THE Pulitzer awards have a most positive advantage in that they call attention to books for the most part well worth reading. And if you pride yourself on having read all the Pulitzer Prize winners, see how high an average you strike with the list of ‘the fifty notable American books of 1931’ recently —and ably —prepared by the American Library Association.
Of the new books fresh from the griddle, two made my mouth water. Limits and Renewals (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50) is the first fresh collection of stories and verse we have had from Rudyard Kipling in six years. Those who, like myself, have been reared on R. K. (not R K O) will have no choice. This book has got to be read. The title I find peculiarly suggestive, for certainly Kipling’s genius does renew itself in these fourteen post-war stories. And yet there are limits. Neither England nor India to-day is a place to evoke the full positive voice with which he spoke in Soldiers Three or Puck of Pook’s Hill: loyalties have changed their base; ideas to which he could give such splendid currency no longer command us or him. This, I think, accounts for the fact that the themes of some of these tales simply are n’t big enough for the occasion. Their inequality, in turn, serves to exaggerate the effects of which he has been past master. No one but Kipling can pack such energy in a verb, can give you so swiftly the sound as well as the feel and fury of a scene, can take you so warmly into his Confidence. In five of these tales you see him at his best: ‘The Woman in His Life,’ a dog story that takes you in its grasp, and squeezes; ‘The Church That Was at Antioch’; ‘A Naval Mutiny’ for its laughter; ‘The Debt’ because it steps straight from The Jungle Book; and ‘Uncovenanted Mercies’ because, for all its involution, it can stir you to the quick. The verses, as of old, are a key leading you across the threshold to begin with, and then laying bare the inner meaning. When genius offers, don’t quarrel, say I.
In 1930, Dr, A. S. W. Rosenbach founded a Fellowship in Bibliography in the University of Pennsylvania. Christopher Morley was the first Fellow appointed, and the talks which he gave there in the autumn of 1931 have now been printed under the title of Ex Libris Carissimis (Univ. of Penn., $2.00). The charm of these papers lies in their informality (they were taken by shorthand as they were spoken); they are casual, simple, not particularly important, and yet charged with Morley’s own strong personality. Here are no chapters about expensive volumes and rare prints: here is hardly a mention of a book which cannot be found (with small research) at a reasonable figure. Chris talks chiefly of ‘association copies’ — those autumn afternoons were not without sentiment — and of authors dead and living. All his old loves are here: Stevenson, Conrad, Sydney, Colvin, Gissing, Captain Bone, Walt Whitman, C. E. Montague; but new anecdotes, new tributes, new symbols. At the end there is an appendicated list of 85 volumes which ‘have given the author the greatest pleasure in his years of wide reading.’
