German Falstaff

THE MIRROR or POOLS--Alfred Neumann--Knopf ($2.50).

Publishers always have some reason for publishing what they do. Authors' reasons for writing what they write are vaguer. In a letter to Publisher Knopf, Author Neumann defiantly admits why he wrote this historical-romantic farce: "Because I wanted to fight against the general and my personal depression, and because in hard and bad times there is always one tragicomic feeling in place--gallows humor." Seekers after belly-laughs need not apply! Author Neumann's humor is fun but it is gruesome.

Heinrich, enormously fat, drunken, gluttonous Duke of Liegnitz, was a contemporary of England's Queen Elizabeth, but he never gave her a thought until his last legs were wobbly. Only thing that kept him from drinking his duchy dry and getting himself kicked out was his timidly pessimistic Counsellor, Schweinichen. But when the Duke, for a joke, tried to get his ugly wife to sit at the same table with his practically naked mistress, it was too much. The Duchess would not; the Duke slapped her; she went to the Holy Roman Emperor and told on him. So Duke Heinrich found himself deposed. Then began a picaresque and piggish progress as the Duke and his rapscallion retinue sponged their way around Europe. The Duke failed notably to have himself made King of Poland. He failed to stir up Germany against the Holy Roman Empire. Though he made enough of an impression on the Counts Palatine and Conde to get on their army payroll (which was all he wanted), he did not conquer France. Finally he thought of marrying Queen Elizabeth. But instead he went back to Liegnitz. lived in harmless drunkenness until patient Death came to deflate his monstrous belly.

Eternal Irish

THE COLOURED DOME--Francis Stuart --Macmillan ($2).

Though some Irishmen have learned to write English very well, the language is even less native to Ireland than it is to the U. S. The typical Irish writer wears his English with a difference. Racial bias toward tragic fancy, racial prejudice against successful fact give the Irish writer a peculiar angle on even plain Saxon themes. Author Stuart's theme is patriotism--which to an Irishman is partly like politics and partly like being in love. His tale, which starts realistically enough and wanders through dirty Dublin streets, ends toward the stars.

Garry Delea worked in a Turf Commission Agency (bookie's office) but he was ready for anything, wished some great opportunity would come along. Like all Republican sympathizers he knew about Tully McCoolagh. the secret leader of the Irish Republican Army, but had never laid eyes on him. When one night a friend hinted that a meeting might be arranged, Garry jumped at the chance. At the meeting Tully asked Garry to sign a manifesto that would mean arrest and certain death to two of the signers. Garry agreed without batting an eye. In Mount joy Prison he and Tully were put in the same cell; they were to be shot in the morning. To his astonishment Garry discovered that Tully's real name was Tulloolagh: she was a woman. The night passed differently from what he had expected. And at dawn he and Tulloolagh were released; the other two had been shot instead. Garry had been ready enough to die for Ireland; his night with Tulloolagh had rather shaken him; and now this final anticlimax upset him further. The Irish Republican Army disbanded. Her days of dangerous disguise at an end. Tulloolagh hoped Garry would marry her and live peacefully in the country. But Garry had tasted true happiness when he was facing death; he wanted it again. With wild Irish asceticism he dedicated himself to share "the little, ludicrous tragedies of the world."

Author Stuart tells this highly improbable and occasionally ridiculous tale with such feeling that its incoherent passion is impressive, convincing in spite of itself.

The Author. Like many a good Irishman, Francis Stuart happened to be somewhere else when he was born--in his case, Australia. His Ulster-Unionist (anti-Free State) parents sent him carefully to Rugby, England's heartiest school. The inevitable Irish upshot was that Francis Stuart landed in a Dublin jail as a rioting Irish Republican. Against the wishes of both families he ran away with Iseult, niece of famed, beauteous Patriot Maud Gonne MacBride, whose husband had been executed in the 1916 rising. Now he lives in Glendalough (Dublin suburb), flies a plane, raises chickens, tries to find in his writing a harmony for the Irish soul. Backed by William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, he has just been nominated to membership in the new Irish Academy of Letters. Other books: Pigeon Irish, We Have Kept the Faith (verse, given a prize by the Royal Irish Academy).

U. S. High Life

TROPICAL WINTER -- Joseph Hergesheimer--Knopf ($2.50).

Joseph Hergesheimer is no Communist and he likes the good things of this world. Like other successful writers he has moved familiarly among the pleasure-hunters of the U. S.'s expensive winter resort, Palm Beach, jotting down many a note of things seen & heard. Some of these ten short stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, but they would make good reading for the grimmest Communist. With few exceptions the people in Tropical Winter are vicious, hysterical, more than half-crazed by pleasure-laden lives. Since Deatfrdebunked Ivar Kreuger, no one supposes that matches are made in heaven, but bourgeois opinion still holds that Palm Beach and romance go hand in hand. Author Hergesheimer does a good best to prick this bubble. Some of the stories:

A middle-aged couple, straining up the social ladder, get their fingernails on the top rung--then slip.

A middle-aged New Englander goes to Palm Beach to visit the widow of his millionaire employer. He finds her changed for the worse, her children fiendish. She wants him to marry her, to protect her from them and from her own bad habits. Vengefully he agrees.

A top-flight gold digger, nearly on her uppers, makes a desperate set at the man of her schemes, succeeds in breaking his engagement, almost lands him. But backgammon ruins her, saves him.

A careful young banker-snob, sent to manage the firm's Palm Beach branch, makes a "success" at the expense of everything.

Author Hergesheimer, somewhat socially-minded but far from panaceatic, tells his tales and lets it go at that. But the most casual reader will see that the suave surface of these stories covers a satirical intention that amounts at times to savage contempt.

Stanley

BULA MATARI--Stanley, Conqueror of a Continent--Jacob Wassermann--Liveright ($3).

To questioning friends, how-nowing him for choosing so buried a biographical subject as Henry Morton Stanley. Author Wassermann retorted: "Stanley's triumphs were gained when I was an adolescent; the whole world was talking of him then; he was the hero of the lads of my generation; his name was a trumpet-call; his mere existence stirred us as a child is stirred by a fairy-tale." Able Novelist Wassermann, better at spinning new fairytales than at retelling old ones, fails to bring to life the hero of his adolescence, but his book will serve to remind the world of many a forgotten fact about a onetime world-figure.

Sir Henry Morton Stanley's real name was John Rowlands. Born (probably illegitimate) in North Wales about 1841. he spent most of his hard childhood in a workhouse, ran away at 15 and shipped as a cabinboy to the U. S. He got a job in New Orleans, was adopted by Merchant Henry Stanley, who died without leaving him a penny. During the Civil War young Stanley made the curious record of serving in both the Confederate and Union Armies. the Union Navy. Captured (as a Confederate) at Shiloh, he was offered freedom if he would enlist in the Union Army. He enlisted, came down with dysentery, was discharged as unfit for further service, and ended the war in the Navy. Discovering a gift for journalism, he put it to work, finally took the eye of James Gordon Bennett, then No.1 U. S. newspaperman, editor of the New York Herald.

When pious, eccentric Explorer David Livingstone vanished into Africa's interior and nothing was heard of him for over three years, he was regarded as "lost"; his disappearance became a newsworthy fact. Most resoundingly newsworthy fact, thought Editor Bennett, would be Livingstone's "discovery." He picked Stanley for the job, gave him carte blanche, sent him to Africa by a circuitous route. It took Stanley two years, cost him 23 bouts of tropical fever, cost Bennett a pretty penny, but Stanley got his man. Every continent chuckled over his famed greeting. Said Stanley: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Livingstone refused to be taken home in newspaper triumph, preferred to stay in Africa, but he gave Stanley letters to prove his feat.

Stanley made two other African journeys: across the continent and down the Congo River to the Atlantic (an exploration which resulted in the formation of Congo Free State); and his most famed exploit--the relief expedition to Emin Pasha. When "Chinese'' Gordon was cut off in Khartoum by the Mahdi's fanatics, the only Egyptian force in the Sudan to escape annihilation was one commanded by Emin Pasha (real name: Eduard Schnitzer). To rescue Emin Pasha became The Thing in England: Stanley was put in charge of the expedition. Practically everything that could go wrong did. but again Stanley got his man. this time succeeded in bringing him out to Africa's edge. During the ensuing banquet at Bagamoyo, Emin Pasha wandered out on a balcony, nearsightedly fell 18 ft. into the street, fractured his skull.

By the time he was 58. Stanley had had enough: he retired to the English countryside, was knighted. Once he met "Grand Old Man" Gladstone, who characteristically held forth on the absurd nomenclature visited by explorers on their discoveries. Two that riled him were the Gordon Bennett and Mackinnon-Mountains. "Who called them by those absurd names?" he boomed. Stanley had to admit that he did.

Sardinia

SARDINIAN SIDESHOW--Amelie Posse-Brazdova--Button ($3).

Sardinia, due south of Corsica, is a large island in the Mediterranean belonging to Italy. But Sardinians remember other allegiances--once they were Moorish, once Spanish, once even Austrian. Clannish, independent, like all islanders they dislike and distrust dwellers on the mainland. Authoress Posse-Brazdova tells a grim tale of a Sardinian private during the War who. told that he could not take to the rear a prisoner he had captured, made sure of him by biting through the artery in his neck, guzzling his blood in great gulps. The Sassari Brigade (Sardinian) was the only one that did not run away at Caporetto.

When Swedish Authoress Posse went to join her Czech fiance, Oki Brazda, in Rome in the spring of 1915, Italy was still officially neutral. Miss Posse had trouble-getting through Austria, but she got there. Then Italy declared war and Czechs, being officially Austrians (though most of them hated Austria) became enemy aliens. Authoress Posse married her Oki. followed him to exile in Sardinia, where he was interned. Sardinian Sideshow is the interesting, lively, not too personal account of the year they spent there. Not being considered at first an enemy alien herself, she made a trip to Rome and besieged the authorities in behalf of her harmless husband (a painter). Sitting in anterooms, waiting for audiences, she read most of Tacitus. Unsuccessful, she returned to the sirocco, fleas, dirt and picturesque boredom of Sardinia. Like all Northerners with noses she was chiefly impressed by the smell: "A little rotten seaweed and fish, a great deal of dirt, tomatoes and paprikas frying in oil, sardines roasting over charcoal fires, garlic, overripe figs, grapemust. tar and pitch from the boats, cheap Virginia tobacco, richly overflowing gutters, and fishing nets hung out to dry. And over and above all, like a dominating undertone, the salt freshness of the sea."

Of the ancient, forgotten "modes" of Greek music (Dorian. Lydian, Phrygian. et al) the Dorian still survives only in Sardinian native choirs. "Sometimes one's teeth were rather set on edge, when they sang a little too much out of tune, but . . . there were times when this music was quite overpowering, of an incomparable beauty." Of Sardinian politeness Authoress Posse-Brazdova gives a startling example. Staying at an inn just before leaving the island they were much bothered by the yowling of the landlord's tomcat. It was really the fault of their own cat (female ). But as soon as the landlord was aware of the situation he got the vet. handsomely had his torn altered.

*For Sir William Mackinnon. president of the Emin Pasha Relief Committee.

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