Judge — March 1, 1930 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUDGING™ BOOKS of our young writers, mark: headman of the classico-culture school this side of Paris. There is no intent to sling a tar brush when we insist this gentle little book seems to be blood relative with the stories in his “Bridge of San Luis Rey” and that it were better had it been snug- gled in the great warm bosom of that work, safe from the cold winds of a world which looks for deathlessness in everything starred authors do. But as it stands, this tragedy of a painted lady of ancient Greece, her sister put in a Big Way by a playboy and an TA ‘ Z ending like an old-time Biograph, ax bg seems no advance on Wilder's carlier “Ss, Pete, what’ ‘ i ne?” work, Say, Pete, what's the chance of us getting a night off to attend a seance? The book lacks that magic frame- work which Wilder, the showman, throws about whatever he does: the mystic masonry of the “Cabala” (his best book) and that collapsible struc- ture at San Luis Rey. But it has Wilder's great ppathy for human despair; his sensing of the unbridge- able chasm between humans and their feeble attempts to throw their cries of love across it. It has his calm, wis- dom and stoical weeping. In one way Wilder would seem to be Marcus Aurelius with just a dash of* Sara Teasdale. But however we slice him, we're just wild about Wilder. Incidentally your favorite critic has been throwing himself about with rav- ings against the young post-war gloom thickeners, and now you find him praising young melancholia. How come? This: it is Wilder's genius for writing pain and sentiment as the gods feel it that separates him from just young frustration. Rapio Soprano-Hater—No, leave her on—she sounds as though she’s strangling! Should you stumble on a frantic hundred-and-fifty pounder at Madi- son and Forty-eighth Street booing unheeding passersby; or if later in the day you should come on him pounding on bars, rudely accosting lady shoppers, insulting traffic cops and generally making himself painful around town, that would be us ex- pressing ourself against him who hasn't read Dashiell Hammett. That twenty-minute hard-boiled boy has swept all the dilettante and drawing- room detecatiffs with their tiddledy- wink, card trick and cross-word puz- zle mysteries out of Crime Hall and dragged in a free-for-all instead. Residents have complained so of speakeasy parties ringing the He writes with a lead-pipe and wrong bell, the wooden-figure idea has been revived. poisoned arrows as coups de grace. 20 comicbooks.com