PAGE EFGHT THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY, MAY 3, 1936 IN THE WORLD OF BOOKS w M9RG1HN His Latest Novel Imbued With Defeatism Of Post-War Era SPARKENBROKE. By Charles Mor- gan. Macmillan. $2.75. By M. L. WILLIAMS (Of The English Dept.) "We were saying, George, that the world is full of evil and suffering; a good part of it seems to think that our present civilization is so bad it can't be mended, and that the whole system~ ought to be overthrown and built afresh. Writers in Piers's posi- tion have a great influence. What he said of social conditions would be listened to. And yet this is the mom- ent he has chosen to turn away alto- gether from the contemporary scene and to write of Tristan and of the coming of the Holy Face to Lucca"! said Rector Hardy. And in defense of his position Lord Sparkenbroke replied: "Even if I hate the Bastille, why should I call upon people tostorm it? Ifathey succeed, it will be rebuilt in another form. Besides, the imprisonment that men su ffer within stone walls and iron' bars is as nothing to the imprison- ment that they impose upon them- selves by their fears, their hatreds, their false ambitions, their failures of imagination. The only escape from spiritual imprisonment is-?" Sparkenbroke left his question un- answered. Charles Morgan requires a whole volume to formulate the an- swer: Death is the final fulfillment although poetic and sex fulfillments may be brilliant but unsatisfying' interludes in the monotony of life. Piers Tenniel, sensitive son of a' wilful mother (she deserted her hus- band) struggles ineffectually against dull environment dominated by his half-brother Stephen and his horsey' father. At the age of twelve he is craftily locked within the Mound, the' S'parkenbroke tomb, by Stephen and' there he makes that ecstatic ac-1 quaintance with death that is for- ever after to be the goal of his ex- istence. The rest of his life is spent: in seeking an experience comparable1 to that early ecstasy. Succeeding to the lordship of} Sparkenbroke, he marries a wealthy girl whose function, apparently, is to keep the estate intact that her self- exiled husband-poet may make peri- odic returns from Italy to the Mound1 to renew his inspiration. On one of these returns, chance (awkwardly handled) brings Lord Sparkenbroke : A SHROPSHIRE LAD Ma tcLeish Is Obscure And Not Too Successful In Latest Verse CHARLES MORGAN (Portrait head by Gordon Alchin) Mr. Morgan's new novel is "Sparkenbroke" (Macmillan) and Mary Leward together. With her begins the Tristan-Iseult plotj motif, further symbolized by Spark- enbroke's (Morgan's) long dialogues and monologues about the composi- tion of an inner novel with that title. Mary is a choice morsel of flesh and spirit who arouses more than lechery in Piers. Her marriage to Piers's boyhood friend, George Hardy, makes it possible for Mr. Morgan to indulge in other dialogues and soliloquies on the question of adultery, present or future. The act of adultery is pre- vented and the speculations finally terminated by Sparkenbroke 's death - fufillment in the tomb where he had first experienced the joyous caress of death. War, love, and poetry: he had sought release from life in all of them, War, ardently wooed in 1914, brought angina pectoris and nitrite am- poules; love, heterogeneous sensual consummations, brought notoriety and cynicism; poetry, verse and fiction composed with infinite attention to the divine afflatus andto the niceties of style, brought fame and obsessions. Only death satisfied, fulfilled, com- pleted; life was naught. This is the tiresomely repeated' message which, embodied in modern 1859-1 936 "We'll to the woods no more, The laurels all are cut, The bowers are bare of bay That once the Muses wore; The year draws in the day And soon will evening shut: The laurels all are cut, We'll to the woods no more." In 1885 a homesick shire boy returned from his country vacation to the dreary routine of the London patent office. Out of a feverish and sudden flare of intense emotion he composed a brief group of poems, which were laid aside and forgotten for nearly eleven years. Yesterday Alfred Edward Housman died at Cambridge, a distin- guished Latin scholar and penetrating literary critic. But to the world of English readers he has never turned 77; he is forever the lonely west-country youth, dreaming back on the banks and hills of Shropshire. Housman is perhaps the only poet to write his epitaph a hundred odd times. In nearly all the delicate lyrics that make up his two slender volumes of verse comes an overtone of death, a persistent preoccupation with the theme of transiency, the inevitable passing of youth, of beauty, of desire and passion and ambition. The war- sick youth, and the love-sick, as well as the lad on the gallows, from all he draws that needle-like touch of subtle and moving poignancy. Elegiac in their simplicity, classical in their restraint and purity of form, yet utterly unchilled by the frost of academicism, the Shrop- shire ballads have achieved a popularity well-nigh unequalled by any modern poet. Housman himself once declared, "Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it." His way of saying it was the way of genius. Ever chary of language and ornament, his verse is completely mu- sical. Moreover he never forgets his role in the poems; to the end he is addressing only the rustic and sturdy hearts of his own shire- folk. One must look in Keats and Shakespeare for confreres of the Housman ballad, that rarefied essence of a courageous if pessi. mistic spirit. In Shropshire the cherry trees are blooming along the woodlands now. And if Housman's threescore years and ten are counted, one cannot but believe that the wraith of his spirit, a lad barefoot and carefree, still wanders along in the sunlit wind of his native country. -D.S.G. Professor Walter Edits Fourth Noteworthy Collection Of Essays PUBLIC SPEECH - Poems by Archi- bald MacLeish. Farrar & Rine- hart. $1.00. By PROF. EARL L. GRIGGS (Of The English Dept.) Archibald MacLeish's slender vol - ume contains some twenty poems up- on various subjects. There is noth- ing very distinguished or impressive about this volume. Mr. MacLeish seems to have considerable poetic talent, but he prefers to write in aI condensed style which robs his poems of effectiveness. The experimenta- tion with assonance and alliteration hardly contributes the beauty for which he is striving. Then, too, he refuses us the convenience of punc- tuation. Occasionally he is deliber- ately obscure, notbecause of any profundity of thought but by a cur- ious lack of ordinary coherence. In the series of love poems with which he concludes the volume, for instance, he has nothing significant to say, savej to detail certain episodes to us; yet if it were not for the titles given for each of the poems, it would be im- possible in many cases to know whiat he means. The best poem in the volume is the' one which gives the book its title- Public Speech. The idea is arresting -we can claim as brothers only those who have suffered with us orf the battlefield, in the workshop, or in the revolt against capitalism. Such lines as these stick somehow in the memory: The solitary and unshared ex- perience Dies of itself like the violations of love Or lives on as the dead live eerily: The unshared and single man must cover his Loneliness as a girl her shame for the way of R[S[RVATIONS Any Stemer or Advertised Ei ZCOMPUETED FRCE * 14Ef EUROPE BERMUDA, CALIFORNIA, CHINA, ETC. BOOK NOW KUEBLER TRAVEL BUREAU 4N* oR Life is neither by one man nor by sufferin Brotherhood ! No word said can make you brotichers Brotherhood only the brave earn and by danger or Harm or by hain whurt and by no other.. fn two poems Mr. M Lct'Iish show: that he is 'versed in I rr,Cintury lit euature. '")over Beach-a Note to that Poem." obvli"'y s, u from Arnold's poem; an n I aeth the e- tractors echoes the Carlyleque no- tion of hero-worship. Occasionally the voltnne is marred' by unnecessary vulga iity. Mr. Mac- Leish can't keels away the physical, though to his credit it is that such passages are merely dragged in and are merely excrescences. To those of us whio turni back to Keats and Shelley, to Father Hop- kins and A. E. Hlousmnan (who died only last Friday Mr. MacLeish seems second irate. He is 's t.°o be rea'ching for something to sy There is un- doubted sincerity in his search for truth; but so far as Public Speech is concerned there is a lack of signifi- cance and only a half-realized tech- nical mastery. Psst! . . But This Isn't a Secret! You films get the finest per- sonal care at the Camera Shop in the Arcade. If you're new in the game, this is the place to help you climb to the top. If you're an exper- ienced amateur photogra- pher you will appreciate our service as the best. Bob Gach THE CAMERA SHOP IN THE ARCADE READ THE WANT ADS f ------ ---- i Mother'sDa extSunday- SEND A. GREETING CARD Ersides many styles of beautiful cards for one's own mother, the re are also many in our stock for the "Mother of my Sweetheart," "My Other Mother," "My Sister on Mother's Day," and so on. You will derive much pleasure in sending these messages on Mother's Day and think too of the joy you give to others. Buy inOw and mail early. RR I LL (HC tin' i.nd.for Everybody foi All Occasions ''iu Don't Take Chances With Your Snapshots We're anxious to help you get clearer, more natural pictures. Kodak Verichrome is the right film to use and our expert devel- oping and printing will insure best results. fiction, inevitably reaches the top of ESSAY ANNUAL, 1936, edited by the lists of best sellers. Mr. Morgan E. A. Walter. Scott, Foresman. $1. is just one of those whom the World B alt ot ForEs War left despairing and hopeless in By CARLTON F. WELLS the wreckage of their world. They (O' the English Department) have sought to rehabilitate their With the publication of Professor mindshan soutinaorehabldtaoen-E. A. Walter's Essay Annual, 1936 this minds and souls in a world of sensa- yearly series of the best American tion, illusion, delusion, antiquity, oryeayseri es of ag pure art. Theirs is a philosophy of essays very definitely comes of age. defeatism and solipsism which is per- In 1933, the first year, the collection meating the minds of the cult wor- anreceivedanthol considerable recognition as shippers and the ultra-artistic today. thology doing systematically for And their death-raptures are the the American magazine article and more insidious when they are offered essay what had long been done by as Byrnidiomeaticismesarke feO'Brien and others for the contempo- as Byroic romanticism (Sparken- rary American short story. The 1934 broke lived only 36 years). and 1935 volumes proved that the This reviewer confesses that, de - series was not to be just another pub- spite occasional passages of superb lisher's experiment and that its posi- prose, the novel leaves him completely tion had been substantially strength- untouched because Mr. Morgan has ened. The present book, in some not convinced him of the truth of his ways the most ambitious of the series, fundamental assumption; the spirit- is also the most solidly impressive. ual imprisonment of man. For one thing, fewer essays have' been included, a total of thirty, andI MAY BOOK FORECAST of these a half dozen or so are very BEST SHORT STORIES by Ed- short. Room has thereby been made ward O'Brien. Houghton Mifflin. for several unusually extended ar- $2.50. titles,