OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I can't help thinking that Mr. H. G. Hibbert has not chosen altogether the right name for his second volume of theatrical and Bohemian gossip, A Playgoer's Memories (Grant Richards). It is not so unsophisticated as the title had somehow led me to expect. Indeed "unsophisticated" is perhaps the last epithet that could justly be applied to Mr. Hibbert's memories. I fancy I had unconsciously been looking for something more in the style of my own ignorant playgoing. "How wonderful she was in that scene with the broker's man," or "Do you remember the opening of the Third Act?" Not thus Mr. Hibbert. For him the play itself is far less the thing than a peg upon which to hang all sorts of tags and bobtails of recollection, financial, technical and just not scandalous because of the discretion of the telling. His book is a repository of theatrical information, but the great part of it of more absorbing concern for the manager's-room or the stage-door than, say, the dress circle. But I must not be wanting in gratitude for the entertainment which, for all this carping, I certainly derived from it. As an expert on stage finance, for example, to-day and forty years back, Mr. Hibbert has revelations that may well cause the least concerned to marvel. And there is an appendix, which gives a list of Drury Lane pantomimes, with casts, for half a century, including, of course, the incomparable first one; but that is not a memory of this world. A book to be kept for odd references in two senses.
CULPABLE NEGLIGENCE ON THE PART OF AN EDITOR OF AN ILLUSTRATED PAPER. IMPENDING LIBEL ACTIONS.
| Captain Eric Blightman, whose engagement to Lady Sarah Hubb has just been announced. | Basher Smith, ex-heavyweight champion of Stepney, who is to act as referee at the Corkery-Hackett fight on Friday. |
What most interfered with my peace of mind over The Happy Highways (Heinemann) was, I think, its almost entire absence of highway, and the exceedingly unhappy nature of its confused and uncharted lanes. Indeed, I am wondering now if the title may not have been an instance of bitter irony on the part of Miss Storm Jameson. Certainly a more formless mass of writing never within my experience masqueraded as a novel. There are ideas and reflections—these last mostly angry and vaguely socialistic—and here and there glimpses of illusory narrative about a group of young persons, brothers and a girl-friend, who live at Herne Hill, attend King's College and talk (oh, but interminably) the worst pamphlet-talk of the pre-war age. It is, I take it, a reviewer's job to stifle his boredom and push on resolutely through the dust to find what good, if any, may be hidden by it. I will admit therefore some vague interest in the record of how the War hit such persons as these. Also (to the credit of the author as tale-teller) she does allow one of the young men to earn a scholarship, and for no sane reason to depart instantly thereupon before the mast of a sailing-ship; also another, the central figure, to fall in love with the girl. The book is in three parts, of which the third is superfluously specialized as "chaos." Whether Miss Jameson will yet write a story I am unable to say; I rather wonder, however, that Messrs. Heinemann did not suggest to her that these heterogeneous pages would furnish excellent material for the experiment.
I have discovered that Miss Peggy Webling has quite a remarkable talent for making ordinary places and people seem improbable. She achieves this in Comedy Corner (Hutchinson) by sketching in her scenery quite competently and then allowing her characters to live lives, amongst it, so fraught with coincidence, so swayed by the most unlikely impulses, that a small draper's shop, a West End "Hattery" and an almshouse for old actresses become the most extraordinary places on earth, where anything might happen and nobody would be surprised. Winnie, her heroine, behaves more improbably than anyone else, but she is such a dear little goose that most amiable readers will be quite glad that she doesn't have to suffer as much as such geese would if they existed in real life. You can see from this that it is one of those books that are full of real niceness and goodwill, and it has besides plenty of plot and lots of interesting characters, and yet somehow it gives you the feeling of being out of focus. You read on, expecting every moment that clever Miss Webling will give things a little push in the right direction and make them seem true, and, while you are reading and hoping, you come to the happy ending.
Should you enter The Gates of Tien T'ze (Hodder and Stoughton) you will not regret it, but it is possible that you may be—as I was—a little breathless before the end of this vehement story is reached. The average tale of criminals and detectives is not apt to move slowly, but here Mr. Leslie Howard Gordon maintains the speed of a half-mile relay race. I am not going to reveal his mystery except to say that Tien T'ze was a Chinese organisation which perpetrated crimes, and that Donald Craig, Kyrle Durand—his secretary (female) and cousin—and Bruce MacIvor, superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department, were employed in tracking it down and smashing it to pieces. Never have I met anyone in fiction (let fact alone) so clever as Kyrle in getting herself and her friends out of tight places. When Craig and MacIvor were so beset by Tien T'ze that their last hour seemed to have come I found myself saying, "It is time for Kyrle to emerge from her machine," and she emerged. In a novel of this genre it is essential that the excitement should never fall below fever-heat, but Mr. Gordon's book does better than that; its temperature would, I think, burst any ordinary thermometer.
"The Vicar's Study Circle is now engaged in considering the teaching of what is known as the 'Higher Criticism.' All interested are invited to attend, whatever sex they may claim to possess."
—Parish Magazine.
The Vicar evidently possesses the open mind so necessary for discussions of this sort.
