Judge — January 31, 1931 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

cia: NMBA SDL “BOOKS ind their cross-purposes, till it bends to the floor, groaning with its good- however, there are ucters in the whole Never do they inspire sym- pathy, yet the reader follows. their problems with terest. Which 1 a criticism of the novel, or it may have been Herr Feuchtwanger’s intention. We think the latter the case, for he does want to inspire sympathy for the crusading intellectual spirit of the piece. sorbing in- In sum, it is a difficult novel to warm up to. It is not great, but it is tremendously important. One can re- spect it but not love it. Naturally, the Literary Guild selected it. a one time Maxwell Bodenheim commanded a small amount of attention (if not respect) by virtue of writing openly about the Great Physi- cal Urge as practised in the more or less natural environs of the railway boarding house, the dance hall, the flop house and tenderloin, He was a bad boy of letters—frank, unafraid and irreverent. We didn't believe the racket-making for him—but kept it even not saying anything about it or reading his blurt.” Si then, however, the exigencies of our post (ahem!) has sullied that happy state of ignorance and we've been forced to worm through two of his books. We feel that our cup overfloweth. ‘rom these two drippy works: “Sixty Seconds,” and now, ked on Roller Skates” (subtle, to say the least, the title, eh?), we gather the following about him. ‘That everything we ever thought of him without having read anything by him was true: he was the first author we'd ever seen who looked as though he wrote th sort of books he wrote. That he is a cheaply sensational writer, who dresses up strictly true confession with a lot of philosophic, psychologic, eupheuis- tic tither. That his bitterness lack any touch of the noble and lacks ex- cuse for being. That he offers noth- ing to us in the way of good writing, experience, wisdom or compassion, which he gives you to believe he is always conscious of spreading. ‘That he is a pathetic reminder of the days when Greenwich V cense with the batiks rarely washed its neck. re sorry for him but he’s verBodenheim as far as we're concerned. —Tep Suanr Supurpanite JUDGE Just let us finish this rubber.” Meier hates Some poor devil probably spent a whole Sunday getting that clinker out of his furnace. comicbooks.com