Judge — March 1934 — page 3: what you’re looking at

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

JUDGING THE BOOKS E FIND ourselves in an em- barrassing position. Sometime ago we struggled thru “Ann Vickers” and found it a dull saga of a homely Vassar pushover, hardly up to the standard of Mr. Sinclair Lewis. Now after patiently reading “Work of Art,” Sink’s latest, “Ann” seems in retrospect a dimpled cutie, whose every movement was as significant as a combination of Kay of Russia, Peggy the Joyce and Izzie Duncan. The idle truth of the matter is that Dr. Lewis has rewritten Babbitt. He | has stuck him in a hotel milieu and not even taken the trouble to put any new clothes on the earnest fellow. “Work of Art” is the story of Myron Weagle of Black Thread, Ct., born dumb but destined to dream and create a perfect hotel. On the way up, Myron passes thru all the spiritual phases fa miliar to American business giants. He sleeps under countless hotel desks, as it were, in the budding capitalist manner ; saves his money; gets seduced and has his grammar corrected by a woman older than himself; learns every phase of the hotel business; applies all the vir- tues of the American Magazine to his job; marries a lithe woman; has some hard moments; and finally Makes Good. One can see that Mr. Lewis attacked his theme with artistic integrity and in as earnest a mood as his chief char- acter. He evidently collected all the old Hotel Guides, menus, cook books and descriptive literature he could lay his hands on and went to work. And the book becomes a dramatization of a Ho- telmen’s Guide, a lot of old menus with a Horatio Alger motif thrown in for the action, There isn’t a flaw in the character or story of Myron Weagle. It is American epic—good house organ epic. Our guess is that Mr. Lewis started out with a magnificent idea—the Story of the Great American Service Centre (with Bath): the Hotel. Had he at- tacked it with the fieryness with which he did “Arrowsmith” or the other good ones, he would have had something Had he made it comparable in spirit to Upton Sinclair's “Wm. Fox” and turned out a huge economic satire of the past 50 yrs. in the centre of which stood the hotel, he would have had still more of a something. But he seems to have got himself fascinated by those old menus and worked himself into a whimsical frenzy over the memories they en- gender. The pages of “Work of Art” are cluttered with exhaustive and ex- hausting lists of culinary works of art such as Myron the Weagle learning to make Cussot de Charvreul a la Fran- catelli, and thereby knocking the eye out of the reader, so stunning is his gastro- nomic knowledge (and Mr. Lewis’). —Tep Suane. clean, ONE DROP OF WATER SPELLS Lrouble FOR USERS OF 100,000 LAMPS! There is one time when 1/100,000 part of a dew drop is a veritable flood! That’s when that much moisture is present in the incandescent lamp you buy. Costly water vapor is painstakingly eliminated from every General Electric MAzDA lamp because it hastens deterioration of the lamp filament; speeds blackening of the bulb; and brings a corresponding loss of light and lamp life. As a matter of fact the gas in General Electric MAZDA lamps is 100 times drier than the air in the very dryest part of the Sahara Desert. That’s one reason why lamps bearing the famous cB) monogram are sure to give you all the light you pay for—why they are used by steamship lines, railroads, leading industrial and commercial concerns everywhere. To look for this symbol of quality is an easy and sure way to avoid inferior lamps —which may contain that tiny particle of water vapor that spells lighting waste and trouble. General Electric Co., Nela Park, Cleveland, Ohio. GENERAL @ ELECTRIC MAZDA LAMPS comicbooks.com