Word: new
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Artillery of Time-Chard Powers Smith-Scribner ($2.75). An undisciplined whopper (853 pages) about two New York State farm boys, one of whom carries the ball for rising U. S. industrialism (in the '50s and '60s), the other for democratic idealism...
...such little known or unknown writers as W. B. Yeats, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Anatole France, H. G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, Symbolist Poets Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, as well as the poetry of Stephen Crane, the fiction of Henry James. They published one of the first (and still classic) examples of the new realism, Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware. Their designers were (and still are) the best in the country: Bruce Rogers, Updike, Goudy. A little heard-of French painter named Toulouse-Lautrec made an advertising poster for them. The Chap-Book started the vogue of Little Magazines (then...
Fascism v. democracy is their favorite, though only a brand new reader of novels would find anything new on the subject. In the worst of them, Charles Francis Stocking's Out of the Dust (Maestro, Chicago, $2.75), an American in Germany huffs & puffs through an interminable, blowhard melodrama. Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Great Tradition (Messner, $2.50) pictures in drawing room prose the democratic gropings of a German-U. S. aristocrat in Germany and revolutionary Spain. A cut above them is W. Townend's Rescue of Captain Leggatt (Morrow, $2.50), naively melodramatizing the enmity and brotherly reconciliation...
...above novels reveal no promising new writers. Few will be remembered longer than a month. Few improve on past performance. But taken together these 22 novels suggest a couple of general observations: 1) it needs a whale of a lot of inferior novels to get a first-rate one; 2) what determines the first-rateness of a novel is not hatred of fascism, love of democracy, reverence for the U. S. past, emulation of best-seller formulas, adhesion to the Party Line, good intentions, or hard work. It is, rather, a private and non-negotiable possession, namely, creative talent...
Timetable for Tramps contains excellent pages on New York City, Marseille, London, post-War Paris, and on the habits of those who live there. Well aware that, thanks to war, most of what he tells of will never be the same again, Koeves subtitles his volume "A European Testament." In a modest and genuine way, it is. It is also what it set out to be: a good book about travel, of which the chief regret is, that with so sharp a focus drawn on the theory of travel, the lens is trained so little on its practice...