Recent & Readable

DIRECTIONS IN MODERN POETRY--Elizabeth Drew & John L. Sweeney--Norton ($2.75). The most matter-of-fact book about modern poetry yet published. Examples of the work of 40-odd practitioners, from Pound to Dylan Thomas, are closely discussed, with an eye to showing just where in the modern world the modern poets stand.

THE MORNING IS NEAR US--Susan Glaspell--Stokes ($2.50).

When Lydia Chippman was 15 she was sent away from home. She was never told why. At 35, returning, she deeply needed to know what no one would tell her, and stared, through enigmas, relics, last-gasp confessions, upon the gradual flowering of her parents' dreadful past. Some feminine passages may give masculine readers the fantods. Yet the novel as a whole has the exquisite gentleness and exactitude, and the fascination, which reside in the proper treatment of an elaborate wound.

FIELDS FOR PRESIDENT--W. C. Fields -- Dodd, Meod ($1.50). Cob-nosed W. C. Fields, with his marvelous sense of timing, here throws his hat in the Presidential ring and leaps on the stump, in one motion. He does not indulge much or effectively in the Will Rogers type of political ribbing; instead, he maunders on about a vaudeville seal, a cornet rendition of The Whistler and His Dog, drops useful hints on bodybuilding, the care of babies. Even without the Fields voice and the Fields mannerisms, the Fields pen shows a delicate sense of U. S. language. The book contains some mothy, mechanized, professional gagging, some second-speed samples of the purest, most incapturable Fields comedy, also the last printable word on the common-or-garden variety of U. S. marriage: "A man must look tidy, if for business reasons only."

THE BEDSIDE ESQUIRE -- Edited by Arnold Gingrich--McBride ($3). For many a U. S. magazine, women call the tune. Not so for Esquire. The locker-room delight of the defiantly A. W. 0. L., white-collar U. S. male, Esquire has made itself the house organ of all brands of U. S. adolescence, its most interesting single product drawings of cellophane-glossed girls by George Petty. Despite its coy title. The Bedside Esquire contains no art-teasers; it is solid print. Among the 77 items: stories or articles, mainly second-rate, by the late D. H. Lawrence and Thome Smith, by John Dos Passes, Erskine Caldwell, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, Westbrook Pegler; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, one of the most ambitious and psychologically the most painful of Hemingway's stories; a wide-open Ring Lardner razz of wrestling ("Come on, Alexis; take me. Anything but a toehold."); Helen Brown Norden's famous Latins Are Lousy Lovers--which is less interesting in itself than in its unintended suggestion that American women are lousy too.

NIGHT IN BOMBAY--Louis Bromfield --Harper ($2.50). Louis Bromfield once looked like a good novelist (The Green Bay Tree, The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg); he now seems to be a pretty good guy. To his farm at Mansfield, Ohio, lanky Louis Bromfield returned this spring from a bout of $3,000-a-week screenwriting in Hollywood, settled down to scientific agriculture. Night in Bombay is a full-blown example of meretricious fiction, conditioned almost to the point of innocence by long practice in commercial writing, displaying at every critical point the artistic acumen of a flashy sophomore. Novelist Bromfield is famed for his "characters"; Night in Bombay'?, are so weakly conceived that they not only lack inner consistency but sometimes waver in their physique (e.g., sinister Mr. Botlivala's hands are "very long and thin and very collapsible" on page 74, "plump little hands" on page 124).

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