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LOOKING BACK--Norman Douglas-- Harcourt, Brace ($3.50). "The winter of my days has come. I have attained the Grand Climacteric. Now, if ever, is the time to take that promenade into the past and into regions which I shall never see again. . . ." Norman Douglas is 65, a good age for looking back. And he has a right to suppose that many a reader will welcome the chance of looking over his shoulder while he is doing it. For the reputation of his famed South Wind, while enhancing his name as an author, has overshadowed not only his other books but his achievements in other lines: as diplomatist, scholar, scientist, cynical man-about-the-world. Instead of setting himself to the usual chronological autobiography, he has thought of a more original scheme. Through all his many travels he has kept a large bronze jar, memento of a love affair. It has been a handy receptacle for calling-cards. "There they lay, slowly accumulating; a kind of kitchen midden." When he came to write his autobiography he simply put his cards on the table, in no apparent arrangement, and told as much or as little as he could remember about each of their owners. Often he remembers nothing; in that case he puts a question mark or a curt "I cannot place him." Sometimes he changes names, but oftener gives the right ones.

About himself Norman Douglas sees no reason not to be frank. Pagan from his youth up and a contemner of Christian convention, he has always believed in taking his fun where he found it. His 65-year-old comment on his adolescent extracurricular activities in Germany: "A sound education for boys of 18 to 20. If some of my young English friends could enjoy its advantages, they would not grow up to be the flabby nincompoops they are, in the matter of sex." Though not a regular frequenter, he admits being ejected from a brothel in this period, though he cannot recall the reason. He tells of once cheating an old tailor out of 50 francs, says: "Disgraceful conduct, which I should not hesitate to repeat if my stomach were as empty as it then was." His comments on others are just as frank and naturally more biting; very occasionally sentiment gets the better of his satiri- cal coldness. On a Major-General Eustace Hill his kindly epitaph is: "Lively; with grey moustache and wiry limbs; athletic; a great walker. I was fond of him. He died many years ago, and I still remember his smile." Of Dr. Axel Munthe (The Story of San Michele} he will say nothing more than: "We have known each other since 1897." Douglas' life, except for the lengthening latest phase, falls neatly into twelve-year periods: childhood, music, diplomatic service, science (zoology, geology, archeology), literature. Though Looking Back attempts no such departmentalized divisions, its fragmentary mosaic adds gradually up into a lifelike picture. Its many irrelevancies, many digressions are a large part of its charm. If a long-unseen visiting card reminds Author Douglas of anything whatever, he writes it down. Memories of the onetime Austrian Ambassador's wife at Petersburg end in a story once told him by the Danish Minister. "A young subaltern [in India] got himself killed by a tiger, and his parents in England . . . wired to the Colonel of his regiment: Please send poor James home to us all expenses paid. After many months, after an unreasonable length of time, a gigantic coffin arrived, on opening which they were horrified to dis- cover a dead tiger. They wired to India: Some mistake here tiger in coffin riot James. The Colonel replied: No mistake whatever tiger in coffin James in tiger." Before the War Douglas met William Henry Hudson. "It was then a source of surprise to me that the author of books like La Plata and Green Mansions and those others, so delicately phrased and so full of original observations, should still be badly off. I begin to understand, nowadays. . . ." (Douglas' South Wind netted him -L-75; at 60 he said: "Haven't made five hundred pounds by this damned writing you talk so much about since I first began it.") In spite of his well-known controversy with the late D. H. Lawrence over Lawrence's publication of and introduction to Maurice Magnus' Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, Douglas and Lawrence were apparently on good terms at the end. Douglas understood him better than most critics: "Lawrence was no Bohemian; he was a provincial, an inspired provincial with marked puritan leanings." On Page 415 Author Douglas decides he has looked back long enough, says: "I am in the mood for closing abruptly, here and now. Enough of these frag- ments!"

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