo rise from the same lake. During these travels he watched the Tatars taming their wild horses, he saw the two eyes of a man-eating tiger peering at him through the jungle grass; an escaped murderer whom he befriended showed him a deadly battle among tarantulas; he visited a camp of Mongol Golds still in the stone age; he became the brother of a Kirghiz rider. A book of adventure for those who are cut off from adventure by the routine of their life. A book of truth for those who 'do not find fiction strange enough.

THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE--Edwin Arlington Robinson--Macmillan ($125). The narrative of Fernando Nash, a musician, is in blank verse. He died in the spirit and, having tasted the uttermost of disillusion and defeat, is 'born again--before he dies in the flesh--to such a vision of glory as "not more than once or twice, and hardly that, in a same century" will be given to another. An average between the best and the worst that Mr. Robinson can do, it is neither masterpiece nor failure. As such, it is filled with cramped or involuted obscurities. But as such it is filled also with the austere gold of his restrained apocalypses, is set down with that eminent aristocracy in the choice of phrases which has carried Robinson to the head of our living poets.

JAMES JOYCE: HIS FIRST FORTY YEARS--Herbert S. Gorman--Huebsch ($2.00). A critique of the "most-talked-about man in modern letters" by an admirer who has abandoned the usual claptrap for eloquent and intelligent exposition. It is lucid and comprehensible. One need not necessarily be won over to Mr. Gorman's enthusiasm for Ulysses in order to pay tribute to the competence of this book.

Honore Willsie

She Edited "The Delineator"

Born at Ottumwa, Iowa, of a father who ran away from home to participate as a drummer-boy at twelve on the battlefield of Shiloh, Honore Willsie Morrow has led a life that has been a consistent development toward the goal which she has sought. Her childhood was spent in the West and it is of the West that she has written. Her stories are vivid, decisive tales of plain and hill. They are filled with excellent background and quick characterization. They move rapidly. They are good stories, probably the best of all the western stories. Mrs. Morrow herself, is tall, dark, a person of rare dignity and poise and of no pretentious. For five years she edited The Delineator. She is modest and she is ambitious. Her new novel,* appearing serially now in Everybody's is called The Devonshers and is a combination of mystery, adventure and the great West. She is a careful workman, spends weeks of hard work revising a manuscript that does not satisfy her. She is, of course, thoroughly American, and she possesses a curious sort of pioneer quality. Just what that quality is you would have to meet her to know. It is this quality that I imagine you will find in her new novels--the novels she is going to write from now on. They will still be of the West; but they will probably show that great historical background of pioneer days with which she is familiar.

Mrs. Morrow is not only interested in her writing; she is exceedingly interested in her children. Of them and of their problems, she is far more willing to speak than of her work. She is essentially a home-loving woman; her interests, while broad, are concentrated in her home, a new home--for she has recently been married again to William Morrow, of the firm of Stokes, her publishers.

Here is a woman who has two great gifts; first, the gift of story telling, second, the gift of looking deep into life and understanding it analytically as well as emotionally. When these two gifts are combined in her work, I fancy that she will write a novel which will not only be as popular as her others, but will challenge the laurels of our older women novelists.

J. F.

*CRAZY MAN--Maxwell Bodenheim--Hat-court ($2.00). * Her works include: Heart of the Desert, Still Jim, The Enchanted Canyon.