WOMEN who think it fine to be a queen had something of a start when they saw the motion picture of Charles Laughton as Henry A III. Evidently the great Tudor lover was not over-nice. Even as late as the Stuart Restoration, London was still a contrast of rude virility and gay courtliness — such is the impression given in a trustworthy little volume.The England of Charles II by Arthur Bryant (Longmans, Green, $2.00), whose biographies of Eepys and Charles II have set a new standard. Here is ’what happened to ordinary people on ordinary days’: the clothes they paid for, the food they loved, the schools they sent their children to, and the drinking they thought proper. You read of their surgery and medicine — how, to cure a sore throat, you swallowed down ‘a silk thread dipped in the blood of a mouse’; you hear the street cries, or. boating on the Thames, you egg on the swearing Whipping watermen; you see the gorgeous coaches blocking the narrow streets, and after dusk you look for a linkboy with his lantern to light you home. So does this pleasant book light up the dark past.
With the threat of increasing hostility and the airing of the armament scandals new war books rise up in wrath. Paths of Glory (Viking, $2.50) is a novel of the French Army with all the earmarks of experience. The author, Humphrey Gobb, is an American of Continental education who served in France as a volunteer with the Canadian forces. That he knows the French turn of mind from poilu to general is what first engages your attention: in a series of Hash-scenes he introduces you to men and officers of the 181st Infantry bound en repos after heavy losses in an exposed sector. In these men, for all their fatigue, are vitality, reliance, and that soldier humor which will be instantly recognized by any veteran: this, you say, is reality— it does n’t matter where the story is taking us. But it does, for when the characters have captured your imagination past escape you find yourself faced with a situation so brutal, so undeniable, and as we know, so close to life that it could only be discussed when the war was over. I salute this graphic and masculine novel: it has the power to make one indignant, and the humanness to evoke sympathy.
In the realm of publishing there are, broadly speaking, two types: the editor, a man of letters, — personified, let us say, by Walter Hines Page, and the merchant prince, personified by his partner, the late F. N. Doubledav. Background versus business, with personal charm a prime requisite for both parties. George H. Doran, whose fifty years of publishing have been summed up in the Chronicles of Barabbas (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50), is by his own agreeable account a business man with a nose for books. He began as a ‘Smart Boy Wanted in an evangelical publishing house in Canada, and pious tracts and Bibles were his first best sellers. From loroulo he went to Chicago, religious books being still his stock in trade; his new associates, Fleming II. lie veil Co., three times declined In His Steps by Charles Sheldon (total sale when published approximately 28 million copies); branching into fiction, they scored a great success with Ralph Connor’s Sky Pilot and missed a second when they rejected the first novel by an Ozark preacher, Harold Bell Wright. In 1908 Mr. Doran decided to publish under his own imprint. The bulk ot his reminiscence is concerned with the authors he eidisted, the success and the personal relations which he enjoyed from 1908 to 1927, when his firm was merged with its Doubleday interests. ’If a publisher,’ says Mr. Doran, ’published only along the lines of his own taste he would simply be gratifying his own taste and failing broadly to satisfy a public.’ I wonder il that is not the creed of quantity rather than quality. Publishing a large list of general books (many ot them an odds against chance), paying his authors large advances, and seeking whenever possible a threebook contract, Mr. Doran’s methods were those of the expansionist. Whether such methods would have survived the test of lean years is a question.
Many will be the wiser for having read this gusty and confident chronicle. The author writes from memory, and his figures generally reflect the optimist. His comments on authors and editors, , always positive, are most illuminating when he writes of his friends. Mary Roberts Rinehart, Arnold Bennett, Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams. In his comments on literature with a capital L it is a business man speaking, candid, bluff, and unsubtle: he has a lasting admiration for ’the immaculate virility’ of the fiction in the Saturday Evening Post; he is shocked by Dos Passos and Hemingway, and angrily inarticulate about D. H. Lawrence. It is too bad that an editor did not police this personable book to remove the nine hundred ’outstandings’ and such other repetitions as irritate the eye.
