Best Sellers

FEW of the phenomena of literature are more gratifying to the critic than the improvement in best sellers. A quarter of a century ago, to call a book a ‘best seller’ was to classify it as sentimental, scandalous, or cheap: to-day the term suggests practically nothing regarding quality. A best seller may be indistinguishable in subject, style, or dignity from a worst seller; and it is no longer true that the qualities that please the critic frighten the general reader, as they appear once to have done. A list of the most popular fiction of any month is almost certain to contain some of the books which critics agree are best.

Of course, certain themes and motives have their vogue in each decade, and these may conceivably affect the sale of books. Just now, to sell at all, fiction apparently must deal with either murder or adultery. The murder usually occurs at the beginning or the end; the adultery in the middle. The murder is, as a rule, fobbed off with as few words as possible, — it is hardly more than a pretext for other matters, — but the adultery is described in brazen detail. I have read of seven adulteries in the past two months, not counting a few other illicit relationships, and have concluded that the main objection to the theme is that it is tiresome. It admits of too little variety. One wonders if a decade will come when the fad will be marital fidelity.

However, in the four novels here noticed we have sufficient variety, and, though the Sixth and Seventh Commandments are firmly ignored in two or three of them, some of the other Commandments are given a good word. I suggest Fashions in the Ten Commandments as a subject for research to any student who has sufficient time and energy and nothing better to do.

I read Michael Arlen’sMen Dislike Women (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50 with considerable enthusiasm, because morals did not disturb my mind from beginning to end. There are various kinds of froth, good and bad, and this is good. The people are supposed to be very sophisticated, but they are really very innocent; they are supposed to be as hard as nails, but I hey are all actuated by the nice old motives of generosity, selfsacrifice, courage, and kindliness. The hero, half Frenchman and half Jew, is a lovable fellow; MacRae, the bootlegger, proves to be as simple as a child; Marilyn, the heroine, who smokes and drinks too much, is an endearing young thing; and Pete Fox, the crooked mayor, reads Tennyson and Austin Dobson. Sheila, the beautiful imbecile, is particularly engaging and men always fall in love with her. She perhaps illustrates the tenet of Oriental mysticism that there is a point at which the highest wisdom and the profoundest foolishness are indistinguishable. It is all highly amusing; it is witty; it is not as frivolous as it looks; it is written with deftness. And one can read it all in two hours.

But I cannot say as much for Hugh Walpole’sAbove the Dark Tumult (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50), which is also froth, but rather poor froth. For here hardly a character ever deviates into a semblance of real life; the incidents are devoid of adequate motive; and the effect upon the reader is that of having lived for some hours in a madhouse. Perhaps that is the effect the author intended, and readers may exist who can be happy there. I for one had an unhappy feeling that I was spending my time without either pleasure or salutary pain. The story deals with the doings of a group of more or less unbalanced people in or about Piccadilly Circus, murdering one another, running up and down stairs, disposing of dead bodies, committing suicide, and talking rant about human vices and virtues. Just why they do these things is never clearly divulged.

The Sophisticates , by Gertrude Atherton (Liveright, $2.00), falls between the two stools of a good mystery story and a clever satire, and ends by being neither. The idea of a beautiful woman, accused of poisoning her husband but acquitted, and of her life among her townsfolk, most of whom believe her really guilty, is excellent. The trouble is that the townsfolk, who are trying desperately to be sophisticated, are trifling folk and are never especially amusing; and the mysterious heroine eludes the reader quite as much as she does them. One simply does not believe in her or in her motives for keeping silent concerning her guilt or innocence, and a story that might have been hard, bitter, and brilliant remains vague and ends by being sentimental.

Mary Hervey, who was portrayed in Storm Jameson’sThe Lovely Ship and The Voyage Home, now makes her final appearance in A Richer Dust (Knopf, $3.00). She is an arresting creation — a dominant woman, of forbidding temper and tongue, who still never forfeits our respect and admiration. A Richer Dust is the story of her losing battle to control the destiny of her grandson, Nicholas Roxby. She is a good loser, and the account of her last days is written with admirable pathos and dignity. It is an exceptionally fine novel, made out of acute observation and shaping imagination. Once more one experiences a feeling of envy of the way English novelists write English. One can only conclude that such ease, resiliency, strength, beauty, and good taste as the best of them show must be the product of a social environment where good speech is not only cultivated as an art but nurtured unconsciously as a mark of good breeding.

R. M. GAY

FOR an appreciation of H. M. Tomlinson, one of the living masters of English prose, it is well to turn to a fellow essayist who knows the man, his tools, and his work.