GARDENER OF EVIL—Pierre Loving— Brewer and Warren ($2.50).
Unless you are a student of French literature you probably think of Charles Baudelaire as an overrated, vaguely Satanic poet who wrote a slim volume called Flews du Mai and wanted to be thought more wicked than he was. Biographer Pierre Loving does not so much correct this impression as amplify it. His story of Baudelaire and his times, written as a novel, is solid and appetizing with plenty of factual meat made more appetizing by the artistic sauce.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire, born with the haughties, found a peg to hang a life-grievance on when his young widowed mother married a man he detested, General Aupick. Stepfather Aupick believed in discipline. Stepson Charles disbelieved in Aupick. When Charles began to roam Paris with Bohemian friends, General Aupick feared for his own careful reputation. Soon they quarreled openly and Charles went off to live by himself. In his way both a dandy and an ascetic, Baudelaire astonished even the Bohemians. His first mistress was a hideous, squint-eyed, consumptive Jewess off the streets. Then he met Jeanne Duval, a beautiful Negress, and lived with her many stormy months. His hand-to-mouth existence was complicated by laudanum, which he took to stifle intestinal pains.
Contemporary and occasional acquaintance of indefatigable Novelist Honore de Balzac, Baudelaire admired the older man’s dogged energy but could not emu late it. His writing, like all his activities, was spasmodic. His friends never knew what next to expect of him. Once at dinner with Jeanne in a crowded restaurant Baudelaire rose, told the company this woman had ruined his life, then tried to kill himself with a knife. Economical Poet Alexander Pope kept copies of his love letters. Baudelaire did Pope one better: sent exact duplicates to two women at once. Pierre Loving tries to explain his hero’s complex character thus: “Artifice and stoicism, these were the keys to the unassailable life of theChesterfieldian martyr and saint.”
Paris, beloved of poets, got its share of affection from Baudelaire. Unhappy in it, he was less happy away, always came back. Once for a few disastrous weeks he edited a provincial conservative paper. His first editorial set his readers howling with rage, just as their wives began to howl at the spectacle of himself and Jeanne living unsanctified in their respectable midst. Once his stepfather got him a job in India, but Baudelaire got off at Mauritius, went back on the next boat.
Baudelaire’s gloomy intensity and obvious poetic ability, soon made him a marked man in a Paris that swarmed with talents. One of the first Frenchmen to discover Edgar Allan Poe (whom he considered his affinity), Baudelaire was Poe’s French translator, and some critics aver the translation betters the original. With no sense of money, he was never out of debt; and his poverty, complicated by Luciferian pride and creeping illness, might have brought him to an unknown end had it not been for his mother and his friends who loved him. He died at 46 (1867) in a Paris sanitarium.
The Author— Pierre Loving, 37, cosmopolitan Manhattanite, has lived much abroad. He knows intimately his left-wing Paris, Berlin, Vienna. Keen on his subject, thorough, Loving visited every spot where Baudelaire is known or supposed to have been, made many a minor find exciting to scholars. Then he settled down on the Riviera to write his book, but never missed a chance of watching Suzanne Lenglen play tennis, of dancing with her. Well-known as a critic, he has also written a play, The Stick-Up. He is now at work on a long critical study of Baudelaire’s work, which Publishers Brewer & Warren modestly announce will be “a somewhat fresh interpretation.”
U. S. Horror
SANCTUARY—William Faulkner—Cape & Smith ($2.50).
A favorite question on Shakespeare examinations is ”Distinguish between horror and terror.” Sanctuary is compact of both. The horrors of any ghost story pale beside the ghastly realism of this chronicle.
A silly girl, a typical college “teaser,” sneaks away from her Southern co-ed institution for a party with a would-be sophisticated boyfriend. He gets drunk, runs out of liquor, insists on going to a lonely country bootlegger’s he knows about. Almost there, he wrecks his car and the two find themselves stranded at dusk at the bootlegger’s, among five hard men, one hard woman. The boy gets drunk again, the girl is terrified but cannot get away. This typical cinema situation does not turn out like a cinema. For one horror-filled night the girl escapes her fate. Next day the boy comes to. ignominiously deserts her. Then the gang’s gunman shoots one of his pals to get her, gets her, takes her away with him to a dive in Memphis.
When the dead man’s body is found and the head bootlegger is arrested for murder, a decent, intelligent but ineffectual lawyer comes to his defense. When he finds out about the girl he tracks her to Memphis, but by then her nightmare is too much for her, she is its prisoner. The lawyer thinks he has persuaded her to appear as his star witness. But the prosecution finds her too. When she appears at the trial her perjured testimony condemns the innocent defendant. That night a mob takes the prisoner from the jail, burns him alive. The girl’s father tries to make the best of an unspeakable business by taking her abroad, trying to patch up a hopelessly smashed life. The lawyer washes his hands of Justice, retires to failure and his shrewish wife.
Months later, the gunman-murderer is arrested and hanged for a job he never did.
When you have read the book you will see what Author Faulkner thinks of the inviolability of sanctuary. The intended hero is the decent, ineffectual lawyer. But all heroism is swamped by the massed villainy that weighs down these pages. Outspoken to an almost medical degree, Sanctuary should be let alone by the censors because no one but a pathological reader will be sadistically aroused.
The Author— William Faulkner, 34, small, dark, of a distinguished Southern family (Great-grandfather William Faulk ner wrote the once famed romantic novel, The White Rose of Memphis’), lives in Oxford, Miss. During the War he served as lieutenant in the Canadian Flying Corps, crashed once, hurt his foot. Other books: Soldier’s Pay, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury.
Graves Goes On
BUT IT STILL GOES ON—Robert Graves —Cape & Smith ($3).
Year ago Poet Robert Graves of England said Goodbye To All That in one of the most successful autobiographies of the year. Now he returns to the subject, his title apologetically murmuring But It Still Goes On. Not really a sequel but a kind of scrapbook, it contains some scraps worth picking up.
In “Postscript to Goodbye To All That” Graves answers some of his critics, prints some of their contradictory letters, gives his own solution for war. Says he: it is impossible to legislate war out of existence, and not altogether desirable, for if it could be controlled it might be fun again. His suggested form of war “falls somewhere between a football match with large numbers of players on each side and an eighteenth-century battle.” Rules: evenly matched forces (not more than 5,000 men a side), neutral umpires, short duration (two or three weeks). “The object of each army would be the capture of as many as possible of the enemy and of their company banners and regimental flags. . . . The agreed and standardized weapon would probably be a padded wicker helmet and a loin-protector. . . . I suggest that the first reformed war should be fought on Swedish territory— admirably suited to maneuver—between Italy and France, those two most gloryloving powers.”
The rest of the book contains: three short stories, all readable, one Kiplingesque, one (about an intelligent madman) first-class; a notebook section with the first and last chapters of an autobiography of God; a three-act play of post-War morals and emotions, in which there are two suicides (one Lesbian, one oldfashioned hypocrite), one murder (of a homosexual husband), no arrests, and no solution in sight. Perhaps not meant to be acted, the play mulls over many an idea. Central theme: that the greatest calamity in history was not the late great War but an earlier, unperceived event, when “the bottom dropped out of things . . . when the last straw broke the back of reality, when the one unnecessary person too many was born, when population finally became unmanageable, when the proper people were finally swamped. Once they counted; now they no longer count.”
Brave Girl
READER, I MARRIED HIM—Anne Green —Button ($2.50).
Anne Green’s brother, Julian Green, writes his very Frenchy, careful, depressing novels in French; has to be translated for the benefit of U. S. left-wing-readers. Not so his cheerful sister. So sprightly, charming, unrealistic a novelist is she that her first novel (The Selbys} was a U. S. best-seller in spite of her brother’s heavy reputation. Reader, I Married Him pushes sprightliness, charm, unrealism even further.
The Douglasses, F.F.V.’s at home, had not been home for a long time because Paris was the kind of town their irresponsible, penniless but aristocratic mode of life exactly suited. Mrs. Douglass was dead and not much missed. Dreamy Hugh and absent-minded but hard-hearted Catherine adored their charming failure of a father, who managed to enjoy life by running up bills, keeping a mistress, being popular with a large acquaintance. Mr. Douglass was fond of his children too, but failed to keep a weather eye on them. He never knew Catherine had become the mistress of egotistic young Gilbert Hunton. The Douglasses had no money, so when Gilbert thought of settling down he never considered Catherine as a potential spouse, instead got himself engaged to a rich little respectable hellcat. Catherine was heartbroken but hopeful, went to a fortune-teller to mend matters. Before she knew it Catherine had her faithless lover where she wanted him. Then, poor girl, she realized what it was to be loved more than enough; she more than half wished she had left spells and love-philtres alone. But she was brave, realistic; you will see how womanfully she dealt with the situation.
The Author, Anne Green, like her heroine a young expatriate in Paris, unlike her heroine has not taken a husband. She writes gaily, is photographed with a smile. A tendency to be kittenish, faintly observable in her first book, obtrudes in her second. But she writes with gusto, a rare quality, and her people are superficial enough to be amusingly lifelike.
Princesse v. Clarissa
HOUSE PARTY—E. M. Delafield— Harper ($2.50).
Of the many novelists who grapple with the amenities of everyday life, Elizabeth M. Delafield (Mrs. Paul Dashwood) is one of the most successful because most delightfully light-fingered. One of her books, attempting to describe The Way Things Are in a typical country household, had the memorable motto: “I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.” When you have become thoroughly acquainted with a Delafield heroine you know she is entertainingly human, can only wonder helplessly whether to praise or blame her.
Clarissa was superficially a very false person. Her accent was obviously a good imitation, her voice was usually controlled. But she had money to burn and a distinct idea of the kind of conflagration she wanted. When she decided to marry worthless Fitzmaurice he was not particularly glad, but he philosophically divorced his wife, made over his little (laughter Sophie to Clarissa. Sophie’s grandmother, the Princesse, a fascinating woman with a genius for attracting calamity, trailed her poverty-stricken menage all over Europe, but Sophie never saw her again till she was grown up. By that time Clarissa’s family were as well-trained as her servants. Sophie was maneuvered into an engagement to London’s richest bachelor and was about to submit, although she was really in love with Clarissa’s son Lucien, when the old Princesse arrived in the vicinity. Where the Princesse was, romance bloomed, common sense withered. Clarissa surprised herself by giving in, gave the children her munificent blessing.
*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.
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