The Florentine Dagger was written with Prof. Hart’s Psychology of Insanity on one hand and the Memoirs of the de Medici Family on the other. Taken as a dramatic presentation of certain psychological phenomena it is brilliant enough to make itself endeared by every psychology professor in the country. Everyone in the book, from the last member of the fastidious de Medicis to the old actress, is troubled by complexes and obsessions of all sorts, so that a miserable and uncertain rôle is assigned to each. All the time-dishonored devices of the mystery story are faithfully observed, although its technique on the whole is genuinely successful.
Mr. Hecht has in this book, as in all his others, displayed his incredible faculty for choosing a new literary technique as casually as most writers choose their stationery.
W. T.
The Blind Bow Boy. By Carl Van Vechten. (Alfred Knopf.)
Carl Van Vechten is an elegant dilettante. His books are the essence of trivial and charming existence. He is fond of cats, George Moore, Rolls Royce motor cars, and cravats by Charvet. He is apathetic to Corot and Monet, to Ibsenism, midwestern mediocrity, and synthetic gin.
The Blind Bow Boy is of inferior quality to Peter Whiffle, just as Peter Whiffle is undoubtedly inferior to Memoirs of My Dead Life, but it is good reading and by far the most intelligent intellectual mixed grill of which the reviewer has partaken this season.
The fact that Van Vechten is in the good graces of the greatest of all American whim-whammers, Henry Mencken, is in itself a warrant for the six editions into which the book has already run. It may also prevent it from running into another six.
The Blind Bow Boy is the story of a summer opera season in New York, an international alliance in the person of Zimbule O’Grady, and the delightful exploits of the Duke of Middlebottom, who lived by the Julian Calendar and in this case “contrived to evade all unsatisfactory engagements, especially if they were complicated in any way by daylight-saving time, an American refinement of which he was utterly ignorant”. There are also some trivial protagonists who strut through the book in a manner slightly suggestive of exaggerated and overdressed Weiner sausages.
The author has an unfortunate habit of becoming enamoured of one character for a chapter or two, and then without warning shifting his affections to another, a failing which gives the reader a somewhat biographically errant point of view.
It is also unfortunate that Van Vechten cannot follow a more clearly defined theme, for he has no sense of plot, shading, or climax. His stories are a series of photographically vivid scenes, innocent of all structural liaison, and hanging together only by virtue of the bookbinding which keeps them from fluttering away to the various literary hemispheres.