Life — July 27, 1922 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

EE it were not for the publishers the Great Open Spaces would probably totter and fall and drag the health of the race with them. The publishers alone understand the vacation urge in man, its glorious impetus, its weak spots. The publishers know that a summer resort is one in which there is no furnace to function in chilly weather. ‘They know that golf in the rain is almost anything but the sport it should be. With uncanny clairvoyance they foresee the vacation crises which make sweltering in town seem such a com- fortable business. Indeed they alone stand between the Great Open Spaces and complete rout. There is actually no way of estimating the numbers of instinctive vacationeers who would flee annually from the summer rainfall of the out-of-door life if it were not for the publishers and their all-consoling summer fiction. HIS present summer unusually earnest work has been done in the noble cause of saving the vacation, and the record of it will fill our page for weeks to come. But right now in the beginning we should like to tell MM. Doubleday-Page and Company that Lire itself saw their “Merton of the Movies” lift a barometer from a piazza floor in the Maine woods and replace it on the wall. And Lire will produce witnesses. Certainly “Merton of the Movies” is a remarkable book. Mr. Harry Leon Wilson, Merton’s author, has the fame of a comedian and, during its serial ap- pearance, his story was pretty con- sistently described as burlesque. There is something in one of the old songs about bringing coals to Newcastle. Just so, burlesque on Hollywood seemed be- side the point and nothing was done Fiction in Flannels about Merton until this incident of the Maine barometer. Gorgeous as Mr. Wilson’s humor is, his novel is far more than burlesque. He has written the honest story of a young man who had great screen am- bitions and no traitor sense of humor to impede them. Merton is an actor, blood and bone, which is to say man specializing in Ego. Merton is a Don Quixote who charges the windmills of Hollywood to inevitable and astounding victory. To be sure, Mr. Wilson has his fun with the infancy of the motion pic- ture industry, but the moral of Mertor cuts far deeper than that, the portraits of his brothers and sisters of the pro- fession are the truest theatre folk we have ever seen in a book and the story of his career is by way of being some- thing of a masterpiece. WE felt that Mr. Norman Davey’s “Guinea Girl” should have shared barometric honors with Merton. Who- ever read “The Pilgrim of a Smile” must have been lured by his successor. Somehow the successor does not come up to scratch. It is shocking and amus- ing, has a deal of individuality and manages to keep up your expectation of the really outrageous. Still, it dis- appoints. We possess what we consider a nice clean Rabelaisian mind and we like stories of beautiful though liberal ladies, not so much immoral as unmoral, if you know what we mean. Very pos- sibly, we asked more of this one than her publishers were willing to give her. Still, it was gratifying that the scene of her carryings-on should have been a French winter resort. That meant much in the Maine woods. VOLUME of short stories named for the best of them, “The Sin of Sudeep Woner Monsieur Pettipon,” and the first-born of Mr. Richard Connell, did not cheer us greatly. We do not relish volumes of short stories, even of short stories good enough for publication in Mr. Lorimer’s modest weekly. It must be admitted, though, that Mr. Connell is an excep- tional young writer. He is intentionally amusing. We could wish that his pu lishers had not proclaimed him “\ New Humorist.” Lire may be par- doned a prejudice against humorists HERE did not, however, seem to be any denying the worth of “TI Unspeakable Gentleman,” the first-born novel of Mr. John Marquand, nor any questioning the promise of its author It is a dashing white cap of the romantic wave, a rattling original story, admirably told and downright exciting And Mr. Marquand’s hero seemed to us as beguiling and fascinating a per. sonage as we had encountered over a snuff box in many a day. Be it said that we own to a weakness for snufi boxes and the romance of New England a century ago, whalers and Jamaica rum and the salt air tinged with a whiff of powder and the days when a gentle man was no less a gentleman for a leaning toward piracy. The adventures of this seafaring aristocrat—“who tried his best to be a bad example because he could not be a good one” and wh: turned out to be quite incorrigible when it came to doing the right and spectac ular thing in a tight place—kept us and left us breathless. Do the Great Open Spaces call you? “Merton of the Movies” will help you over the rough spots and “The Un- speakable Gentleman” will do you no harm. S.H. Flashlight of a Banquet in Our Town comicbooks.com