Outline of Art

Outline of Art*

MEN OF ART--Thomas Craven--Simon & Schuster ($3)./-

P: "We can easily imagine what the old Florentines, renowned and feared for their sharp tongues and fierce wits, might have said on seeing their beloved city besmirched with a mob of insolent Black Shirts, and how the masters of art, accustomed to designing banners, uniforms and all sorts of processional devices, would have sneered at so stupid and colorless an emblem as that worn by the followers of Mussolini. . . . Florence is still one of the fairest cities on earth . . . but she is, as we say, a dead town, without spirit, imagination or courage."

P: "To the outside world Spain is the only country in Christendom that has devoted herself, at the cost of everything that is modern, decent and enlightened, to the preservation of her romantic soul."

P:. "Yet the long reign of George III embraces all the great names in the history of British art; and after this astonishing fruition of national genius, there is no more painting of importance."

P:. "Matisse, growing old, turns out pretty sentiments for the American trade; and Picasso, to judge by his prize-winning exhibit at the Carnegie Institute, is a candidate for the Academy. The present condition of French painting is not one to make the heart rejoice."

Such provocative statements speckle almost every page of Thomas Craven's philosophy of painting which the Book-of-the-Month Club this month offers its lodge members. Lay readers should not be discouraged; if Mr. Craven's conclusions are sometimes questionable his book--useful as a reference work in any library--always holds the attention, stirs the imagination.

Mr. Craven's method is to trace the development of painting by a series of critical and biographical sketches of great painters, applying continually his test for true art: vitality, gusto, a passion to interpret life. It is as good a standard as any other but leads inevitably to the conclusion that lusty Rubens was one of the greatest artists who ever lived; and that patrician Velasquez, who "painted the King's face in precisely the same spirit as his modern kinsman Monet painted haystacks," was little more than an expert technician. The 500 pages of the book are a learned sausage stuffed with much meat. Author Craven has spent three years writing it, studied original sources all over Europe to prove his points.

The Author, Thomas Craven, 42, is a red-haired Kansan, as unassuming in private conversation as he is dogmatic on the printed page. He has been a reporter in Denver, a schoolmaster in California and Porto Rico, a deckhand in the West Indies, an unsuccessful painter and poet. His essay, "Have Painters Minds?" in the American Mercury for March 1927, brought him into contact with such critical bigwigs as Britain's Roger Fry, France's Elie Faure. Today the entire U. S. art world pays attention to him.

Further Adventures of Clim

THE MAGNET--Maxim Gorki--Cape & Smith ($3).

For a country that officially does not exist (to the U. S.), Soviet Russia is doing pretty well in gross tonnage of literary exports. Maxim Gorki's latest (839 pages) ups the total by at least a couple of pounds. A continuation of Bystander (TIME, April 14, 1930), The Magnet carries the story of Clim Samghin, myopic Russian intellectual, a few hundred thousand words nearer its goal.

But Clim is only a peg, and a square one at that, through whose uneven peregrinations up and down the cribbage board of pre-War Russia you are made aware of the extent of the scene, the background vastness of Russian life. Clim never wanders far from Moscow nor from his self-interested, skeptical observer's viewpoint, but the scores of characters that throng the story come from many outskirts, are of every tinge of political conviction, agnosticism or despair. Clim's history winds through real events, from the coronation of the late Tsar through the Russo-Japanese War to the Bloody Sunday (Jan. 22, 1905) in St. Petersburg--the dress-rehearsal for the 1917 Revolution. Recognizably real figures hover on the edges of the action: Lenin, Trotzky; you hear Feodor Ivanovitch Chaliapin's mighty bass lifted in revolutionary song in a Moscow restaurant.

Through everything Clim makes his cold and dubious way: the university, journalism, a law office. He marries Varvara, mainly for intellectual reasons, and cares very little when her love is chilled into seeking warmth elsewhere. Clim is really a parlor liberal, but even parlor liberals were looked at askance in Tsarist Russia, and he several times runs foul of the police, once goes to jail. Not from any excessive love for his fellow-man but because he has a head on his shoulders Clim begins to side with the revolutionaries. No longer just a bystander, he begins to feel the pull of the unseen magnet sweeping over Russia.

The Author, Consumptive, gaunt Maxim Gorki (Alicksei Maximovitch Pieshkov) has survived 63 years in spite of his disease, in spite of one attempt to commit suicide. A bystander like his hero, he took no part in the Revolution but is in good odor with the Soviet Government. Plain Russian Communists like him (although he spends nine months a year at his Italian villa) and have bought over 2,000,000 copies of his books in the last four years. Speaking no English, he does not know the phrase "moral turpitude," but on his single visit to the U. S (in 1906) he met many a chilly shoulder because the lady he was seen with was not his wife.

Super-Thriller

THE GLASS KEY--Dashiell Hammett-- Knopf ($2).

Out of the glassy sea of crime fiction this book bursts up like a breaching sea-serpent. . . . If you have a sneaking suspicion that the general run of detective stones are drab, mechanical, unconvincing --in short, not so well done as they might be--read The Glass Key and have your suspicion confirmed. Defenders of the old-line detective story might object that The Glass Key is less a detective than a crime story. But whether you are a squeamish voyager among books or so hardened that the roaring forties seem like the doldrums, this book will be a portent and a welcome one.

Paul Madvig was the city boss; he had risen to the top of the pile by patience and "guts." But it was Gambler Ned Beaumont's brains that helped him out of many a tough spot. Beaumont did not like the idea of Madvig's supporting aristocratic Senator Henry, thought still less of Madvig's sparking the Senator's daughter Janet. When the Senator's son was found murdered, suspicion soon fell on Madvig, but strangely enough failed to wreck the political alliance between the boss and the aristocrat. Ned Beaumont was used to fishy doings. He said little to anybody, but he went after the murderer on his own. That was nearly the end of Beaumont. How it all turned out is a story Author Hammett tells with raciness and verisimilitudinous realism. If you have any breath left afterwards you will probably use it to inquire for earlier Hammetts or to ask for more.

The Author. Like William Shakespeare, Dashiell Hammett has little Latin and less Greek, abandoned formal education in his first year of high school to be: a messenger boy. clerk in an advertising office, in a broker's office, timekeeper in a machine shop, stevedore, railroadman. But his chief job, at which he worked both before and after the War, was as a Pinkerton detective. He says: "I was a pretty good sleuth, but possibly a bit over-rated because of the plausibility with which I could explain away my failures." During the War, Hammett acquired a sergeantcy and tuberculosis, has lost them both. Other books: The Dain Curse, Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon.

Short, Not Sweet

SAD SAD LOVERS--Daniel Carson Goodman & Duffield ($2.50).

Of the many things that can be and are being said about love, Author Goodman has chosen to voice the cynical. He pleads an unpopular cause, but the cases he presents make their occasional point. Of these 17 short stories not one gives aid & comfort to romantic love.

Some of them:

A racketeer-businessman is seduced from his comfortable wife by his unattractive but spiritual secretary, wishes when it is too late that he had not fallen for that high-brow stuff.

Two young men in love (with each other) come to a violent end.

An aging professor's advances are scornfully repulsed by one of his girl pupils, whereupon he succumbs to a senile bronchial complaint.

Daniel Carson Goodman, 48, M.D., has been a theatrical producer, cinema executive, author, businessman (he is vice presi- dent of Celotex Co., of Southern Sugar Co.), one of the late Cinemactress Alma Rubens' husbands. He has also written: Hagar Revilly, Because of Women, Battle of the Sexes.

Wrong Generation

AMBROSE HOLT AND FAMILY-Susan Glaspell--Stokes ($2.50).*

Harriette had always been called Blossom because families are funny that way. But the name did her less than justice: she had money, good looks and made more sense than any flower. But she married Lincoln Holt for love, and then discovered she was in the wrong generation. Lincoln was too cold to be a poet, too temperamental for a businessman; as a husband he was a little difficult. Ambrose, Blos- som's father-in-law, was really her opposite number. Ambrose wanted to be natural and have a good time. When he found he could not do it at home he just picked up and left. That finished Ambrose with his family, but Blossom understood, kept a warm spot in her heart for him.

When Ambrose finally returned after his odyssey, to live down by the lumber pile, Lincoln was scandalized and still furious. When Blossom stood up for her father-in-law Lincoln got mad and went away himself. Old Ambrose finally solved the difficulty by dying. That mollified his son, and Blossom, who had sense, went on being a wife & mother.

The Author, Susan Glaspell (Mrs. Norman H. Matson), relict of the late George Cram ("Jig") Cook, who was one of the founders of the Provincetown Players, has a bigger reputation as a playwright (Bernice, The Verge, Inheritors, Alison's House) than as novelist. She started as a political reporter in Des Moines, Iowa, went to Manhattan to write for the Provincetown Players, sandwiched a few novels in between her plays. Other books: Brook Evans, Fugitive's Return, The Road to the Temple (biography of her first husband).

Ambrose Holt and Family is rated aaa (for rentability, salability, suitability) by The American News of Books, monthly trade journal.

Post-War Teutonic

THE WEB or YOUTH--W. E. Sueskind-- Brewer, Warren & Putnam ($3).

Nobel-Prizewinner Thomas Mann thinks Author Sueskind "belongs among the most gifted and . . . most representative members of the generation of young German writers." But only if you like earnestly humorless reports of adolescence, if you believe passionately in a Youth Movement, may you like what Author Sueskind has to offer.

Fleming was a bright boy and stood well in his classes, but he got in trouble when the school authorities found he had spoken at a radical meeting. But being under a cloud did not keep him from graduating, and afterwards he had such luck on the inflated German stock market that his winnings kept his family in comfort and himself in their good graces. Meantime he fell in love with a poverty-stricken Norwegian girl, and their cat-&-dog affair lasted many a wearisome month. Then he became the gigolo of a shrewd, middle-aged business woman. When the market cleaned him out he decided it was time to grow up.

The Web of Youth is Author Willy Sueskind's first novel, but he has published two books of short stories. He meant to be a student of history, went to work as a bank clerk and somehow began to write. Bavarian-born, he lives in Munich in spite of the fact it is regarded as an art centre. Thirty years old, his youth spared him from fighting in the late War. He went to college in Munich, thought university life "extremely insipid."

/- Published March 30.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

*Published April 9.

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