Judge, 1920-10-09 · page 12 of 32
Judge — October 9, 1920 — page 12: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis: Judge Magazine Book Review Page This is a literary review page from Judge magazine, not primarily political satire. It contains three humorous book reviews: 1. **"A Tankard of Ale"**: The reviewer (Benjamin De Casseres) adopts a drunk persona, using Shakespearean drinking-song references and mock-serious fraternal language ("Grand Cellar-Keeper," "Eternal Order of Lid-Busters") to humorously praise this fifteenth-century drinking-song anthology. The joke is the reviewer's exaggerated intoxication and theatrical reverence for alcohol. 2. **"The Book of Susan"**: Satirizes a novel about a slum girl who becomes a cultured intellectual, goes to Greenwich Village, discovers Nietzsche and Shaw, then becomes a WWI Red Cross nurse. The satire targets literary clichés—the predictable "enlightened heroine" plot and the overuse of war-nurse storylines in contemporary fiction. 3. **"The Skin Game"**: Praises Galsworthy's play for including stage-set diagrams, criticizing the tedious practice of lengthy written stage descriptions in published plays. The page satirizes literary trends and publishing conventions rather than politics.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
BETWEEN COVERS Drones by Heavens Paton When the Dry-ad By Benjamin Gather "Round Ye Toss pots! 'ON’T you wish you were a book reviewer when I tell you that I received free from Robert M. Me- Bride “A Tankard of Ale”’?—being an anthology of drinking-songs from the fifteenth century to the present day,compiled by Theodore Maynard (Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!) This book is for all Good Fellows, Knights of the Bumper, the Jolly Bacchanals, the Nut-Brown Noodles and Ye Poet of the Pot. This book was bottled in the cellars of Falstaff, corked by Dick Swiveller, drunk from cover to cover by myself in the presence of the Eternal Order of Lid-Busters, of which I am Grand Cellar-Keeper. It is 190 water-proof. “Come all ye jolly Bacchanals That love to tope good wine. Let's offer up a hogshead Unto our Master's shrine; Then let us drink and never shrink, I'll tell you the reason why: sin to leave a house ve drained the cellar dry!” ! To limbo with the long faces! Down with the mollycoddles! Life was made for ecstasy! Out upon skin-tight mugs! “Make a new world, ye powers divine Stocked with nothing else but wine! Buy, beg or steal this book (nope, you can’t borrow mine!) Pawn your false teeth or your wife’s wedding ring, break open baby’s bank—but get it! “Up and at ‘em, boys, with this book! With a row-ti-dow-ti-oodly-ow, We'll laugh at original sin!” “Up with the sale of it—down with a pail of it— Glorious, glorious beer!” Susie and Old Doc Nietzsche ITTLE Susan was “born in a New Haven slum.” Now what are a slum, and what are a slum doing in New Haven? I have never connected New Haven with slums, ghettos or Bar- Meets the Jag-uar De Casseres bary Coasts; but we New Yorkers are so provincial that we cannot believe that anything interesting exists on the other side of the Brooklyn Loop. Anyhow, Susan (the heroine in “The Book of Susan,” by Lee Wilson Dodd; E. P. Dutton & Co.) got out of the Nutmeg Slum and shot right up into a Precocious Young Thing. the Occult in chapter so-and-so, and then whiz! lands in Greenwich Village, which is to the Paris Latin Quarter what lobster 4 la Newburg is to scrapple 4 la Camden. Boom! She goes into Nietzsche. Bernard Shaw and Walt Whitman. Her purpose was “to clarify for the semi-cultured the more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our enlightened and humane civilization.” But before Susie could get started Bill the Kaiser poked his snout over the Belgian border, and Susie’s enlightened and humane civilization was taken down sick, where it still lies at the point of death Susie gets into the war—do you know a real heroine that hasn't? But I quit Susie at that point. I’m sick of the Red Cross nurse stuff in fiction Mr. Dodd can write English— ful nowadays. 1 that’s saying a mouth- A Bright Little Idea HY didn’t somebody think of it before? In the second scene of the second act of John Gals worthy’s “The Skin Game” (Plays: Fourth Series; Charles Scribner's Sons), there isa page drawing outlining the way the stage is to be set for the scene. But it is the only one in the book, made up of three plays. Why didn’t Mr, Galsworthy do this in every scene, thus reducing the friction on the reader's brain of following those interminable italic introductions to printed pl. which describe minutely all the furniture. doors and fainting spots for the Duchess or the shop-girl? Look at Bernard Shaw, for instance. He sometimes runs on for three pages with the description of the s By the time you plunge into the dialogue, you are tired. Carrying the idea still further, why not paint a play giving small pictures of motion of the actors and actresses in the drama, doing away with print altogether, or at the most running “cut-ins” under the cuts. Then by turning the pages rapidly you have a sort of moving-picture book, and thus in ten minutes you have not only read the play but seen it acted. escaping war-tax, speculators and latecomers. Oh, I forgot to say that I am supposed to be reviewing this book. Well, the plays are all good. Galsworthy is not an Ibsen, but he leads Gus Thomas by a whole track. comicbooks.com