?AGIC SEK IlHE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1936 'IN THE WORLD OF BOOKS BELL Ma TH CL Fri Ac of th Soviet Book s umerous Authors )MOR, with an introduction by they are so different that comparison is written by 34 authors, whose mostly xim Gorky (Smith & Haas); is impossible. unpronouncable names are given op- E CRISIS OF THE MIDDLE There is, first, Belomor, which is a posite the title page. This is the first ASS, by Lewis Corey (Covici- Soviet product in every sense of the of the Soviet's jointly written books ede.) word. It is the story of the canal to be published in the United States ouple of books from the left side built by prison labor, between the and deserves a place on the shelves e house are up for remarks. But White sea and the Baltic. The book of anybody interested in literary cu- riosities regardless of its merit, whichR The canal has been a dream among Russians for a century. Stalin isA credited with making the dream come true by incorporating it in his second STUDS LONIGAN, A Trilogy by five-year plan, and by turning over James T. Farrell. Vanguard Press. supervision to the GPU. The work $3.00. was "laid out" in 1931, and completed By ARTHUR A. MILLER .n 2When Zaharoff was speeding over in 20 months. Prisoners did the workI the face of Europe in a cool effort to and according to Belomor the work sell guns, -- when the Czar was madly -77 .fir l:E.: Remember-- If You Want To Buy or Sell USED BOOKS did more for the prisoners than the{ latter did for the canal. It seems that digging the canal "reforged" the prisoners, and numerous touching stories are included to prove the point. ADVERTISEMENT WThat Is The Candid Camera? Last fall, the camera shop in the Arcades started as a publicity stunt, the candid camera idea. At that time all pictures were taken unawares. Due to public demand for informal pic- tures, this policy has evolved into the following plan: The only pictures in the window are those that are still taken unawares. All others are in the files and shown only by request. At any time, the candid camera men will be only too glad to have you ask them to take any picture, and will take pictures without being asked only when there is a shortage of requests. Don't be bashful, step up and ask for your picture. The candid cameras will be at the J-HOP and will be looking for you. (Adv.) It Will Pay You To See Us. (Our Specialty) Utrick's Bookstore dispatching Cossacks throughout Russia in a frantic effort to root out rebellion, - when the peoples of the world were lined up against the wall,-Studs Lonigan was a boy wondering whether to walk into his father's living room with a cigarette in his mouth. These were the days Studs Lonigan thought back upon as he lay, much too old for his thirty years, on the bed in his father's house, dying from a recurrence of pneumonia, the dis- ease he had contracted when his "pals" neglected to lift him from a puddle of water next to the curb- stone one hilarious and alcoholic New Years' Eve. Jame's Farrell's trilogy, Young Lonigan. The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and Judgment Day, is much more than a photograph of living death, and death in Chicago's South Side. Farrell lived his youth with the street Arabs of Chicago but he graduated from the pilfering, brawling caravan and with the halls of the University of Chicago behind him, he returned to the scene of the street gang, Catholic education, rape, prayed - against - drunkenness and downright Irishment. Of all the aorenamect Farrell has plenty to say. His study of the be- wildered Irish middle class might merit, by virtue of a black and white characterization alone, more than the usual congratulations. But Studs Leniga n, with class-conscious James Farrell to set it down on paper, must certainly be worth more than the usual bouquets since it possesses be- sides the above setting, the sparkling stone of scientific extra-literary pur- pose. But propagapda, as any extra-liter- ary purpose flust be called, is not tacked on to the appalling truth of Studs Lonigan's tragedy. Farrell has written with unquestionable honesty and convincingness, and the quiver- ing tale of American boys standing in the jaws of a slowly closing steam- shovel atmosphere; boys who strag- gle up to manhood, spurning the letters of those who teach for pay, drinking in emulation of the pool parlor philosophers, functioning like cannibals and always, persistently always, rubbing their finger tips rough to claw their individual ways toward a new suit, a new conquest, toward the new. They stand in the mouth of a monster, Farrell forces one to see, and they learn to curse, to brag and bully not because they are "born tough" or "born Irish," but because the organization, the cul- tural habits of American cities and Chicago's South Side in particular, are founded on what Farrell sees LL: Seething Slums Strangle . Their Spawn .".". as a decadent and wholly barbaric way through the volume in his own and worn economic system, language, and Farrell follows him -, . I along Indiana Avenue enveloping him Yet as clearly as Ferrell is con- in words Studs would recognize. And vinced that the fault is the system's, this is the marrow of any criticism his propaganda for the overthrow of which could possibly be made of the that system and its replacement by book. In rare but present spots, the Socialism is not superimposed with University of Chicago rears its the short-fingeredness with which 1mortar-boarded head for just the another writer might have superim- twinkling of an eye, utters a three posed it, were he interested with the syllable word, and slides back into conviction that society is the uncon- its holes, the damage done. victed waylayer of Studs and the This fault of slight inconsistency of gang. The story of Studs is not a language, although it occurs rarely, unit in itself which cries out inter- may be taken as a reminder, for one, mittently against capitalism, against of the art with which Farrell has the injustice of a dying system which told his story. It is certainly a strike has overlived its natural span. Far- against him but it is also the hammer rell has not "woven propaganda" in the hand of the reader who would into his saga. He possesses such skill hit a very definite nail on the head. that it is apparent he has spotted That Farrell's language is Stud's is propaganda, alive and living without accentuated by the spots where Far- the benefit of the literary weaver, rell's language isn't. But the nail in the very life and situation of the to be struck is that which indicates sons of the middle class. What can a subtle desire on the part of the be found, however, and what slams author to plant in his reader's mind any reader between the eyes is the the relationship between the economic continuous, slow, ever-present and environment of an organism and the present everywhere declamation that culture of that organism. It is part all this terrible ignorance, all these of Farrell's skill, or perhaps his for- mistakes and blasted lives cannot be tune, that he has succeeded in im- the result of an individual's heritage parting a describable sense of the or a mayor's whim. In this respect strangulation of every and any Indi- Farrell has found, slipped into his ana Avenue bud which shows signs palm and reported the actual propa- of the smell of learning. He has ganda that lies in every filthy street obviously taken it as his function to and every reform school. It is the demand his reader's attention to the kind that millions of Americans know economic system which he sees as and fail to recognize as such. It is the cause of a miscarried culture. the kind that drags one to the cor- As was stated before, however, his ner to peer up Indiana Avenue to see ideas are not smeared on whenever a ribald band of Studs bound, torch a surface which will hold the paint in hand, for the library where those presents itself. All he does is pre- book-learning anti-Old Glory for- sent the case of dead-at-thirty Loni- eigners are quietly planning sedition gan against society. The economics- and a new idea culture relationship arises like a For Studs, his gang, the gang's steady fist above a wavering mob. It fathers and mothers are ever alert is a steady fist because it is attached to ascribe every misfortune to the and is growing out of and with an encroachment on the Irish neighbor- arm and body, itself rooted in the hood of either the Negro or the Jew. mob. It has not been thrust from Yet their anger at this arises from above, into the crowd, like a pumpkin causes which Farrell has not left to on a pole. It is rooted in the mob. the imagination. He illustrates im- plicitly, what can only be an actual state of affairs. It is a kind of living D BINON implicitness, more like that which ROBINSO~JN exists in life than on the usual printed page. Here the implicit is not a device to be used for this or that Lines Fall Like Flowers purpose. Here it is the expression of ACross The Page inhibited development in a stifling Acos h environment. Ina Last Poerm '1; For Second Semester-- We are offering the largrest stock ever of and SUPPS We have acquired loads and loads of USED BOOKS wliclh .re prie(l to your odvantagc- DRAWING SUPPLIES FOR THE ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT Everything for the Student at WA H R'SUNIVERSITY 3 16 State Street BRING IN YOUR USEI) BOOKS The book is classified as a prole- tarian novel. The name is a bad one especially ill-suited to Studs Lon- igan. For although Farrell is surely of the Left, Studs cannot quite be called proletarian. His status is bourgeois and his psychology, -his acts and his manner of thinking,- all stand at the darker end of the middle class. However, if the name proletarian is to be granted a work because it may be read and under- stood by the working class, this is, surely one of those. Studs kicks his KTNG JASPER, by Robinson; with by Robert Frost; Edwin Arlington an Introduction (Macmillan). .I I ______, Delightful Stories Of Childhood Are Among Recent Non-Fiction ,, By JOHN SELBY THREE FLIGHTS UP, by Helen Woodward (Dodd, Mead); IF THIS BE I (AS I SUPPOSE IT BE) By Margaret Deland (Appleton-Cen- tury). By one of those pleasant coinci- dences which happen occasionally in the book world, two delightful stories of childhood come out within a few days of each other. Each is auto- biography; each differs from the us- ual; neither is like the other except perhaps in the sincerity with which both are done. Three Flights Up is by Helen Wood- ward. She is telling the straight and usually unadorned truth about a German-Jewish childhood in the New York of the 'nineties. The childhood was not spent in the Ghetto, but in Yorkville. It is not a record of loose BLUEBOOKS All Sizes, mcluciing Law Brush Up with College Outlines Book Exchange Your uised books sold for you at your own price, a nominal fee charged. STUDENTS SUPPLY STORE 111 So. University Ave Phone 8688 wandering, wicked influences, sear- ing contact with life. Quite the contrary. Mrs. \ Wood- ward's mother was a Puritan. Her father was a cigarmaker whose best wage was in the neighborhood of $16 weekly. The mother's life was bound- ed by the austere, painfully clean fiat in which the family lived. At first the father was a socialist, then a single-taxer; finally he found re- lief from home repressions in play- ing the races enthusiastically and not too unluckily. Mrs. Woodward has given the facts of her childhood, and has psychoan- alyzed herself, her brother and sister and her parents -not forbidingly or in bad spirit or in technical language: Just by truthtelling. The result is one of the best books on childhood in years. It should not be missed. Margaret Deland's If This Be I (As I Suppose It Be) is an attempt to re- create the girl Mrs. Deland was in the sixties. She lived in good circum- stances in Pittsburgh. She was a fascinating little imp, possessing most of the material things Mrs. Wood- ward lacked. Mrs. Deland sees her- self rather clearly, and writes around her girlhood a deft and probably faithful picture of the time. The book is less consciously a social docu- ment than Three Flights Up, but there are implications in it for those who want them. This blank verse opus, the last from the pen of one of America's most distinguished poets, will neither add nor detract from the reputation some 40 years of writing built for him. Of course, those 40 years witnessed a kind of writing in verse which only Edwin Arlington Robinson could have produced- that is what is import- ant. The yearshave little to do with it. Chatterton was 18 when he died, and Rimbaud stopped writing at 18. But they are remembered for quali- ties that were theirs. Now Robert Frost, perhaps the most distinguished for the American poets, alive or dead, raises precisely this same issue in his touching, ap- preciative and analytical foreword. Mr. Frost calls attention to the fact that in recent years there has been an amazing scramble on the part of poets, old and young, to write in a new way. Mr. Frost has no quarrel with newness per se, so long as the result is a poem. But few poems have resulted from dropping rhyme, from omitting rhythm, from discarding sense. And he admires Mr. Robinson for sticking to his forms - once Mr. Robinson had discovered that he had a way of using them that was dif- ferent. The followers of Edwin Arlington Robinson will find again, in King Jasper, that finely attenuated, in- voluted thought structure clad in the characteristic blank verse of which this poet was a master. The wars of strong personalities are vividly projected, and as usual, throughout the long work, lines fall like flowers across the page or strike into music as if the reader touched unseen strings. SET COMPLETED The Cambridge University Press will publish in March the eighth vol- ume of the Cambridge Medieval His- tory which will complete a set begun twenty-five years ago. The complete set will be sold for $90, and no cheap- er edition will be issued during the next fifteen years. I. II I f1 THE COLLEGE BOOKS OP State Street at North University BOOKS WANTED See SLATER 'S Ad o Page 7.