Undertaker's Garland

hundred thirty books undertaker's garland Everyone who read The Bridge of San Luis Rey has been eagerly waiting for Thornton Wilder to publish his next book; some anti- cipating a second master piece from America's new master of prose, and some hoping to see the public mizzled again by the sober-faced clowning of a charlatan. Nobody is going to be disappointed in The Woman of Andros.* The fabric of this novel is a strong one, taken from Terence, and this background Mr. Wilder has embroidered with many-colored flosses borrowed from various sources. There is a strand of Sinclair Lewis; the woman of Andros is a smart young woman from the city, who comes to bring culture to a home-loving community that knows not rouge or Euripides. But alas, this Chrysis does not have Carol Kennicott's social advantages, for instead of being the wife of a lead- ing citizen she is only a courtesan of the type you have met in the pages of Michael Arlen. If you have ever been to the movies you know the kind of man that this kind of woman falls in love with, and you have only to supply Fanny Brice's little sister from My Man to guess what happens to him. After the lay figure Pamphilus, the man-who-is-fallen-in-love-with, has got the innocent little Glycerium into 'trouble', nobody, including Mr. Wilder, knows what to do next, for if you have ever read a page of the Cosmopolitan you know that a young man of good family cannot marry a nobody, and particularly a nobody who is going to have a baby any day. And besides! Lud- wig Lewisohn has not failed to point out that no good can come of marriages between alien races, and these Andrians are not one hundred percent Greeks. But Mark Twain, in his account of the composition of his first short story, led the way for the present author: the two Andrian angels who have troubled the Brynian waters are, figurative- ly, dumped into a convenient well. With a touch of Cecil B. DeMille, the novel ends on the higher note, pre-figuring the birth of Christ. the Woman of Anidros by Thorntonz Wilder. A. and C. Boni, 1980. The cloth that has just been roughly ravelled for your own good is nevertheless beautiful; it contains the material for a moving, signi- ficant novel. Time after time the author touches on questions of eternal importance, shows insight into deep pools in the stream of human life. There is the problem of Chrysis: what is there for her in life, cut off as she is from the world of the intellect because she is a woman, and equally cut off from the home and the family because she is a harlot? The great riddles of the home and the career, love and domesticity, freedom and virtue, are implicit in this character. This superb theme, which has never been overworked because it has never been generally understood, offers a path toward genuine tragedy, the situation in which noble character finds itself without choice and at the mercy of fate. Mr. Wilder seems to have an inkling to this opportunity, but he is not capable of taking advantage of it. He propounds the eternal questions that have no answers, and then he answers them. He answers them trippingly, with platitudes about loving one another and seeing beauty in suffering. The way of the Greek dramatists with whom this author has sometimes been compared was not the way of platitudes, but Mr. Wilder has not been able to follow Euripi- des toward the summits of human character. Stopping short of this -his books may be said to be absolutely devoid of character building -he has occupied himself with the colored pebbles of style and man- nerism. The result is a book that maddens the reader with its self- conscious, artificial form, and leaves him perplexed and disappointed when it closes without conclusion, a dismal tale, yet not a tragedy. A good many prophets have hailed Mr. Wilder as a new messiah, about to save the novel from the torments of realism, impressionism, psychoanalysm, and any other isms that begin to be a little tiresome. The Woman of Andros suggests that he is less a new voice, speaking in new accents upon new problems, than the last dreary echo of the post-war futilitarian school. Keeping the futility of these writers, he has given up their realism, and with it their sincerity, their genuine suffering and their genuine laughter. He has got in return nothing but a ponderous formalism, an adolescent's terrible gravity and an adolescent's preoccupation with style, that barrier that lies between writer and reader, that wall that a great writer steps over in his stride. Before we can afford to lay aside Galsworthy and Dreiser, hundred thirty 57 Lewis and James Joyce and Thomas Mann, we shall have to have redder meat than Thornton Wilder to fill our plates. -leila shelley k queen elizabeth katharine anthony, alfred a. knopf, 1929 "Elizabeth never saw herself after she became old in a true glass," said Ben Jonson. In a figurative sense, Jonson's statement was doubt- less true not of her later years only but of her whole life. She never really saw herself through her subjects' eyes. She was essentially queenly ; she claimed divine right ; she ruled at a time when patriotism, creative energy, Renaissance enthusiasm were at a height. To Eng- lishmen she was a symbol of their government and their country ; and they praised her, in part of course for what she was, but still more for what her exalted position meant to them. The modern biographies of Elizabeth attempt, at least, to paint a true picture of her. Perhaps no one after the lapse of so many cen- turies can be expected to depict quite correctly so mysterious and elus- ive a character; but probably the modern critic, aided by a great wealth of letters and other documents, and armed with the present- day mental equipment of frankness and a determination to see things as they are, is able to arrive at a truer conception of her than even her contemporaries had. If Elizabeth could be called back to earth in the manner of the fam- ous historical characters in Swift's Island of Magicians and given an afternoon in which to glance through some of the most recent accounts of herself, including Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex and Katharine Anthony's Queen Elizabeth, what a revealing experience would be hers! The erect, overdressed figure enters; we recognize at once the long, white face, the high forehead, the red wig, the eyes sparkling with a pleasant, youthful light. A shapely hand reaches for the books. And then hours pass as the leaves are rapidly turned. What expres- sion does her face wear as she takes her leave after the ordeal of seeing herself as the cool modern historian sees her? Possibly she sus- pelted all along that she was not quite so goddesslike as her courtiers insisted, and yet I fear that the afternoon may have been rather startling in its disillusionment. Katharine Anthony in the latest life of Elizabeth gives, I believe, a fairly accurate picture of the great queen. Certainly Miss Anthony does not dwell unduly on her defects. If she insists on Elizabeth's artificiality, her parsimony, her indecision and changeableness, her tortuous diplomacy, and her double dealing, she insists also on her sociability, her fine sense of justice, her ability as an administrator, her brains. The awkward, involved style of Elizabeth's writing she attributes in part to her schoolmaster, though Professor Cheney con- siders it one of many indications of but moderate intellectual powers. Professor Cheney, an authority on the last fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign, certainly has a lower opinion of her statesmanship than Miss Anthony, and draws on the whole not quite so favorable a picture. Miss Anthony's book is one of the novel-like biographies so popular today. Its 258 pages of large, clear type, its many illustrations, and its witty style will make it appealing to busy people who want history and biography in the pleasantest possible form. The publishers speak in the "blurb" of Miss Anthony's "original research," and she has undoubtedly consulted original sources freely, and quotes often from them, with the result that her book has an authentic tone often lacking from the lighter biography of our day. Elizabeth is made to speak, I imagine, only words that have been, on at least fair authority, attributed to her; and not often are we given her thoughts in the im- pertinent fashion of many of the "new biographies." On the other hand, I doubt whether Miss Anthony would herself claim to have pre- sented Elizabeth in a truer light than various others have done. She speaks modestly of the fact that Elizabeth's character can at best be merely guessed at. A special charm of the book is its style. Brevity, coupled with con- creteness, picturesqueness, and occasional irony and humor, are its chief characteristics. The epigrammatic quality often attained is well illustrated by the opening and closing sentences. "Henry the Eighth," the book begins, "was a descendent of Narcissus"; and it ends with this sentence: "Her reign was a marriage, and the nation was her child." Miss Anthony's sense of the picturesque and her skill in figurative language are illustrated by the following reference to the Spanish soldiers shipwrecked on the shores of Scotland and Ireland after the defeat of the Armada: "In hundreds and thousands their naked bodies, robbed by the barbarous natives of the last stitch of clothing, lay like white enormous larvae, thick along the beach." Of Elizabeth's personal leadership at the time of the Armada, she says: "The Queen was like a may-pole round which the whole country wound with mad enthusiasm." Her account of the defeat of the Armada is a model of vivid, rapid narration; in fact, I can recall no more spirited brief account of that most spectacular of England's naval battles.

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