High-Yellow Fictioneer

THE INCREDIBLE MARQUIS: Alexandre Dumas -Herbert Gorman -Farrar & Rinehart ($5).

The Man. Quadroon son of a black-mothered father, Napoleon's reckless General Alexandre Dumas, born in July 1802, was blue-eyed, thick-lipped, with fairish, crisply negroid hair. His skin's yellow was so high it was almost white. His mother found him, aged 3, climbing stairs with a musket. Alexandre explained he was on his way to heaven: "I am going to kill God for killing my father." Better than God the boy liked the Arabian Nights, Buffon's Natural History, bird-hunting. From his windows he once saw French and Prussians clash. On an afternoon more peaceful, the bumpkin, 16, burst his breeches while showing off robustly to his first love.

Resolving then to acquire urban gloss, Alexandre set out for Paris. He won 600 glasses of absinthe at billiards and converted them into a coach ticket. In the city he had his first duel, which became a burlesque when his trousers fell down. At 22 he became an unmarried father. His employer allowed him to write plays in the office. Five years later Playwright Dumas scored a Romantic smash with his Henri III et sa Cour, which posed the problem of Romanticism v. Classicism. Balzac, father of Realists, detested Dumas, told him "When I can do nothing else, I shall take to writing plays." Snapped Dumas: "Begin at once then!"

In the Revolution of 1830, Dumas wore a loud hunting-suit, led 50 men through Paris. Encountering enemy troopers, Dumas approached their captain, politely asked permission to go on to the centre of fighting. When refused, he retreated courteously, went by another street. In an attack on a Museum, he refused to let the shield, helmet and sword of Francois I be damaged, wore them home to his daily cup of chocolate.

After the Revolution Dumas' fortunes mounted with his debts. Not invited to the King's costume-ball, he staged one all his own between walls painted specially by the great Eugene Delacroix, with 500 bottles of champagne and a vast morning-after street parade of famed guests.

In 1844 he took all his friends on a Mediterranean cruise. In 1847 he kept them for weeks at his magnificent chateauvilla Monte Cristo, then took them to the Theatre-Historique built for his own plays. In 1853 all Paris read Le Mousquetaire, the periodical he edited, owned and wrote with disorder. Now few Frenchmen read even the greatest of Dumas' novels-Les Trois Mousquetaires, Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Literary France now scorns the great romantics. Dying in 1870, Dumas produced his first louis, saying "Why have they accused me of prodigality? I have always kept it, that louis."

Said Alexandre fits: "My father is a great baby of mine ... so vain that he is not above mounting behind his own carriage so that people will think he possesses a Negro footman." In Pere Dumas' lavish life there were a dyspeptic brunette, the Ida he married and soon forgot, the great-hipped courtesan Ada Isaacs Menken (TiME, Aug. 19), the woman who called him her "big bow-wow," the blonde sempstress who mothered Alexandre fils,* the actress who imprisoned herself with him nine days to make him finish a play, the three naked ones with whom a fourth once surprised him. He boasted of begetting 500 children. In literature, too, he exhausted his collaborators, spawned 1,200 volumes.

The Significance. Author Gorman's researches have been colossal, minute. But dealing with his flamboyant discoveries, his comedy is often overdone, his manner heavily platitudinous, his character-drawing flimsy. To grand-scale literary, mili tary or social movements, the Gorman style gives a tumultuous vividness. Dumas once summed up his own significance: "I carry with me wherever I go - I don't know how it is, but it is so -an atmosphere of life and stir which has become proverbial."

The Author. Herbert Gorman, 36, native of Springfield, Mass., sacrificed cobbling and banking for newsgathering and reviewing. He likes Stravinski's music, bad puns, James Joyce, blue, Greta Garbo, golf, phonograph records by Helen Kane. He is a gourmet, hopes someday to live in France.

The Publishers. The Incredible Mar quis is the first large offering of Farrar & Rinehart of Manhattan, who began publishing in September, stating: "There is a need for literature that is written in quiet places and that is brought to the public with dignity." To found their firm, John Chipman Farrar, onetime editor of The Bookman, and Stanley Marshall Rinehart Jr., son of Novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, both of them long connected with Publisher George H. Doran, departed from executive desks in the merged house of Doubleday, Doran.

Black Ulysses

WINGS ON MY FEET (Black Ulysses at the Wars)-Howard W. Odum-Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50).

"I'm magic black boy, rainbow round my shoulder, wings on my feet. War never got me, never will. Got my buddies, never got me. . . . I'm high brown, black, mean and lean. I ain't no tenderfoot, soft-skinned, fat-bellied an' green. I'm long an' tall, hardboiled, chocolate to the bone. . . . Thought about my mama's papa tellin' me 'bout fightin' tribes in Africa. . . . Lord, been mighty change since I was born. Lord, I wonder is good old U. S. A. gonna blow me down. Thought about marchin' in New York, peoples cheerin' colored soldiers. Thought 'bout singing on boat goin' over when torpedo missed us. . . . Gonna rock trouble to sleep, rainbow round my shoulder, wings on my feet. Well, don't you grieve after me, Lord, don't you grieve after me. . . ."

Author Odum is a white Southerner who knows black Southerners. As in his Rainbow Round My Shoulder (TIME, April 9, 1928) he makes a Wartime U. S. Negro tell his own story of Armageddon, interweaving work-songs, spirituals, blues. Crude semi-rhythms rise everywhere in the troubled utterances which are best appreciated when read aloud. Frenzied, dolorous, it is a saga with moments of grandeur.

Author Odum, 45, is editor of scholarly Social Forces, was born in a log-cabin. Twice a Ph.D. (Clark, Columbia), he has written much on Social Science, the Negro. He dislikes dignity, intolerance; he likes Jersey cattle, tennis, his three children.

Sex as Pacifism

LYSISTRATA-Maurice Donnay-Knopf ($2).

In 411 B.C., Playwright Aristophanes wrote a provocative bed-scene into his 1321-verse comedy, Lysistrata. The play became the immediate smash of that Athenian spring. The heroine was a social leader of Athens who led her fellow women to lock their girdles against all men, including their husbands, until the men should outlaw war. Another playwright, France's Donnay, has now written another Lysistrata, using the same heroine but with differences in the scheme, notably: i) much sympathetic raillery at modern men and women; 2) a subplot which is Gallically triangular, Lysistrata successfully holding out against her husband but relenting for her lover; 3) several sub-sub-plots one of them thoroughly wicked in the Paris manner. The Donnay Lysistrata can be said to amuse. It is presented to U. S. readers by Drama Critic George Jean Nathan as the "oddest contribution to dramatic letters made in recent times by a member of the French Academy."

Hard Knox

JOHN KNOX: Portrait of a Calvinist-Edwin Muir-Viking ($3.50)-

The hardness of Homer's heroes was that of swashbuckling giants who asserted themselves. But the hardness of Christian heroes was a spiritual pugnacity in behalf of the Messiah. Early German bishops led their flocks to fire and sword; Popes told Henry IV and Frederick II to bend their knees; Luther denounced Popes; Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury, mighty Cardinals all, violently helped to shape France out of chaos.

Scotsman John Knox (1505-72), historian and leader of the Reformation, follower of the great Calvin, had his own share of Christian belligerence. His charity was far from meek. He began to harden in his early days as a Catholic priest, hardened further as an oarsman in prison-galleys, was completely hard when he did battle in the front line of the Scottish Reformation. Patriarchal rodomontade was his only weapon. With it he accomplished great destruction against the Catholicism of tolerant Mary of Guise and impulsive Mary Stuart. With it he was able to deprive Scotland of Renaissance pleasures.

To this task less of biography than interpretation, Author Muir has brought the qualifications, not of the poet and novelist he is, but of the scholar he also is. Unfortunately it is a dry sort of scholarship.

Young Love

WRITTEN ON WATER-Francis de Mior-mamdre-Brentano ($2.50).

The tribulations of a boy in the toils of sex are substance enough for many novels. In this one Jacques, 19, having yearned vainly for a blonde matron, tries to divert that yearning to a melancholy young brunette. But raptures are not transferable-he does ,not really like the girl even when her father intervenes. Next he makes embittered attempts to enjoy himself with Jeanette, a tortoise, with Coco, a vulture who once grew tired of vegetables and tried to breakfast on a bedridden friend. At length Jacques learns that in love, as in croquet, ambition exceeds performance. Chastened, he returns to his "cabinet of memories."

Tenderly, whimsically told, despite its salty theme, this story won France's famed Goncourt prize in 1908.

* Novelist and dramatist like his father, Alexandre fils (1824-95) began to write when he found himself $10,000 in debt. Taunted throughout youth for his bastardy, his works contained preachments against adultery, seduction. He gained most fame from his plays (La Dame anx Camclias, Idces de Madame Aubray, La Femmc de Claude, L'Etrangcrc) in which such great actors as Sarah Bernhardt, Benoit Constant Coquelin and Jean Mounet-Sully appeared. In 1874 he was elected to the French Academy, a distinction which his father never achieved.