THE MICHIGAN DAILY-
WAGE SIX
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1922-
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER.5; 1922
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
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Babel
By John Cournos,
(Boni & Liveright),
he American reader of discrimi-
'.on has lately been driven to the
.agreeable conclusion that the mod-
English writer is on the whole
superior to his American conten-
ary. The exact cause of this in-
rality might be. explained in several!
isible ways, but that is not the'
pose of this review. The' fact re-
ns that the triviality of many ofj
or American writers is all too appar-
"nV when contrasted with the sound-
r"s and depth of thought which can
found in contemporary English lit-i
; ture, and one of the most recent
" demonstrate this European super-
ty is John Cournos. in his new
v nel, "Babel."
The story does two definite things-
it depicts the "babel" which charac-
terized the under-the-surface world in.
the years just previous to the war,I
when men were vainly crying peace
a, nd internationalism; and it relates
--_.idly the love affair of an individual
which by its intense reality and truth
,comes to the reader his own lovel
:.fair, and the love affair of ten thou-
- Id others.
ohn Gombarov, the central figure
o the book, is an international com-
posite. Born in Russia of Jewish par-
untage, reared in America, and at the
time of the story residing in London,'
as entire life has been a "babel," a
pa n ful groping for expression of the,
urge within him. The love story is
( :mcerned with one Winifred, who for!
a time seems to offer satisfaction for
th cravings which will not down. lIet
Is that she can inspire him in his
w-riting, but, with no immediate pros-
pect of marriage, she halts between
her desire for wealth and comfort
. 'w her love for him, and in the end
be definitely leaves her, disgusted and
discouraged with her flickering affee-
tion.
in the meantime Gombarov has lost
touch with the two or three other
women who could have meant as much
to him as Winifred, and the half of
his complex nature remains unsatis-
ied. He is one of those men to whom
a woman is a vital necessity, not a
11 ury. A congenial woman is his
pl hysical and intellectual inspiration
a part of his artistic being, and all
t his in a very real and fundamental
sense, without a trace of sickly 'sen-
tij:.entality. His almost grudging
f:.: hfulness to Winifred when other
omen with equal appeal are his foi
i taking makes us want to kick him
heartily as a means of concealing our
admiration. And after she is gone we
want him to hurry back to one of the
other girls, who were willing to giveI
something in exchange for his devo-
tion. But of course, they-too are gone.;
That is the dickens of it-the story
is a cross-section out of life, intensely
A):
) a
The drama comes to a fitting 'con-' H artbea
clusion with the declarations of ' war
in '1914, and the strong' closing sen- -By Stacy Aumosiler
tences epitomize the blindness of the (Boni & Liveright)
world and its failure to realize that The unique -feature which distin-
an era, has 'worn itself wearily out, guishes this book from scores of oth-
that a new era has commenced, andj ers equally"readable is -to be~found in
that things can never return to their .the nomenclature of both title and
former state: book divisions. "Hea'rtbeat" is a trifle
In the background was a , flagrant, but = there is a certain sig-.
shop, and in the window of the shop nificance gained from the consistency
a placard, an-d on the placard the le- with which the idea of a throbbing
gend: heart is expressed in the captions of
'Business as usual!, the three parts. These are respective-
"ly, Diastole, Systole, and Diastole.
Thus it must have been also, whenFor those unversed in the biological
' Nineveh fell and Rome fell."vernacular, diastole is the dilatation
It is almost anticlimactic to say of the heart drawing the blood in;'
more,.but I feel constrained to mention and systole the converse movement,
the author's description of London, the contraction, which sends it pul-
running through the book, which is sating through the arteries. This
quite the finest I have ever read. The trilogistic rhythm sets the tempo of
book is fuM of this sort of thing- the thought.
splendid. thoughtful, keen-minded The first "beat" is concerned with
writing, beside which the efforts of Barbara Powerscourt, a: girl of twenty,
many of our American popularity cap- naive, epicene, seething with rebellion
italists seem pitiful indeed. against the suppression of a mid-Vic-
Delbert Clark. torian father. With an unfortunate.
-- heritage from an environment of sub-
The first two volumes in a proposed terfuge and dissonance, the psycholog-
new edition of "The Novels and ical development of a woman's char-
Among the Magazines
W. M. R.
The Hole in The Camf
t
t
>.
Stories of Guy de
just appeared from
A. Knopf..
Maupassant" have aeter and her struggle for self-expres--
the press of Alfred sion is the theme.
1 Liberated- through the sensational
FIRST
4 NAT IONAL
BANK
ORGANIZED 186 3
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/
JIOHN CoUrinfo
real, well told but unembellished, and
3 with no perversions to fit a precon-
ceived plot. It simply tells the truth.
But in this John Cournos displays
his artistry. Dealing with the un-
sweetened facts of life as he does,
yet he never descends to the crudity
of those who mistake brazenness for
truth in literature. Frank as the book
is, it leaves no unpleasant odor.
For the other side, the "babel" is
. admirably depicted. In the opening
chapter, C- urnos makes one individual
state the t. _sis that money will inter-
nationalize the world, while another{
man in another place believes that
art has become international and will
I prove to be the great force for world
unity. And then the story, which quiet-
ly lifts the lid and reveals the chaos
underneath.
, In the chapter on "Babel's .Great
l Men," in which Gombarov interviews
J several of them, there are pictures of.
- Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold
g Bennett and others, some of them com-
r plimentary, some decidedly not, but
r all, one cannot help but feel, just and
truthful.
:::: OLDEST BANK IN ANN ARBOR :::
OLDEST NATIONAL BANK IN MICHIGAN
THE DIAL for Novemular achievet aTy
real art in book review. Its critics (B.AC. Ilissey).The snowfall was just as heavy the oceansn-,tohrni
are not mere critics. They are cre- The recent excavations which have following winter, and again the sum-: of snowdthat th
ative writers as well, and their work been 'made on and abou the' campus mer sunfailed to drive it all away. was lowered 20
has a living 'quality which raises It hv eele ayitretn at Each year this was repeated, and each! During the ha
Sa th ra have revealed many interesting facts year the sun struggled in vain to re- front extended
Thisrnuber ism unuually rih iny tto the geologist. The main part of the store the lost balance. Slowly the Ohio River. On
campus was built up by a stream which snow-field grew, spreading far over did not retreat
respect. First in line is an apprecia- flowed from the general direction of the rolling country. Deeper and deep- at intervals. On
rollin counry.yDepereadrdyes1 ataytervls.PO
tion of .Lady Gregorys plays by Pa- the gymnasium towards Memorial er grew the drifts until the hills made just east
draic Qolum, also an interesting com- Hall. Then the stream shifted its di- themselves were overtopped. This was Hospital. Here
parison of two modern American po- rection and flowed towards the south- an alarming thing. Did it mean that tionary for a 10
ets, Conrad Aiken and Carl Sandburg, east, and built up that part of the the sun was slowly dying? Did it forward moveme
by Malcolm'"Cowley. The Paris and plain which lies south and east of the i mean that the earth would soon be anced the loss di
American letters are good, particular- campus. The stream shifted its course shrouded in a blanket of snow and long-past time,
ly the latter by Sebastian Cauliflower, repeatedly, and excavated many chan- go swinging through space cold and now situated, t
who presents some new viewpoints in nels in the top of the delta and then lifeless as the moon? Still the blan- lake, rippling o
regard to present day literature. Turn- filled them full of gravel and sand. et of snow spread west and south. clay. As the wa
ing from books to the theatre, we find One of these old courses was well The Hairy Mammoth, the lumbering ice flowed awa
a little play by William Butler Yeats shown in the excavation for the new Mastodon, the heavy-bodied, Saber- large quantities
entitled "The Player Queen," remark- Physics building. If you examine the toothed Tiger, the 'shaggy Musk which were'depc
able for its combination of realism sides of this excavation you will not- Ox, were all driven from their a delta 80 feet
and poetry, a rare discovery in the ice that the and and gravel is de- old haunts, and forced to migrate The top of this o
current magazinea posited in irregular, slanting layers., south before the advancing snow.: campus plain. W
The most beautiful bit of work in The direction of slant of these layers Under the influence of pressure this walks, great he:
the book is "Musical Chronicle" by tells us which way the stream that great mass of snow clowly changed to wander.
Paul Rosenfeld. It is a veritable l deposited these layers was flowing. into solid ice, probably 8,000 feet thick The last ice
prose'poem and mh superior to the A million years ago a great snow- in the center. Finally its onward region 50,000 ye
,two specimensofpseudo-outhentic 1storm raged over eastern Canada, fill- march was halted about where the paratively re~ce
verse given definite place in the pre- ing all the valleys and piling up in states of Pennsylvania and New Jer- is measured. It
vious pages. These are "The Waste huge drifts which grew deeper each sey now are. Then the climate grew at some far-dist
Land" by T. S. Eliot, and "Brancusi's day. The short sunmer came and slowly warmer and the ice gradually 'live ruins of the
Golden Bird" by Mina Loy. The lat- went, but in the hollows and pro- disappeared. Six times this great gan will be ove
ter is the better, placed as it is with tected places big sheets of snow defied drama was repeated. So great was the of ice as mercil
a reproduction of the famous bronze. the heat of the sun and still lingered. volume of water withdrawn from the mer ones.
"Waste Land" is more than anything
else a mass of jumbled impressions,
rising to real poetry at rare intervals
and then only for a brief moment. It
is for the most part sordid in the ex-
treme, in a class with Sherwood An-
dersonis story, "Many Marriages."
Life to Sherwood Anderson is a thing
of perversions and distortions, always
at fever heat, and to the average r'ead-Cg
er, profoundly disgusting. "Dr.
Graesler," by Arthur Schnitzler, is
better, but even that does not reach a
truly high quality. The art is on a
par with the fiction and verse. Two
pen sketches of the nude by Pablo Pi-
casso are only a little less grotesque
than "The Acrobats" by Duncan-
Grant. "Nude" by the latter artist has
beauty of line but will find many crit-
ics. Elie Faure's essay on Greek artA sat'
deserves mention, chiefly because of ' A modish frock of velvet 's t ll
its variance from accepted standards.
In the whole magazine radical and worn with one of these Jac- or gold met
conventional ideals are indescribablya miatf
mixed, reacting upon one another to quettes will give Milady a aw h a bi of
the detriment of both and leaving the
reader with no clear impression at: costume that will be unex- elty orname
all, only the remembrance of some clt ou
things very good and some things very ceed for beauty and style. _thecostume
bad. But the Dial is worth reading. 6.
E. W.S. a}
THE NATION has always prided it-
self on printing the news that no other
paper ever prints. In the "Interna-! '1(
tional Relations Section" of the issue
for November 1, The Nation borrows.
from the Manchester Guardian an ex-
tremely interesting story that throws
some light on the benevolence, not to
say tact,with which the English rule H E last word in winter wraps - a jacqi
India. Paxton Hibben writes about . .
the Russian Fair at Nizhni Novgorod of black astrakhan! The college girl will
which marks Russia's return to aorba kat kh n T ec leg gilw l
sound, world-wide. recognized, to her best in such a wrap. Some of these jacqu'
nomic power. Also in the same field'
anaT have contrasting fur collars while others
tion in Great Britain," by J. A. Hob-hi
son, gives us some new ideas on the completely of the astrakhan:. Some fasten a
questionable advantage of being a vic-
torious nation. And for those who waistline with a fancy carved buckle while
know the refreshing quality of Art f ye
Young's cartoons, his monthly Page ers have a velvet ribbon girdle that ties piq
"Looking On" will make this week's
Nation especially worth while. sl on one side.'They are beautifully lined
Of peculiar interest to us this week, -
is the fifteenth article of the Nation's makeUnusually attractive wraps. Suc h a
study of contemporary American civ-
ilization which has been running twice' quette is delightfully youthful and yet spler
a month for the past seven months
under the title "These United States." l modish. M adamoiselle will not err i
"Michigan: The Fordizing of a Pleas-
ant Peninsula" was written by Leon- chooses an astrakhan jacquette.
ard Lanson Cline, a true Michigander
by birth, by virtue of having lived in
the state of Michigan the greater part'.
of his life, and by his education in the
schools of this state. Cline was a
student in the literary college of this
University from 1910 to 1913.-
He sees the state of Michigan- ant
mate by the'"sale",spirt of Deroit,
which, in turn, is dominated i te
spirit of hig h .himneys, finj i, er
and the desire to he "always in the '
7" , # l- ?ml 11 '( {
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