Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 221

CHICftoo 3UXLIAV OCTOBER. 21, 195! PART 11 Fine Stories by a 'Verbal Virtuoso Detachment Limits Critic's Enthusiasm I "THE SOUND OF SPANISH VOICES1 by Lonnie Coleman IDutton, $3. Reviewed by Chad Walsh Lonnie Coleman is a versatile writer and a fine craftsman. His NOVELETTE, with Other Stones," by A. L.

Buker. I So timer, .75 Reviewed by Henry Cavendish It would appear that England's A. L. Barker, pictured in a dust cover photo as an attractive lass with wavy hair, is busily engaged with methodic persistence in nailing down a place for herself as one of the finer masters of mood, and atmosphere since Katherine Mansfield. In "Novelette, her third book, she hews to the line of stjlistic brilliance that prompted an earlier Chicago Tkihxe unifwer to praise her "Apology for a Hero" for its "fine feeling for words," its "evocative precision' of phrasing." The same tributes and, indeed, considerably more may be paid to "Novelette," in reality a aeries of two novelets and nine short stories.

The "more" that rises in mind comes of a feeling Miss llarker is what, for lack of a better description, is termed a verbal virtuoso. This is in the sense that Heifet is a virtuoso of the violin, Rubinstein of the piano. EliwytH Than tit i Hi-am, uni ui first novel, Escape the Thunder," grew out of a short story which won the Atlantic Monthly contest for col-lege students back in 1941. It was a i and moving book about the Negroes in Ala- Series Gets to Williamsburg in the Thirties Lonnie Coleman Miss Barker adheres to the utmost simplicity in plotting, and string's words together for varyinc A. L.

Barker Alg ren Pens a Distorted, Partial Story of Chicago "CHICAGO: CITY ON THE MAKE," by Nclio Ahjren. Double day, $1.50. Reviewed by Alfred C. Amsj Algren's publisher says: "This will be the gift book in Chicago for years published in good time for the fall-Christmas market." Gift books characteristically are pleasant, meant to please the recipient and to be something one likes to have around. This one is thoroly unpleasant, unlikely to please any who are not masochists, and is definitely an ugly, highly scented object.

Another View of the Phases of Civilization effects. The resultant is lacelike patterns which portray, after much or little, the particular mood the author is seeking. She pictures the chief feminine character of the title piece, for instance, in this wise: In the world of Strauss waltzes she would have been upstairs turning down the beds." "Work!" a character explodes. People don't know work from whortleberries." Fear appears as the distinguishing mark of a scared rabbit bucketing down a hillside: "A long eared anatomy with a shallow brain pan and a knocking heart. Fear, if it were embodied, would run with ears laid back, popeyed, white tail betraying it from the rear." The author's preoccupation with expressionistic 'virtuosity appears most clearly and divested of all other intent in "Variations of a Theme of Rain." Here the effect is almost that of a take-off in words on musical variations; such, for instance, as Brahms' "Variations on a Theme by Haydn." The author takes rain as a theme, and writes four variations.

One shows a drooping romance coming full blown thru the rain, another depicting rain on an old coat as the revelatory evidence of a crime, a third with rain cloaking a once ardent lover's forgetfulness, and the last portraying rain as reviving the hopes of a drouth stricken farmer. In each variation, the same method creation of a mood thru placement of a character in a set fictional situation is followed, but with the achievement of separate effects. The author occasionally resorts to the addition of suspense as a complicating factor in her story telling. This is particularly the case with P. and Pringle." But for the most part her talent is concentrated on nunnl and atmosphere, and a dazzling talent it is.

Dama. His second novel, "Time Moving West 1947, was a restrained story of the navy during part of World War II. And now his third book, "The Sound of Spanish Voices," has just appeared. It is laid in a Central American country, never identified, but closely resembling Guatemala. A young writer, Roger Haynes, anxious for a new beginning, goes to Central America and stays at the pension of a certain Senora Fitzsimmons.

There are three other guests in residence; the story describes what happens in a brief period of time to these five people, and to the little Indian maid, Estella, with whom Roger falls in love. Estella is involved in the coming revolution and is building her life on hope of its success. Roger, the American intruder, introduces both love and complications into her life. As for Senora Fitzsimmons, she is so skilled in self-deception that only at the end does reality succeed in overtaking her. The most perceptively drawn character is Eliot Morgan, an aging writer whose success came too easily, who wrote too facilely," and now is forgotten in the States.

There is a poignancy about him which the reader will not soon forget. For this reviewer the greatest defect in "The Sound of Spanish Voices" is the almost excessive detachment of Mr. Coleman's manner. He writes in a beautifully limpid and transparent style, but keeps himself at arms' length from the struggles and turmoils of his characters. Beautiful as the book is from a literary viewpoint, there is a remoteness to it, a refusal to write with the heart as well as the head.

In this the author a native of Alabama is very different from southern writers like Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. The dispassionate attitude of the spectator has become more prominent in his writing since "Escape the Thunder" a book with greater passion and commitment than the latest one. Tho Mr. Coleman prefers to remain a precise and uninvolved observer of the human comedv. he The title implies that the book is about Chicago.

The magazine in which a large part of it has already appeared used a more accurate heading: "One Man's Chicago." Algren's Chicago is "the neon wilderness of which he has written before. It's the Chicago of the useless, helpless nobodies nobody knows." There beats Chicago's heart," he says. If you have a job and a home and any basis for self-respect you're a square, "stuffed with kapok." You just don't figure in this man's Chicago. A novelist is at liberty to report on observations made thru whatever filter he chooses or has to wear. But a man who purports to be characterizing a city, to be doing a reporter's job, is expected to try to see his subject steadily and to see it whole.

This Algren did not succeed in doing. He didn't try. A more distorted, partial, unenviable slant was never taken by a man pretending to cover the Chicago story. Definitely not a gift book. "THIS WAS TOMORROW," Eluwyth Thane, Wucll, Shmn Vearee, Reviewed by Mildred Walker This novel begins with the return of Jeff Day from his job a a newspaper man in Europe to th old Williamsburg home left him by his Aunt Sue's will.

The atmos-phere Is fragrant with memories of Aunt Sue and all the other Days way back before the war between the states. But there is an ominous sadness in this homecoming, for Jeff Day at 21 faces life with strict limitations due to a rheumatic heart and for this reason tells his cousin, Sylvia, whom he loves that he cannot marry her. This would be deeply moving except that magically the heart tie-comes stronger so that he can take physical and nervous strain and marry his love, and this reader had a feeling of falsity about the opening scene. The many people in the world with rlfeumatic hearts that won't be so magically restored make so facile a resolution unimpressive. Perhaps if the reader kept one finger under the front cover of the book and referred constantly to the family tables Riven there it would be easier to keep track of the many members of the Day and Campion families and their relationships, but they are easily confused in the course of reading the novel.

Ilermlone, who is a disagreeable bundle of inferiorities, jealousies and stands apart from the harmonious blend of well-bred charming women in the family. Mab, the youngest member, and Evadne, who is taken in completely by "the Cause" and her cousin Ilermlone, are distinct in the mind, and Sieve the dancer "with his humorous hands, his transfiguring grin," and his liquid grace of movement quickens any scene he enters end gives it a' musical comedy llght-iifss. Victor, born and brought up in Germany and the son of a German father, is arresting in that first meeting with his English mother since his childhood, but after that steps back into his role. The author assays with considerable success that difficult task of recreating the anxieties- and tensions and thinking of the very near past, the years between 1331 and 1938, and leaves her characters on the threshold of World War II. The succeeding novel we are told on the jacket is in preparation.

We are sure that it was just like that and that these charming people would meet those trials with just that gallantry and fortitude, but their problems seem too typical and appear to say nothing very significant or new about those years or about human beings. A great deal of the historical background Is given in undigested chunks in letters and there are long paragraphs of explanation that bog down the dramatic action of the story. Jeff marries his Sylvia and Steve captures Evadne and it all ends for the minute on happy note. "THE BIRTH OF CIVILIZATION IN THE NEAR EAST," by Henri Frankfort, Indiana University Press, ti-1 Reviewed by Laurence T. Heron If, as devotee or dabbler, you enjoyed Toynbce's "A Study of History" or Spengler's "Decline of the West," Henri Frankfort's little book is must and fascinating reading for you.

You still can salaam to Arnold Toynbee as does this reviewer, but you'll have to cock at least "one interrogatory eye upward. Dr. Frankfort assails both Toynbee and Oswald Spengler for ignorance and myth making. Inasmuch as he is an archaeologist who trained under both Flinders Petrie and James Henry Breasted and who has made a mark for himself in Egyptology and Assyriology, his criticism merits earnest evaluation. A former professor in the Oriental institute of the University of Chicago and now professor of pre-classical antiquity at the University of London, Dutch-born Dr.

Frankfort declares Toynbee and Spengler to have been thoroly familiar with only classical and western history. From this knowledge they devised theories such as Toynbee's sequence of phases and characteristics in a civilization. Into his iron maiden formula, Toynbee tortures other civilizations as Frankfort sees it In an arbitrary manner that clashes with the facts. For the reader who hasn't felt the allure of Egypt and Mesopotamiaand especially for the political scientist, the economist, the sociologist -the author would have done well to shorten his title to "The Birth of Civilization." Prof. Frankfort holds that Mesopotamia and Egypt produced self -starting and self-propelled specimens of civilization.

Even if you don't like cuneiforms and crocodiles you're concerned. Hayford Contributes Harrison Hayford, of the Northwestern university English department, contributed the article on American literature to the 1931 Britannica Book of the Year, annual supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. shows an understanding of those who throw themselves into life. Roger, the young writer, Is an overserious person and the sum of philosofy of life as he leaves the country on the day of the rev- olution is closely akin to that of the existentialist, Albert Camus that all men have a weight of responsibility to one another and ust live in awareness of it. The cartoon panel reproduced below is from The New Yorker S5th Anniversary Album," a collection of the best cartoons from more than 20,000 published in the New Yorker magazine since its first issue in 1925.

The book is published by Harper at 5. -i S. 6- FT-V! 'J.