Word: messer
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...first non-love-story Donn Byrne has written, the attempt of a prose-poet in his late thirties to achieve an ascetic spiritual masterpiece. The success of the effort will be strongest felt by strangers to the earlier Byrne manner. People who remember and relish how Messer Marco Polo was drawn to the Old Man of the Mountains by white magic, for example, will have difficulty distinguishing between florid fantasy and sincere interpretation when it is told how Saul overcame the snuffling, pad-padding, loathsome shapes of evil conjured by Bar-jesus of Paphps. The Celtic love of melodramatizing...
...unsensitive people for whom the mellow, wry blarney of Author Donn-Byrne has no meaning at all. These are pitiable folk, for they will not understand the astonishing thing he has now done-written a book of modern times with all the glamour upon it that was on Messer Marco Polo, The Wind Bloweth and his other tales of days long gone. His warmest admirers will be quickest to see that he has not done this rich thing without overdoing it occasionally-slipping over briefly into unredeemed melodrama, laying on a few too-thick bits of the Biblical locution...
...than 40 years ago, with a long north-of-Ireland genealogy. From three on, he grew up on the family estate in Ireland, getting faery lore and the Gaelic. His college learning was at Dublin, Paris, Leipzig; he served an editorial apprenticeship in the U. S. Until he wrote Messer Marco Polo (1921), few guessed his genius and there were money struggles, hard ones. His wife, Dolly Donn-Byrne, writes too-collaborated with Gilda Varesi on the play Enter Madame. There are four little Donn-Byrnes, including the twins, but not even the best friends of the family attempt...
...those of the Gertrude Hoffman girls, late of the Moulin Rouge, are exquisite, adept. Authors Harold Atteridge and Harry Wabstaff Gribble do not depend on the upholstery to make their lines agreeable; the art directing and music decidedly the most able that those penetrating students of public taste, the Messer Shubert, have ever paid for. There is, also, a funny man, one Phil Baker...
Donn Byrne, author of Messer Marco Polo, Anatole France, Joseph Hergesheimer Mr. Cabell enjoys at least in part because he sees in them "the artist who labors primarily to divert himself." And that, says Mr. Cabell, is why he and all other artists create beautiful things beautifully...