Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 114

PART 4 PAGE 8 fi? 3 BOOKS BOOKMAN'S HOLIDAY BOOKS ALIVE (D BY VINCENT 5TARRETT (TZ) BY DELOS AVERY Pioneer Tale Richly Told, But Uneven "BEULAH LAND," by H. L. Davis. Morrow, $3. Reviewed by Victor P.

Hass Few contemporary American novelists can write of our pioneer past i' iv with quite the rK richness and power that Harold L. Davis It brings to his VTjl stories. Yet Mr. d' f7 Davis can be an exasperating writer- too--If "Beulah Land" were as eood as its parts it would be a novel to match i Pu 1 i H. L.

Davis Suggestion to Dictionary Makers WE THINK it would be nice if the G. C. Merriam company would throw a little party some day so that two groups of its employes, now seemingly estranged, might get together and compare notes. We mean the editors of Webster's Biographical Dictionary and the editors of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. Here's why: the paragraf about Mr.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley in W. B. D. describes him as the originator of a poem form to which the name clerihew (small and no quotation marks) has been given by common consent of English language bards, thus adding a new and useful common noun to the treasury of literature. So the word clerihew ought to be in the New Collegiatebut it isn't.

The clerihew, described as "pseudo biografical" is a quatrain with the aabb rhyme scheme and with lines of uneven length A famous example, by Bentley himself, is Sir Christopher Wren Said, "I am going to dine with some men. If anybody calls Say I am designing St. Paul's." Taking this as a model, our man Severac composed a clerihew in honor of the clerihew's creator i Edmund Clerihew Bentley By trying intently Was able to place His middle name in lower case. There must be dozens of other men in history whose names have been treated that way, but off hand we recall only two both of whom were executed for their crimes. One was Quisling, whose name with a small now means traitor; the other was William Burke, who had a special technique for murder, so that the verb to burke now means to murder by suffocation, with an added figurative meaning, "to dispose of quietly, as by suppressing or shelving." Any of you folks remember some others? Postscript to a Sonnet Writing on the letterhead of the Chicago center of.

the Poetry Society of London, Ruth Crary Clough, distinguished prosodist and president of the local branch, informs us that she intends to use in a forthcoming textbook a sonnet of ours in which (to show that this is a free country) we administered a kick in the sestet to one of the Sacred Laws of the Italian or Petrarchan code. "I shall designate your poem," she says, "as an 'Avernian' or 'hellish sonnet." We don't give a rap. We paid taxes, didn't we, to help meet the cost of pounding the Avernus out of the Mussolini regime. Margaret Dierks sends us a few rhymes concerning an accident suffered by Clement Wood, poet and dictionary maker, who on different pages of his Poets' Handbook credits (a) Whittier and (b) Oliver Wendell Holmes with writing "The Last Leaf." Consider the plight of Mr. WOOD, It's understandable how he could Become confused about a LEAF.

But I suspect he'll come to grief With his impartiality Which shall it be? Which shall it be? I do -not mean to be unkind, But please, dear sir, make up your mind. Margaret Dierks. The Funk Wagnalls Company plans to publish in July (tho hedging on the date by calling it a book to be called "After (Business) Hours," by a group of authors, including Henry J. Kaiser, Mrs. Raymond Clapper, Walter Lowen, Prof.

Dale Houghton, Joseph Eccelsine, Dr. Leo Handel, Walter Weir and "more than 130 others You may wish to start saving pennies for it when you learn that one of the subjects treated is to be "What to feed your idea factory." We certainly hope our "factory" will find the diet appetizing. Otherwise we'll fix up a menu of our own. The phone just rang. Man down the hall speaking-this column answering: What's a cocotte? a trollop, sort of.

Not a coquette, then? No-rougher thanthat Just a minute-I'll give you what the French die says, verbatim "Cocotte, woman of easy virtue; inflammation of the eyes; kind of skillet" SOMETIMES, in sentimental mood, I am tempted to believe that the most charming book ever written is E. V. Lucas's "Over Bemerton's" (1903) It is well known, of course, to all good bookmen as a rambling, old-fashioned love story centering in and around a second-hand-book shop; and it is literally packed with the love and lore of old books. An ultra-modern critic would not be found dead with the volume on his shelves, I suppose; but I can think of no story that more alluringly, or more contagiously, or more humorously expounds the happiness to be found in reading. I am surprised that I have not mentioned it before.

The novel, if it is a novel, is simply a vehicle for Lucas's desultory gossip about his favorite books. Falconer (who is certainly the author himself) is troubled with insomnia, it will be recalled, and his sweetheart finds him a set of rooms "over Bemerton's," so that he may always have something to read. It is an ideal arrangement for everybody concerned; and thereafter there is more good talk of books ana1 authors than you are likely to find outside the pages of a well-annotated catalogue. One of my favorite chapters occurs when the upstairs tenant is asked to take over the shop for a spell, while Mr. Bemerton is in the country valuing a library and his assistant is attending a sick mother.

Miss Wagstaff, the assistant, gives Falconer his instructions as follows: "The prices are marked just inside. They are all net, but if any one bought several books you might knock something off. Don't ever knock anything off a cheap book." "Be very careful with people who look at the illustrations. Sometimes they pinch the plates." "Whatever you do, don't buy any books." "Keep an eye on the outside shelves." "Don't let any one stand too long reading." "Watch them to see that they don't rub out our price and put in another themselves." And poor Falconer takes over his duties in a kind of stupor; he had not been prepared for such revelations of perfidy. He had thought of a secondhand-book shop as being off the main stream of human frailty and temptation; and behold it was the resort of the most abandoned wretches! But Miss Wagstaff was a cynical old spinster, and the story relates other and happier aspects of the old-books market.

If you don't happen to know it, I think you will like "Over Bemerton's." On the subject of missing manuscripts, discussed briefly in this column not long ago (May 1), the Rev. J. C. Lehane, director of De Paul University's fine Irish Library, writes: "it may interest you to know that Herbert Gorman, in his life of Jame Joyce, mentions that a five-act play by Joyce, called 'A Brilliant Career, has been either lost or destroyed. The author had sent it to William Archer, translator of Ibsen, but Gorman does'not say whether Archer returned it, although the context of the footnote implies that he did.

"Also, Joyce had filled two copybooks with poems based on French poetic patterns, which he gave to his friend George Clancy. These too have disappeared. The information may be found on pages 68-9 of Gorman's biography. "Earlier (p. 36), Gorman states that Joyce, in 1891, when he was nine, wrote a pamphlet attacking Tim Healy, Parnell's successor as leader of the Irish party.

Joyce's father had this youthful outburst published in pamphlet form, but no copy of the item seems now to be extant. The possibility exists that all these literary efforts by Joyce may still be lying forgotten somewhere in Dublin, and may still -he found. They would be an exciting discovery." Recently, as told elsewhere (I believe) by Miss Butcher, your commentator was honored by a luncheon de grand luxe sponsored by the Friends of the Chicago Public Library, the Society of Midland Authors, and the Caxton Club. There he sat, in a sort of happy daze, while a dozen of his friends (only his friends were asked to speak) hurled compliments and memories at his ageing head; and if you think that is not a difficult situation, just try it some time. However, he took it very well and left the hotel unassisted.

If I were to be critical of this event, I would say that the effect of the several talks was rather like that of being shown thru a gallery of pictures in each of which, by some curious convention, the artist had introduced the same figure in much the same attitude-I borrow the whole analogy from C. K. Chesterton' observations on George Moore. Thus there were such pictures, let us say, as "The Grard Canal with a Distant View of Mr. Starrett," "Effect of Mr.

Starrett seen thru a Scotch Mist," "Mr. Starrett by Firelight," "Ruins of Mr. Starrett by Moonlight," and so on. But it was a pleasing occasion withal, and I am glad I was able to attend. One is nWer quite certain what one's friends remember about one.

I have an uneasy feeling that mine were too lenient, too extravagantly kind. In the words of the Fair Cuban (in Stevenson's "Dynamiter" stories), "I am not what I seem!" Not always, anyway. Prize winner of 1936, "Honey in the Horn." But it is not. There are arid' stretches in this new novel that struck me as having been jotted down on the back of an old envelope and then transcribed verba'tim. Still, there remain those portions where Mr.

Davis has brought the full force of his unquestioned talent to bear and these gleam like burnished copper. His account of frontier hoedown, for example, is the best thing of its kind that I ever have read while his description of the wild life to be observed along the banks of the Mississippi river from Cairo to Natchez and back held me spellbound. That was in the early 1850s when ducks, turkeys, geese, swins and other wild creatures still existed in vast numbers. Nor, I think, is Mr. Davis to be matched in his passages on a frontier race meeting with a faro game as taut as a thorobred stallion's nerves.

These are the highlights of his novel, and they are splendid. The remainder of it, while frequently above par, is too often spoiled by sketchy continuity that is something less than adequate. "Beulah Land" is the story of a handful of people in that vast stream of people who marched west to conquer the tremendous territory beyond the Mississippi. The central characters are Ruhama Warne, half-Indian daughter of a man who inevitably loved the wrong woman at the wrong time, and Askwani, a white boy who was raised an Indian. With Ruhama's father, Ewen, they set out for what is now Oklahoma after Ewen has killed a man in North Carolina.

They flatboat down to Natchez where Ruhama spends a year in the home of a courtly old maker of fixed gambling devices while Ewen begets a child by his Indian wife (who dies shortly after) makes his stake and sets out again for Indian Territory. Somewhere in Illinois Ewen is slain and Ruhama, Askwani a ad the baby continue the journey westward. After incredible hardships sometimes implied rather than told they reach their goal only to be uprooted again during the Civil war. Eventually, and almost as an afterthought so lightly is it pencilled in, Mr. Davis takes them to Oregon where they live out their lives.

"Beulah Land," as I have suggested, is a tantalizing novel. Much is left unsaid that you wish had been said and much said that might have been skipped. Yet to all of it Mr. Davis brings humor and sometimes sardonic wit, vivid imagery and effortless grace. That saves it.

THE MURDER CHART 1 BY DREXEL DRAKE PAYOFF Intense altho exasperating tedious X. ray of alowly mounting mental travail in struggle against fear and devastating truth. Thoroly satisfying performance of undemonstrative but efficient detecUve technique In the accepted French tradition- ENTRY "THE INNOCENT," by Evelyn Piper. Simon 6 Schuster, $2.50.1 "POLICEMAN'S NIGHTMARE," by Marten Cumberland. Don-bleiay, $2.25.

Reviewers and persons are constantly urging potential readers to "beg, borrow, or steal" some book or other that has taken their fancy. The phrase is a famous cliche, but except for the borrowing, which is overdone, I don't believe the advice is followed as often as it is given. Shouldn't the locution read "buy, beg, borrow or steal," with special emphasis on the first word? A lot of people do buy books, I realize, but there could be more. There is a French phrase to the effect that "it is always the same people who get killed." Similarly, I think it is always the same people who buy books. It is part of this department's job to sell books to those w'ao do not habitually buy them.

You will be surprised how easily you fall, Lto the habit. PERFORMANCE Young Marjorie Carter thot It too good to be true that she had become the wife, hnwbeit as second choice, of a veritable Adonis, but when some fragments of the veil that obscured his first marriage fell way. she proceeded to tear oft the veil completely, with terrifying consequences. When head of Parisian printing firm disappeared, circumstances suggested an intentional walkout on an unhappy marriage, but quickly ensuing deaths of a spinster private secretary and a meddlesome chauffeur convinced Commissaire Saturnln pax that he had a ruthless find' "h'ch did with IntulUva kill and patient perseverance..