BRIEFER MENTION
Very Woman, by Remy de Gourmont, translated by J. L. Barrets (12mo, 317 pages; Brown: $2.50). In three great works de Gourmont struck the balance between the life of the mind and the compulsion of reality: Sixtine, Les Chevaux de Diomède, and Une Nuit au Luxembourg. In the last, the dualism is welded beautifully into one; in the second it exists most harmoniously as a duality; in the first, the present volume, it is applied with the most vigour. What Schnitzler tackled in The Green Cockatoo, de Gourmont tackles here with a wholly different set of mechanisms. His keen love of ideology appears on every page. If Sixtine begins where A Rebours left off, it is to show us the charm of erudition where Huysmans showed us its atrocity, and to give us grace where Huysmans gave us precipitancy. Very Woman—the English title is blasphemous and unfair—is a literary novel, dealing with literary people and literary currents of thought, and written by an author who possessed an acute sense of literary values. While rooted in symbolism, the virtues of the book are absolute.
Vandemark's Folly, by Herbert Quick (12mo, 420 pages; Bobbs-Merrill: $2) turns over the rich and inexplicably neglected soil of the plains in those significant years when the rich Mississippi valley was a battleground of pioneer conquest. Mr Quick turns from the fashioning of rapid romances, skilful and swift-moving and evanescent, and proves himself qualified for a more serious work by one of the best pictures of that period which American fiction affords. The book represents a considerable absorption in the life and lore of the time, which has been sufficiently mulled over to lose its mustiness, and the novel which emerges is well-constructed, picturesque in detail, and intelligently related to the era with which it is concerned.
Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works, by Carl Van Vechten (12mo, 247 pages; Knopf: $2.50). Although this is Mr Van Vechten's first excursion into the field of fiction, yet it is such a sure-footed and airy-heeled promenade of the imagination that apologies for him on the basis of inexperience are rendered pointless by the sureness of his stride. Whiffle as a character is an errant whimsy whose factitious identity lends an authentic air to the most beguiling criticism Van Vechten has so far contrived.
Pierre and Luce, by Romain Rolland, translated by Charles De Kay (12mo, 136 pages; Holt: $1.50) is Rolland's version of the Paul-and-Virginia motif: young love is pressed for time by the ubiquitous threats of the war; it strives to affirm spring above campaigns and communiqués; and at the moment when the lovers are absorbed with the greatest intensity in their love, the potentialities of the war become kinetic, and both Pierre and Luce are annihilated. The thesis, thus, is ingeniously and violently presented, and much more succintly than is usual with Rolland. But one will find few additional documents on young love beyond the element of the intruding war, as noted above.
