U PAGE EIGHT THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY, JAN. 24, 1931 IN THE WORLD OF BOOKS SCHOLL Elizabethan Quali Give Poignancy T~ \W,+.,, ties HO VwriIin9 THE ROSE JAR, a collection of poems by John William Schol, as- sociate professor of German in the University. Ann Arior, i936. By MARY A. GIES "I do not seek for something new, aware How earth and sky and ocean too despair Of novelty." Here are the ancient, tranquil streams of constant love, regret at the decay of beauty, and platonic worship of an ethereal ideal. No "mystic griefs, no monstrous unsung woes" pour their passionate torren t through this verse; here is peace ani serenity, a country wedding, and a father laying his Bible deep under the pillow of his new-born child to "keep hell's bow unstrung." These are the scenes the poet knows, the scenes for him imbued with the peace of the old front parlor which was reserved for the minister of a Sunday, or the calls of daughter's "young man;" and there's the mischief of ..another game remembered still, That filled the recesses - some- times shocked the town." The collection takes its name from the group of occasional lyrics - the songs of the lute player admonished by the poet to,- "Sing me of love! Let devil and beast repose, You with the lute there." He sings of meadow flowers, of eglantine, the lover's vine, sometimes he is startled in the noonday stillness by the great god Pan, or he medi- tates on Ronsard's epigram, "Time stays. We pass." In his ronantic tributes to "Giulia," the poet pauses once to recollect with a twinkle, how his first amour dissolved in the acid vision of the prospective mother-in- law. He has seen the plump berry pricked by the wasp, and the squirrel "nibbling maple seeds or cutting branches." But even more than the occasional songs, "The Old House" is etched with the clarity of things seen, and colored with the light and shade of things really felt. The poet knew such old crumbling farmhouses, or he could not describe uncurtained win- dows that blink and stare; he knew some such family with a son off to war, and a daughter God knows where,- and saw the last act with the ribald auctioneer jollying the crowd into putting up thirty cents for, the swinging chair in old-gold plush. We never lose the sense that we have somehow stepped back out of the experiments of the twentieth century in meter and form, and have come upon a belated Elizabethan. Here are sonnets in a Platonic mood of distant adoration, and not so dif- ferent in conceit or sentiment from those of the Renaissance sonnet cycles. "And then I'll seek some goldsmith in their streets- Some flenvenuto, or some Ren skilled- And have a casket made. When it is filled With all these sonnets writ on vellum sheets, And all these pictures with their, fine conceits, I'll write in bold black-letter, eagle-quilled: "Ignotus ad Ignotan." ** Love has willed, And Love's executor his wil im- pletes: Professor Scholl's verse has a qual- ity of ease and facility that delights the ear, and a direct and happy imag- ery that spreads out visionary rain- bows. It is primarily this lack of self- consciousness that sets it apart from the verse of our day,- that reminds us of an Elizabethan whose descrip- tion of his own verse is more fitting for. Mr. Scholl's than anything we could say,- "The chaste and pure devotion of my youth, . Or glorie of my Aprill-singing yeeres, Unfaned love, in naked simple truth." BARRETT PORTRAIT HERE The oil-portrait of the late Dr. A. M. Barrett, former director of theI State Psycopathic Hospital here, pre- sented to the University this fall, isI now on exhibition in Alumni Mem- orial Hall. The picture was executed Parker Piquant As Always In PoemsOf Humorous Frustration NOT S DEEP AS A WELL, a collec- and less stereotyped, until in the lat- tion of poems by Dorothy Parker, ter part of the book, her "character- The Viking Press, New York. $2.50. istic epigrammic colloquialism, witty summary or vehemently brilliant An insight into human nature, a ending" to quote Mr. Benet again, tender heart and a pungent and sa--'come forth and assert themselves. t ea Judging from the early selections in tirical wit-all these combine to Enough Rope, it seems evident thatj make Miss Parker's style one of the I the work of A. E. Houseman, along1 most mimicked and popular in mod- with some of the earlier poems ofI ern verse. This volume, containing Edna St. Vincent Milldy, had a large all of her poems except a few which degree of influence on Miss Parker. she did not wish to retain among her With a combination of all her collected verse shows all of these poems in one offering,- one cannot characteristics, help noticing Miss Parker's fondness Beginning with selections from for the lovelorn, jilted lady and the Enough Rope, her first bock of poems, naughtyende lilting samnathyoqu published in 1927, Miss Parker con- these two are among the charac- tinueswconclud ethGus lection teristic touches which make this vol- Death and Taxes and several poems ume thoroughly delightful for any never before printed in book form. Dorothy Parker addict. Miss Parker's style is difficult to an- Readers will be glad to learn that alyze.ssn maysot callsid cynical such much-q u o t e d favorites as for"Words of Comfort to be Scratched fon aseetandtenders ndifon a Mirror," "Ninon De Lenclos on1 one uses the term "humorous," some- Her Last Birthday," "Chant For Dark one is liable to cite an example of Hours," "The Flaw In Paganism," a poem with an underlying strain of "Sweet Violets" and the like have sadness. With many such opposites been included. And of course the appearing throughout the entire vol- much-quoted "News Item," namely ume, the only way to sum up the 202 "Men seldom make passes pages is to say that it is a typical At girls who wear glasses" Dorothy Parker mixture and in typ- as well as "Fighting Words" with'its Dorothy Parker ixtyre.andn famed couplet against literary crit- ical Dorothy Parker style. icism, As William Rose Benet so adroit- "But say my verses do not scan ly puts it in The Saturday Review And I get me another man." of Literature, "Tenderness, bravado are among the more prominent poems and the arrogantly colloquial are in- in the volume. imitably made use of as well as Dor- Anyone with any degree of fond- othy Parker's own version of the ness for Parker verse will welcome Voice of Experience." this volume as a combination of typ- As one peruses the book, Miss Par- ical unpredictable poems in Miss ker's presentation becomes clearer Parker's own inimitable manner. Can Art Be AWeapon And Still Live Up To Aesthetic Pedigree WILDE New Biography Fails Clear Up Muddle Of His Life To I ASPECTS OF WILDE, by Vincent O'Sullivan; (Holt). If ever we should approach the unbearable majesty of George Ber- nard Shaw, we shall chide him for what he has said of Vincent O'Sul- livan's latest book, called "Aspects of Wilde." He called it the first "sane and credible description" of Wilde, and said it was necessary to clean up the "superfluous mud" that has been poured over that exquisite poet. This seems to us pish-tush of the first grade. In the first place, we have read a dozen better descrip- tions of Oscar Wilde, some of them written years ago. This goes for the material included in Mr. O'Sullivan's book as well as for the bad articula- tion of the book itself. In the second place, it does not MEERSCH French-Fleming Relates Story Of Life In War Zone INVASION, by Maxence van der Meersch. Viking Press, New York. 706 pages. By Harriet Madison. By HARRIET MADISON Van de ,Meersch is French, but ob- viously he has Flemish blood in him. He was born in the north of France, hard by the Belgian border, and "In- vasion" is set there, in the midst of clear up the mud. As a matter of about the premises in order to catch fact it only muddles up a few clear a glimpse of Longfellow. Which is a places. Mr. O'Sullivan seems an- bay and not a black horse. xious to impress his readers with his Out of all this welter of remarkably broad acquaintance among literary arranged anecdote no clear picture of men of the Wilde and post-Wilde anyone emerges. Wilde remains period. This is his right but it need Wilde-a brittle and brilliant talent not involve retelling familiar inci- shattering under the pressure of pub- dents badly. And there are indica- lie opinion. It does no good to insist tions that Mr. O'Sullivan's memory is that public opinion was wrong; ob- either faulty or his research spotty. As one example, he has Queen Vic- viously Wilde could not help his sex-' toria insulting Longfellow by declar- ual proclivities. It was a matter for ing somewhat superciliously to the sympathy. But when has the public poet that the servants in the palace been sympathetic to a victim of its all read him. prejudices? Perhaps we are letting our memory do an O'Sullivan with us-but some- STATIONERY where we read, quite a while ago,yd s 0S E that what Victoria actually did was, 100 SHEETS THIRD HOPWOOD WINNER TO BE PUBLISHED "Straw In The Wind," Ruth Dob- son's $1,500 prize-winning novel in last year's major Hopwood contest, will be published Tuesday. This is the third Hopwood novel to be published, previous ones being Mildred Walker's "Fireweed" and Hu- bert Skidmores "I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes," which appeared last spring. "Straw In The Wind," which deals with the story of a family in rural Indiana of the picturesque Amish sect, will be reveiwed in next Sunday's Daily by Prcf. Karl Litzenberg TYPEWRITING MIMEOGRAPHING Proimptly and neatly done by experi- enced opera~tors 'st mode~rate oarices, 0. D. MORRI LL 314 South State Street to express surprise and pleasure, af-I ter the poet had left, to find that the 1 palace attaches and such like had! hidden themselves in various nooks 100 ENVELOPES .. T Printed with your name and address THE CRAFT PRESS 305 Maynard Street Phone 8805 I i .. =f I JUST RECEIVED - The AVERY HOPWOO PRIZE BOOK 1936 "STRAW IN TIHE WIND" By RUTH LININGER DOBSON $2900 * WAH R'S BOOKSTORES 316 South State Street Main Street Opp. Court House 1, I p- . . t)- i I t ' s a T o u g -h t' hNut: :..:":" To Crack.. The problem of deciding where to take your negatives for the best results. About once a year the old subject of Is Art a Weapon and if not, why not, comes up and several serious literary critics get pretty much dis- turbed about the whole thing.' Edmund Wilson, in the current is- sue of the New Republic is one of the most disturbed, and taking the viewpoint so long and valiantly de- fended by Mr. Krutch, he says, ".When you relax the esthetic and ethical standards you abandon the discipline itself of your craft." And communism, apparently, with its at- tendant evils of ignorance and Sta- lin censorship is the primary cause today for the degeneration. Communism, according to Mr. Wil- son, is not the originator of the marked political bias which he says has long been manifest in Russian literature, but is merely serving to irritate an oldhcancer dating from the days of the Tsars, the stifling of freedom of thought. Perhaps Mr. Wilson is looking at he situation a bit too dogmatically and attributing to American left- wing writers a closer alliance with Russia and Russian principles than actually exists. The development of what Mr. Wilson terms a "war psy- chology" he believesrhampers the ef- forts of the radical section of our school of literary criticism. An art which will spring tooth and nail into ihe political arena ceases to be art, he avers. But there are two sides to every question, especially among profes- sional critics, and Malcolm Cowley, in an article which follows close upon the heels of Mr. Wilson's plaint, picks out several points for conten- tion. Especially does he object to Mr. Wilson's use of the term "Stalin- ist" in describing the literary and critical left; pointing out that it is ambiguous in the broad sense of any- one willing to cooperate with the Third International and manifestly unfair in the narow sense of a blind follower and worshipper of Stalin. a country he has known since baby- The word "Stalinist" seems to sug- hood. This is not the reason the gest, says Mr. Cowley, that anyone setting is so sharply drawn in the professing sympathy with the Com- reader's mind-but it must have munist movement must support un- helped the writer. reservedly every policy of the gcv- ernment of Moscow and be ready to The book is a study of the French defend it on all occasions. people under the heel of the German Mr. Cowley also seems justified in invader. It is curiously fair; not attacking another phase of the Wil- much French writing about the war son essay-the fact that Wilson pro- has this quality so highly developed. tests against the invasion of Rus- The Germans are the enemy, to most sian politics into the American lit- of the people in the book, but they erary scene in an article filled with are painted with the same care and the same Russian politics, and filled the same honesty as the French, and in a manner which seems certain to are never made into mad dogs run- provoke more trouble than it will ainvrma.do r settle-a quality which Mr. Cowley The action is chiefly centered up- desci'ibes as "factionalism to end Teato scifycnee p factionalism," and comparestrather on a group of small villages, some adroitly with "another Wilson's war of them hardly more than farms, and to end war." upon a few cities small enough for So the debate goes on. The em- the author to present them entire. battled left wing continues in its tra- There are (probably) too many char- ditional spirit of combat, and when acters, or at any rate he probably it tires of the old battle-fields it finds has drawn some of the minor char- a new setting on the question of acters too carefully; the first third choice of weapons. Trotzkyite and of the book is made slightly obscure Stalinist, Wilsonian and Cowleyite- by this. But on the other hand it encore plus de tonnerre! Is Art A is something to know so many people Weapon? We still aren't sure. so well. The sly and evil Lacombe, -J.G. the good Abbe, the put-upon Judith, -Albrecht the German who slipped WHO WILL PLAY SCARLETT? so easily into French farm life, these The most sensational casting cam- and dozens more are tangible, under- paign ever waged for a motion pic- standable humans. ture-thus Selznick International de- The psychological and ethical im- scribes the advance excitement over plications to be drawn from a study the filming of Margaret Mitchell's of people suddenly forced to accom- novel, "Gone with the Wind." modate themselves to a foreign mas- Over 75,000 letters have been re- ter are so many as to be almost stag- ceived by the Selznick Studio from gering. It is possible that M. Van all parts of the country, suggesting der Meersch has made a few of them actors for the roles of Scarlett O'- too caplicit, although that is a mat- Hara, Rhett Butler, and other char- ter of taste. As a novel there is no acters in the story. The following questioning "Invasion's" power and are some of the names proposed: most of those who read all its 706 Miriam Hopkins, Margaret Sullivan, pages will come out of them with a Tallulah Bankhead, Jean Harlow, new idea of France-perhaps of Ger- Janet Gaynor, Bette Davis, Ginger many as well. Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Wendy The idea would have come more Barrie, Norma Shearer, Ann Sothern, easily out of a more restricted can- Constance Bennett, Claudette Col- vas, it seems to us. 'ert, Ronald Colman, Clark Gable, William Powel, Fredric March, Alan Marshall, Edward Arnold, Melvyn A bookseller operatxvgi both Douglas, Leslie Howard, SpencerCg and Knoxville, Tenn., Tracy, Warner Baxter, Gary Cooper. !recently wired the Atlanta office of The Macmillan Company : Not only are fans, critics, and radio Twenty-fiveChattanooga 75 Knox- ville must be today otherwise wire erences; the stars themselves aewr openly seeking the coveted roles, says The order was promptly filled for Selznick, but no casting has yet been the Macmillan sales force long since done. found it unnecessary to mention Sidney Howard is preparing the Gone With The Wind by name- screen version of the novel and 1,120,000 copies of Margaret Mitch- George Cukor will direct it. el's novel have been printed to date. Like all problems it has an answer. want genuine satisfaction to- Take those shots, if you Francisco & Boyce Since 1905 723 North University 108 East Liberty HEADQUARTERS FOR "YEOMAN OF THE GUARD" PHOTOGRAPHS hi mw Attention Fine Home Owners! Convioisseurs! AUCTION AEOUF TUESDAY, January 26th at 2:0 in the Afternoon and 8:900 in the Eening In a drastic money-raising event, Mr. V. Dedeian of New York and Chicago offers his $100,000 collection of high-grade Oriental Rugs at public Auction to the highest bidder. This is undoubt- edly one of the largest and finest collections ever shown in Ann Arbor, consisting of -antique, semi-antique and modern rugs and carpets, in all sizes, colors, types. Plan to be here- in the New Year's Eve apparently was too much for either the Times or the Herald-Tribune. Those of you who were able to read the newspapers on New Year's Day may have noticed what we did, but since numerous peo- ple habitually do not feel up to such activity on January 1, perhaps we had better tell you what we saw. Both the Times and the Herald-Trib- une ran identical Associated Press photos, showing a scene from the Spanish Civil War. Eight soldiers of one side were closing in on one rep- resentative of the other side. The lone warrior was advertised, in the caption under both pictures, as being the last defender of a village in northern Spain. So far so good. The puzzle arises when the captions are examined more closely. According to the Herald-Tribune, the eight are loyalist troops "closing in on last rebel." According to the Times, the "last defender" is a loyalist, "gradu- ally being surrounded by the rebels." afternoon or evening. JAMES W. FINNELL, Auctioneer. ON EXHIBITION MONDAY! Customers are invited to come in to- morrow and make personal selections to be put up for auction to the highest bidder. THIRD FLOOR - PHONE .4161 p Ak .A I HIGHEST PRICES PAID in CASH or TRADE for USED TEXTBOO KS I I I® -L I