Commentator

JOURNAL OF FORGOTTEN DAYS: 1934-35 (145 pp.)--Albert Jay Nock--Henry Regnery ($3.50).

Albert Jay Nock was a mysterious man. Not that he ever seemed to be one--the literary public knew him as an editor (the highbrowed, low circulation Freeman, 1921-24), an essayist of distinction, an authority on Rabelais, a biographer of Thomas Jefferson and Henry George. He wrote in an urbane, aloof style with an odd characteristic. At unpredictable points, caustic opinions on politics abruptly intruded, as if someone occasionally interrupted an hour of chamber music by reading well-written editorials from the Boston Evening Transcript. Editor Nock considered himself a radical.

Critical Comparisons. None of the eminent writers on the staff of the Freeman (e.g., Van Wyck Brooks and Suzanne La Follette) knew where he lived. It was an office joke that the only way to communicate with him was by leaving a letter under a certain stone in Central Park. He was an expert billiard player, a master of Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and a seasoned music critic. He was in the U.S. foreign service, serving under Ambassador Brand Whitlock in occupied Belgium in World War I. Since he had also been an Episcopal clergyman, his diary is studded with the names of such people as New York's Bishop Manning and Chicago's Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell.

Before his death in Wakefield, R.I. three and a half years ago, at 72, Nock destroyed all his manuscripts and papers except for one batch of letters and this little journal, which is a continuation of his Journal of Our Days, published in 1934. It begins with Nock setting out by steamer for Florida and ends after his 1935 vacation in Belgium. His notations are casual and apparently aimless: he notes the appearance of a handsome Jewess on the ship, the drab, suburban-New Jersey-type architecture of parts of Florida. He comments on book reviewers and publishers, Mrs. Roosevelt, Anthony Adverse, Shakespeare and the prose of subway advertisements. Someone told him that certain South Sea Islanders permitted an unmarried girl to bring a boy home for the night "as freely as an American girl could bring one home for lunch, and a different one each night, if she liked." Nock thought it rather a good idea.

Congenital Crooks. With H. L. Mencken he deplored the passing of the sturdy old American virtues. He was impressed when an acquaintance remarked, "The real trouble is that the average American is a congenital crook."

Reviewers did not always like Nock's books, and it is easy to see why. They nodded respectfully to his fine style, but belabored his single-tax theories. What he had to say was said merely with increasing stridency as he grew older. Albert Jay Nock was persuaded that his civilization was creaking badly and in sore need of repair, but all he chose to do about it was to utter the graceful melancholies of an innate Tory who does not care to bring his own talents to the aid of a program.

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