NON-FICTION

Corsican Comet

The story.* The Alps, if they could, would have snickered in 1796 at a shaggy-haired, large-skulled, short youth of 27 with a tatterdemalion army at his back. He was part failure, part lover, part dangerous. . .

A Corsican, he had been sent to France to a military school because his parents were too poor to keep him at home. He brooded--shy, taciturn, lonely--while scions of the frivolous French nobility laughed at him. He wrote absurd fiction; he contemplated suicide. "Everything goes awry," said he to his diary. Then a long-smoldering idea flared up in his mind. He would get even with these Frenchmen; he would liberate Corsica from their obnoxious yoke. Three times he tried and failed. Humiliated, ousted from his native land, he went to Paris to watch the French revolution. One day, he was given the opportunity to put into action his simple theory: "that a cannon ball, if it strikes a man, will kill him."/- This theory dispersed a mob, saved the Directory, brought Napoleon a wife--Josephine, the mistress of one of the Directors. This theory was the reason that Napoleon was at the foot of the Alps with his ragged army. In less than a year the Austrians were thrashed, Northern Italy was conquered, the Alps snickered no more.

The star of the man of destiny had begun to shoot like a comet. Epical dreams of a march to the Indies swirled within him. But he went no farther than Egypt, returned to Paris without his army. Everyone knows the rest of the story--the coup d' etat . . . imperial crown of golden laurel leaves . . .Austerlitz and "name your children after me" ... a treaty on a raft at Tilsit . . . the comet begins to droop . . . conqueror of a burning Moscow . . . Leipsig and puny Elba . . . Waterloo and hellish St. Helena.

Biographer Emil Ludwig is no dull historian, neither is he a manufacturer of fiction. He takes the story of Napoleon, rips away the nimbus of legend, builds upon the facts of history a character that would stagger any novelist. He peeps into Napoleon's bedroom on his wedding night; he thunders across France with Napoleon in his battle carriage with maps swinging on the walls. Wisely, Mr. Ludwig has made the diaries, memoirs, reported conversations and 60,000 letters of Napoleon the bulwarks of the biography. Few men have written so much and so interestingly about themselves as did Napoleon. Herewith, some of his words as selected by Mr. Ludwig:

P: In the first heat of his love for Josephine, Napoleon wrote: "I am waiting for you. I am wholly filled with you. Sweet, incomparable Josephine ... I find calm when I give myself up to my passion, that on your lips, at your heart, I may fan the flames which burn me."

P: Concerning his wedding night and his wife's lapdog, he said: "I had to choose between sleeping beside the beast or not sleeping with my wife. A terrible dilemma, but I had to take it or leave it. I resigned myself. The dog was less accommodating. I have the marks on my leg to show what he thought about the matter."

P: On becoming Emperor: "Look at Alexander, for instance. After he has conquered Asia, he declares himself to be the son of Jupiter, and the whole East believes him, save only his mother and Aristotle and a handful of Athenian pedants. But if I, nowadays, were to declare myself the son of the Father Eternal, every fishwife would laugh in my face. There is nothing great left for me to do."

P: Napoleon's intense desire for a legitimate heir* caused him to divorce Josephine, marry Marie Louise of Austria. Said he, on hearing of the prolific reproductivity of Marie Louise's ancestors: "That's the kind of a womb I want to marry." Marie Louise bore him a son, L'Aiglon, who died at the age of 21.

P: "I have only one passion, only one mistress: France . . . she has never been untrue to me."

P: Napoleon's last will and testament: "It is my wish that my ashes shall be laid to rest on the bank of the Seine, in the midst of the French people ... I shall meet my brave warriors in the Elysian Fields. ... We shall talk of our battles to the Scipios, to Hannibal, Caesar and Frederick. What a delight that will be! If only people here on earth are not terrified at seeing so many soldiers put their heads together! ... I bequeath the shame of my death to the royal family of England."

P: His last command gave to his legitimate son his old home in Corsica.

The Significance. Napoleon is always good biographical material, but seldom has he been exhibited in so dramatic, episodic and psychological a book as Mr. Ludwig's. Europeans were agreeably amazed in 1925 (when the book first appeared) that a German had written so sympathetically of Napoleon. Now, in the able translation of Eden and Cedar Paul, it is well on its way to be the outstanding biography of 1927 in the U. S.

The Author. Emil Ludwig began to write plays at the age of 15 and, despite dabblings in law and business, continues to do so at 46. Quite naturally, he plunged into dramatic biographies to achieve his greatest works. Heroes--Goethe, Wagner, Bismarck and particularly Napoleon--inspire this understanding scholar, lift his pen out of the commonplace. Said he last summer: "My pet aversion is the historical novel, which falsifies history to meet the requirements of romantic fiction, and falsifies romance by trying to force it into the framework of history. My ideal is to produce a work which shall be strictly accordant with the available documentary evidence, but shall none the less bear the imprint of an imaginative recreation."

FICTION

Miss Tiverton Goes On

THIS DAY'S MADNESS -- Anonymous--Bobbs Merrill ($2.50). The author of Miss Tiverton Goes Out still wishes to remain anonymous. Her critics still fatten their admiration upon their curiosity. Critic William Lyon Phelps, politely rebuffed by her publishers, went ahunting "this superior intelligence" by himself, and discovered its identity. But lo! when he came to divulge her name, it had escaped him. Said he: "A name totally unknown to English and American letters. It might have been Miss Abercrombie or, for that matter, Miss Fitch."

Until Dr. Phelps's memory mends, "Miss Tiverton" will serve. The lady's second offering fully merits the company of her first. Maidens revolt in every third novel these days but here is a maiden whose technique is neither kittenish nor hoydenish. Motherless Letty Monckton is a British country gentlewoman with as much poise as poetry about her. Her flight from the bosom of Moncktonism--father, manor, cousins, suitor --to the humbler hearth and home of Andrew Bullen, tweeded biologist, is not like the flapping of a decapitated chicken but like the career of a startled teal, which will explore other ponds before circling back to an inviting one nearby.

Order Changeth

Twilight lasts all a summer's night in the Baltic countries. The air becomes heavy with dreams. Sometimes the nobility roam abroad troubled or sleep in peace under the stars, like peasants. They feel a change upon their world which philosophers say is more than the passing of the seasons. A twilight is falling, some say, upon the feudal order of things.

The old codes are dying and time trembles for a birth. Thus, the cedar forests remain but in places they are being leveled to pay gambling debts. Barons and landlords still shoot capercailzies at dawn and snipe at sunset, or shoot one another in grave "affairs of honor." Yet here is a man, a little crazed perhaps, who finds dueling a pitiable farce and who would rather watch the love-antics of moorfowl at sunrise than slaughter them. In the white castles and proud manors, dames still drill their men-servants, still preserve an ancient ritual for meals and marriage, dancing and death. Yet there is a lady, brainless perhaps, whose love transcends pride and ancestors. Baronial Germany, decadent, is threatened with perception. Light shows through the chinks of crumbling castle walls.

Such is the atmosphere that, like grey mist, informs two of this book's* three parts. In such a mist events of the most personal nature loom up with unwonted significance. It is not so thick as to shroud details; these are handled gently but with such calm precision that close scrutiny will reveal no blurred edges. Fastrade von de Warthe walks in the great park, brooding, but her figure is seen clearly through the trees. Dietz von Egloff, with unrest in his soul, rides his black stallion over the estates when the countryside is abed, but the effect is not supernatural. The beast's hoofs ring sharply, the rider's voice is strong and clear.

Emotional sequences proceed with similar distinctness, subtle as the Russians, lucid as the French. Twilight is the tragedy of Dietz von Egloff driven to suicide by his thirst for a real fate among peers immured by aristocratic routine. He takes the wife, then the life, of his best friend. From Fastrade, whom he loves, he can evoke nothing but pity. She takes his body home through a spring morning with birds and sunlight making a festival of death.

Harmony ends with a suicide too, the idyllic drowning of Annemarie. A fragile narcissan, she could not survive the robust air of a manor thriving with cows, milk-wenches, plowing and her gentle but healthy husband, Felix.

In the light of these two tales, the third one, Kersta, completes a demonstration of where Germany's vigor truly lies--next to the soil, be it cruelly frozen or warm and fertile. Kersta, runty peasant girl, bears the gamekeeper a lusty baby during her huge husband's absence at war. Life is hard, but it goes on and may get better. She is cheerful under mockery and resolutely presses suit for her little dowry of land. That was her Thome's parting command. Thome returns, thrashes her for deceiving him. She guards the child; he may warm to it. The land suit is won at last. Thome praises her, drinks deeply, brings her a kerchief. He brings also a white roll "for--for that--well, for the brat." Life is good again.

The Author, as his publishers have somehow neglected to make clear, is not to be confused with Count Hermann Alexander von Keyserling, author of The Travel Diary of a Philosopher and editor of The Book of Marriage. The latter lives at Darmstadt, in Hesse (southwestern Germany). Count Edouard, a cousin, used to live in the Baltic provinces of Prussia (northern Germany) but has been dead for a decade. Count Hermann is a mystical metaphysician. Count Edouard was an aristocratic realist, a minor figure in the movement led by Authors Hauptmann, Sudermann and Mann in the last century to clarify and simplify German prose. The struggle of youth to escape palsied age was his favorite theme. This is not his "first full length novel to be translated into English." His Gay Hearts came out in 1913. Another woeful oversight of the publishers, who are new to the field of worthwhile books after several years' traffic in cheapish thrillers, is to award some one credit for a beautiful translation.

Disreputable Dublin

MR. GILHOOLEY--Liam O'Flaherty--Harcourt Brace ($2.50). For those who like the "slice of life" kind of novel, here is red meat masterfully carved. An engineer, after 20 years in the Andes, retires to Dublin to nurse a weak heart. Idle city life forces upon him a strange new gamut of temptations, indulgences, inhibitions, hysteria. Not a wicked man, Mr. Gilhooley takes up with disreputable people through sheer indolence. But they bore him. The Dublin fog smells of charcoal. He longs for an honest emotion. In the street he finds a girl, more fascinating than sluttish; keeps her; tries to marry her. When he understands that her one remaining fibre is loyalty to a one-time lover, he preserves his dream in the one infallible way.

To cry, "Genius!" for Author O'Flaherty, as some have done, is flighty. But force and humor, irony and sympathy, he has in abundance. He builds small episodes into "big" material without visible effort. His occasional inability to evoke deep pity without strangely disgusting the senses seems to be the common lot of many Irish writers past and present.

*NAPOLEON--Emil Ludwig -- Boni & Liveright ($3.00).

/-To use the words of able Playwright George Bernard Shaw (The Man of Destiny).

*Napoleon had two known illegitimate children. One, Leon, became the no-account husband of a U. S. cook; the other, Count Walewski, was a distinguished Minister of State in the Second Empire.

*TWILIGHT--Count Edouard Von Keyserling-- Macaulay (12.50.)