Chapter C: G. Poore

_Book Reviews_

_Jean Huguenot._ By STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT. (Henry Holt.)

Flowers in writing are like flowers on a grave: they commemorate death. And Benét’s first novel was a little too prone to floral decoration. In his third book, _Jean Huguenot_, his work as a stylist is noticeably improved. He still remains all poet in his prose, and, as ever, reads the better for it. Yet he has reached a saner manner of writing that does not overwhelm and cloy as did parts of _The Beginning of Wisdom_.

Despite mechanical improvement _Jean Huguenot_ marks a lull in the author’s literary progress. You are moved along for two hundred or so pages by glowing language and well-drawn situations. And just when the book has become really enjoyable--well, all pleasure in it begins to subside. You are dropped, like a deflated balloon, into a flat and tasteless completion. Why, oh, why, you say, couldn’t he have given us something else--anything else? The spectacle of Jean Huguenot Ashley turned _cocotte_ is neither appealing nor revolting; it is just plain drab. Perhaps Benét is true to nature in his picture, but--read it and see if it doesn’t affect you in the same fashion. The story is worth while for three-quarters of its course--and then, being so near the end, one might as well finish it, anyway.

J. R. C.

_The Florentine Dagger._ By BEN HECHT. (Boni & Liveright.)

Ben Hecht is mountebank of words par excellence: their swirling shapes, their sounds, their shifting colors, as he juggles them so adroitly before our bewildered eyes. The subject-matter of his books serves only as a pattern, an excuse for weaving a tapestry of fascinating and often amazing phrases. Whether it is a psychological study in the manner of Dreiser, like Gargoyles, or an all-night detective story, like the present book, is an altogether incidental matter. It is the words that count. That may perhaps explain why Mr. Hecht should suddenly decide to perform before such a bourgeois audience, descending, so to speak, from the Palace to the four-a-day. He evidently realized that the world was quite bored by anything he had to say, but perfectly entranced by the way in which he said it.

_The Florentine Dagger_ was written with Prof. Hart’s Psychology of Insanity on one hand and the Memoirs of the de Medici Family on the other. Taken as a dramatic presentation of certain psychological phenomena it is brilliant enough to make itself endeared by every psychology professor in the country. Everyone in the book, from the last member of the fastidious de Medicis to the old actress, is troubled by complexes and obsessions of all sorts, so that a miserable and uncertain rôle is assigned to each. All the time-dishonored devices of the mystery story are faithfully observed, although its technique on the whole is genuinely successful.

Mr. Hecht has in this book, as in all his others, displayed his incredible faculty for choosing a new literary technique as casually as most writers choose their stationery.

W. T.

_The Blind Bow Boy._ By CARL VAN VECHTEN. (Alfred Knopf.)

Carl Van Vechten is an elegant dilettante. His books are the essence of trivial and charming existence. He is fond of cats, George Moore, Rolls Royce motor cars, and cravats by Charvet. He is apathetic to Corot and Monet, to Ibsenism, midwestern mediocrity, and synthetic gin.

_The Blind Bow Boy_ is of inferior quality to _Peter Whiffle_, just as _Peter Whiffle_ is undoubtedly inferior to _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, but it is good reading and by far the most intelligent intellectual mixed grill of which the reviewer has partaken this season.

The fact that Van Vechten is in the good graces of the greatest of all American whim-whammers, Henry Mencken, is in itself a warrant for the six editions into which the book has already run. It may also prevent it from running into another six.

_The Blind Bow Boy_ is the story of a summer opera season in New York, an international alliance in the person of Zimbule O’Grady, and the delightful exploits of the Duke of Middlebottom, who lived by the Julian Calendar and in this case “contrived to evade all unsatisfactory engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly ignorant”. There are also some trivial protagonists who strut through the book in a manner slightly suggestive of exaggerated and overdressed Weiner sausages.

The author has an unfortunate habit of becoming enamoured of one character for a chapter or two, and then without warning shifting his affections to another, a failing which gives the reader a somewhat biographically errant point of view.

It is also unfortunate that Van Vechten cannot follow a more clearly defined theme, for he has no sense of plot, shading, or climax. His stories are a series of photographically vivid scenes, innocent of all structural liaison, and hanging together only by virtue of the bookbinding which keeps them from fluttering away to the various literary hemispheres.

It is, however, very satisfactory reading, for in his multiplex catalogues of names and places the author gives the reader a vivid sense of personal familiarity which is quite flattering. No doubt this effect is obtained by mentioning so many aspects of contemporary civilization that everyone must needs have come in contact with at least some few of them.