FICTION

One More War

WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE (Vol. I & II, 1914-16)--Little, Brown ($4 each).

Nearly everyone who won the War has now been heard from. The mysterious and importunate friend who always urges statesmen to write their memoirs has finally prevailed on David Lloyd George. His first two fat volumes (918 pp.), telling his side of the story through 1916, are written with that shrewd candor and political zest that are as much his hall-mark as his bright eyes, flowing mane and bourgeois mustache. Historians should find these volumes of a challenging usefulness; literary critics will rate them as above the average for a non-professional writer; plain readers, who will find them generally entertaining, may draw from them the conclusion that war is not hell for politicians.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer at the outbreak of the War, Lloyd George was not at first directly concerned with military policy. But he soon made it his business, and from the time he became Minister of Munitions until in 1916 he forced out the Coalition Government and got the Premiership himself, he fought a spirited battle with the War Office. He proves by the record that he was against the disastrous Dardanelles campaign and the mismanaged affair in Mesopotamia; that as early as January 1, 1915 he saw the hopelessness of the stalemate on the Western Front, and urged an attack elsewhere.

In his long wrestles with the professional soldier, as represented by Lord Kitchener and Sir Douglas Haig, he generally enlists the reader's sympathy. Apparently Kitchener for a long time could not be made to see the necessity of increasing supplies of heavy guns and high explosives, objecting to them obstinately on the grounds of unnecessary expense. An almost speaking photograph shows "Papa" Joffre and Haig behind the lines at the Battle of the Somme, excitedly pointing out to Lloyd George, who stares at them skeptically, that as soon as the imminent break-through is made, their massed cavalry will charge and demolish the Germans. One of the many muddies Lloyd George reveals is that as late as 1915 the Allies were bidding up the price of T.N.T. in the U. S. market by competitive purchases. He throws fresh light on British foreign policy when he explains that the Balfour Declaration (for a Jewish homeland) was a reward conferred on Dr. Chaim Weizmann for discovering a new process for speeding up the production of wood alcohol, vitally needed by the British Ministry of Munitions.

Though he usually keeps his temper when paying his respects, Lloyd George never conceals his real opinion of his colleagues. Kitchener he kindly calls "one of the unsolved mysteries of the war." After Neuve Chapelle, he says, Kitchener groaned not over the casualties but the wasted shells. Of Balfour he says: "[The Admiralty] was an office that called for unceasing attention to detail. It meant long hours, early and late. Mr. Balfour was obviously unsuitable for such a post."

He spits at his enemy John Maynard Keynes as "an entertaining economist whose bright but shallow dissertations on finance and political economy, when not taken seriously, always provide a source of innocent merriment to his readers."

Fairies

GENTLEMEN, I ADDRESS YOU PRIVATELY--Kay Boyle--Smith & Haas ($2.50).

Fairies, in the best and worst sense of the term, are the theme of Authoress Kay Boyle's far-from-unadorned tale. She handles her emotional subject with a cold greenish brilliance that is perhaps its own justification but that will make her book antipathetic to readers who like to warm their hands over something more human. In Gentlemen, I Address You Privately she writes, with what seems an almost deliberate avoidance of charm, about people who cannot be said to exist, who would hardly matter if they did. Authoress Boyle, nearly as far astray from normality as Faulkner, has clothed her fairies in human guise, but they remain fairies.

Munday, an unfrocked priest living peacefully with his piano in Le Havre, France, meets a young cockney sailor, Ayton, an attractive weakling who has deserted ship. It soon turns out that Ayton is completely untrustworthy and has done worse things in life than deserting. But by that time Munday, though not blind to his faults, is hopelessly involved with him. When there is danger of Ayton's arrest the pair take refuge with a poverty-stricken farmer and his wife. There, visited occasionally by three friendly Lesbians, they lead a simple life, and Munday has hopes of Ayton's settling down. But when he discovers that Ayton has seduced the farmer's wife, sold Munday's piano and gone off to Italy on the proceeds with the three Lesbians, Munday realizes that his hopes were in vain.

Literary Life

YESTERDAY'S BURDENS--Robert M. Coates--Macaulay ($2).

Last week, as in all weeks round Christmas time, few U. S. books were published. Far & away the best of those that were is Author Robert Melvin Coates' Yesterday's Burdens. Too far to the left for many a middle-of-the-roader, this novel is squarely in the centre of the modern experimental path--a path broad enough to accommodate Ulysses and the books of John Dos Passes, but on which such backtracking behemoths as Anthony Adverse never set hoof. Fated to be overlooked or judged "queer" by the general reader, Yesterday's Burdens will excite the attention of those who are more interested in whither the novel is going than in whence it has come.

For the benefit of those who might object that his book is not a novel at all, Author Coates defines his aim: ". . . Perhaps one might better describe it as a Jong essay discussing a novel that I might possibly write, with fragments of the narrative inserted here & there, by way of illustration or example." His "hero," one Henderson, is a wraithlike Manhattan Everyman who appears only by snatches and never long enough to establish his identity. He is shown seeing his wife off to Europe, bringing another man's wife to the narrator's house in the country, making a drunken speech at a Manhattan party. His story has three endings. The reader is left with the impression that any or all of them may be true, and that it hardly matters. What does matter is the way Author Coates handles his kaleidoscopic but cunningly patterned "narrative." Each of the book's four sections introduces a theme sentence and develops this simple melody into complex harmonies and discords.

Unlike those modern writers who attempt to present a picture of reality undistorted by the lens of a personal style, Author Coates gives the picture in his own style. His reality is consequently very personal and to that extent limited. It is a respectably authentic picture of life he shows, but a very literary life. Yesterday's Burdens is a tour de force, a literarization of the dust and heat of our day.

The Author has already made a small but solid place for himself among U. S. writers. Yaleman (1919) who escaped the "Yale literary renaissance" but not the War, he joined the U. S. literary colony in Paris after the Armistice, stuck it out for five years. In Paris he knew "everybody," contributed to such magazines as Broom, transition, Gargoyle, wrote a Dada novel, The Eater of Darkness. Friend of Gertrude Stein's (who described him as "the one young man who has an individual rhythm, his words made a sound to the eyes, most people's do not") he introduced Ernest Hemingway to her. Back in the U. S., he wrote for the New Yorker, until last year was its book reviewer. Meantime he had married Sculptress Elsa Kirpal, written a best-seller (The Outlaw Years), and begun to build with his own hands his own house near Brewster. N. Y. Tall, redhaired, slow moving, he likes to read dictionaries and trade journals, spends whole afternoons throwing an ice-pick at a target on a barn door.

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