THE MICHIGAN DAILY- WAGE SIX SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1922- SUNDAY, NOVEMBER.5; 1922 THE MICHIGAN DAILY .. .,. x... ._ p _ _ .ugr.i.. .. .. _., .. ; .., .:-.a-° . ir:'=. "..,-. ... .,,.....:-.,-. ",.3 :.::;ri..:Yii: IR i rY°S . 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 - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~- / 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 '( { i 4 l b I Individuality- >1,"", D KAHLER SHOE S el~mfrtcbl Soe ola Siiflish ilno rshyute'E illustration shows what ill fitting shoes TH~oto your feet. ~Thright hand side of the illustration shows the straight-line last of Dr. Kahier Shoes. It allows '-your foot to retain its normal shape vithout ; crushing -and distorting the toes. 'Indeed, it m ~.arts that' very desirable note of-smartness whicha ~is they mark of a.-perfect fitting. shoe. Comei, tod.ay and try on a pair. 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