The half-dozen books about Hitler which appeared in 1932 were just a year too soon. When the present din subsides, — and Nazi censorship relaxes, — there will be fresh surveys of Germany for all to buy. Meanwhile, those wishing a post-war view of the royalty which may or may not be restored, those who have a taste for witty and intimate memoirs, should be quick to read Peace Patrol (Putnam, $3.50) by Colonel Stewart Roddie. This English soldier and gentleman was attached to innumerable commissions sent into Germany directly after the Armistice; he patroled the impoverished palaces, inspected factories, directed the destruction of armament, was sniped at by rebels, and everlastingly applied now force, now sympathy to a broken people — by turns an amusing and a pathetic picture of the personalities behind that caricature, boche.
In this day of strict realism, fiction in the form of letters presents too much difficulty to the average writer. But there is nothing average about Ring Lardner. He knows baseball as shrewdly as Hemingway knows bullfighting, he knows Main Street better than O. Henry knew New York, he knows how to develop the gossip in a barber shop into something more moving than pathos or satire. Of the ’colloquial’ writers, Lardner is the most original, the most accurate. His latest, Lose with a Smile (Scribners, $1.50) is the exchange of love letters between a rookie ball player and the girl back home. Funny at the outset, filled with the ’horsing’ of the training camp, these letters disclose beneath the rookie’s conceit, and despite his ’dumbness,’a human quality which is irresistible. To men only the story will afford the full measure of its humor, though, of course, if is lucid enough in comedy and pathos to entertain anyone. The aptness of the mad misspelled idiom is best appreciated when read aloud; it rings perfectly true.
Pioneer stories are too remote in time for us to corroborate the exact flavor of their dialogue. They depend for conviction more upon the vividness of the descriptive detail and the skill with which the writer recaptures the spirit of the 1 imes. Let the Hurricane Roar by Rose Wilder Lane (Longmans, Green, $1.50) brings fresh vitality to a somewhat familiar scene. A short novel, it marks the struggles of a young couple in establishing their homestead on the Dakota plains. Making their home in a dugout, bearing her first child and later weathering a fierce winter alone, Caroline, the newly-wed, in her speech and resourcefulness embodies that fearlessness we like to think American. She is rounded and real, where Charles, her husband, is flat and romantic. Caroline, for her spirit, and three striking scenes — the plague of the grasshopper, the miracle of the October blizzard, and the ghostly coming of the wolves — give this short narrative its uncommon distinction.
