The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 9, June 1923)

FRANK D. ASHBURN.

_Lady of Kind Hands_

Long ago to you I gave All there was of me to give.

Lady of Kind Hands, I gave All the things I used to love To attain my love for you; And I ask that you will save, So they may be found in you, Surf the soft winds whisper of Sleepily across the sea, Star that slips athwart the blue, And all Beauty lost to me.

Long ago to you I gave All there was of me to give.

J. CROSBY BROWN, JR.

_Book Reviews_

_Victoria._ By KNUT HAMSUN. (Knopf.)

With the translation of _Victoria_ into English, Knut Hamsun demands again our serious consideration. He is universally recognized as the author of _Growth of the Soil_, _Pan_, and _Hunger_. In 1920 he received the Nobel Prize for literature; a great distinction for any writer. That fact alone should fascinate us into searching out his latest translated novel.

_Victoria_ is a tragical romance dealing frankly with the hopeless mutual love of an aristocrat and one of lower caste. The plot is obviously commonplace; but Knut Hamsun has done with it what few other men could do: excited and maintained interest. To emphasize these qualities there must be some twist in his technique, some trick in his style. Perhaps this is it:—

He chooses an incident, relatively unimportant for the progress of the plot, and describes it distinctly in short, rapidly moving sentences. Action always commands inquiry into the who and the why. Then he presents the necessary description of the character, his situation, and any other details that he deems necessary. And in this last feature Knut Hamsun is a master craftsman. Interest is maintained greatly by the refinement, and consequently the confinement, of description. He is a poet by divine right, some one has said. True. And he is moreover a modern poet, abiding by the same principles that Ezra Pound and his followers recognize: namely, to present instead of to describe; to give direct treatment to the “thing”, whether subject or objective; and to compose in musical phrases.

_Victoria_ is a poetical novel with a strange love for its theme. Formerly Knut Hamsun has been expansive, taking life as a whole for his study; but now he is dealing with love alone, and is therefore able to cast off much of the commonplace in details. He asks, “Ah, what is love?” and gives many conjectures on it. “Love was a music hot as hell which stirs even old men’s hearts to dance. It was like the daisy that opens wide to the coming night, and it was like the anemone that closes at a breath and dies at a touch. It might ruin a man, raise him up again and brand him anew; it might love me to-day, you to-morrow and him to-morrow night, so inconstant was it.

“But again it might hold like an unbreakable seal and burn with an unquenchable flame even to the hour of death, for so eternal was it.

“Does it not lead the friar to slink into closed gardens and glue his eyes to the windows of the sleepers at night? And does it not possess the nun with folly and darken the understanding of the princess? It casts the king’s head to the ground so that his hair sweeps all the dust of the highway, and he whispers unseemly words to himself the while and puts out his tongue.

“No, no, it was again something very different and it was like nothing else in the whole world. It came to earth one spring night when a youth saw two eyes, two eyes. He gazed and saw. He kissed a mouth, and then it was as though two lights met in his heart, a sun flashing towards a star. He fell into an embrace, and then he heard and saw no more in all the world.”

Is there more beautiful treatment in all prose?

The tragical element enters into the form of fate. The Miller’s boy is not to have that love fulfilled, the daughter of the castle shall have it snatched away from her by death; the world is an unhappy place full of all beauties. Knut Hamsun the fatalist! Miss Larsen points out in her exhaustive study of the man that there is no reason why the novel should have been a tragedy except that, like Hardy, Hamsun believed during the period of his life when the book was written that no joy was to be attained. When he saw happiness coming towards any character he would say, “Ah, this must not be! It is not the order of things.” And that would end it. Yet there is strong foundation for an opinion that the tragedy enhances the pathetic charm of the book.

It is Knut Hamsun’s finest romance. Is there any more to say?

A. H. C.

_Blackguard._ By MAXWELL BODENHEIM. (Covici-McGee.)

Perhaps the most startling quality of _Blackguard_ is its graphic lucidity of language. Consider this description of a man sobbing: “It was as though a martyr were licking up the blood on his wounds and spitting it out in long gurgles of lunatic delight.” The whole story is told with such compelling clarity of phrase, and Bodenheim has shifted his genius for acid wording from poetry to prose without the slightest apparent misgiving as to outcome. Result: a luminous biography of an introspective young author that in some ways approaches the manner of James Joyce.

The book concerns the poetic and amorous development of Carl Felman, an aspiring scribbler who stoops casually to thieving rather than enter its father’s business of whiskey-selling. His fight against the world, and particularly against his mother, who had a body “on which plumpness and angles met in a transfigured prizefight of lines”, is rendered doubly difficult by his own discriminating soul. He is not willing to give and take, but is concerned with the taking only. In the end he achieves some tranquility of mind—in a manner strange enough to warrant reading about it.

Bodenheim will not cheer you up; rather will he wake you up. And for rhymesters who aspire to better verse or don’t know when to quit—here is an eye-opener that should not be passed by too lightly.

J. R. C.

_Black Oxen._ By GERTRUDE ATHERTON. (Boni & Liveright.)

The notion of rejuvenation is not a new one, and the theme of sophisticated womanhood reverting to romantic young love is not unprecedented. In _Black Oxen_ Mrs. Atherton has successfully disguised the problem of the first with the accoutrements of the second.

The hero, Lee Clavering, is a scintillating “colyumist” whose literary worth is not restricted by journalism and whose ideals are not cramped by the Young Intellectual atmosphere of the Algonquin Group.

Mary Zattiany, the much-discussed heroine, is an American woman who married a foreign nobleman, dazzled the European courts and salons with her beauty and wit, and, after a process of re-upholstering, returned to New York, where she falls in love with the young journalist.

The motivation of the book is centered in the translated personality of the heroine, and Mrs. Atherton’s treatment of feminine psychology is exceedingly dextrous. But a large part of the story’s merit consists in the cross-section of metropolitan activity at the margin where contemporary artists enjoy social registration.

_Black Oxen_ is primarily a woman’s novel. Its theme will always be close to the heart of womankind, and Mrs. Atherton has added a more than feminine touch by leaving the problem unsolved. When, at the end of the book, Mary obeys the call of European duty and closes the taxi door in the face of transcendent love, the reader continues to wonder whether or not rejuvenescence is a good thing.

The author has employed an idealized “colyumist” as a foil. Clavering’s sudden success as a playwright is dubious. And the ending is too obviously an escape from the lived-happily-ever-after solution. But one loses sight of these technical anomalies in the impetus of the romance, the deftness of satire, and the intricacies of the heroine’s strange predicament.

Mrs. Atherton, in her first treatment of Eastern “civilization”, has had the good grace to sublimate sentimentality without destroying its perennial charm.

H. W. H.

_Editor’s Table_

“It’s about time you did some work around here,” said Cherrywold, as Ariel arrived only one hour and fifteen minutes late.

“Oh, no, not nearly!” remonstrated that irresponsible virtuoso.

“You can write the Editor’s Table,” growled Mr. and Mrs. Stevens patronizingly, who had come back from New York with a first edition of Coleridge and couldn’t forget it.

At this point Rabnon, the Brushwood Boy, was detected trying to set fire to the LIT. office with his cigarette stub. As the office was still damp from the presence of the preceding Board, no conflagration ensued. In the confusion, however, three poems by Freshmen were accidentally accepted.

Little Laird Fauntleroy wrote the Table of Contents laboriously, being jumped on every minute or so for misspellings which he was expected to commit, but which he carefully disguised by writing illegibly. Thus the time wore on.

“What would you do with a man who perpetrated this?” expostulated Cherrywold, holding up a poem with the inscription: “I’m very much afraid that this is worth publishing—Mercury.”

“It _shows_ he has no soul!” exulted Mr. and Mrs. Stevens. “No one with a soul could have a face like his, anyway.”

“No personalities in Art,” cautioned Rabnon the politic.

In walked Roland at this juncture, smoking a poor cigar and holding in his nervous hands a large sheet of paper with a one-word correction of his latest poem.

“Here’s the man who wrote a sonnet in six-foot lines!” Han cried. A chorus of groans and hisses greeted the heeler.

“Any defense?” asked Cherrywold, while Han prepared to hit Roland over the head with his stick.

“He’s just been elected Chairman of the _News_,” said Mr. and Mrs. Stevens in explanation.

“What’s the _News_?” inquired Han, hand to ear.

A wild scramble followed. Roland, vilified by the names “Traitor!”—“Snake in the Grass!”—“Turncoat!” ran for his life.

“He got away,” Cherrywold panted, his fair face flushed with exertion.

“That’s all right,” said Han; “I couldn’t have spelled his name, anyway.”

ARIEL.

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