Blackguard. By Maxwell Bodenheim. (Covici-McGee.)
Perhaps the most startling quality of Blackguard is its graphic lucidity of language. Consider this description of a man sobbing: “It was as though a martyr were licking up the blood on his wounds and spitting it out in long gurgles of lunatic delight.” The whole story is told with such compelling clarity of phrase, and Bodenheim has shifted his genius for acid wording from poetry to prose without the slightest apparent misgiving as to outcome. Result: a luminous biography of an introspective young author that in some ways approaches the manner of James Joyce.
The book concerns the poetic and amorous development of Carl Felman, an aspiring scribbler who stoops casually to thieving rather than enter its father’s business of whiskey-selling. His fight against the world, and particularly against his mother, who had a body “on which plumpness and angles met in a transfigured prizefight of lines”, is rendered doubly difficult by his own discriminating soul. He is not willing to give and take, but is concerned with the taking only. In the end he achieves some tranquility of mind—in a manner strange enough to warrant reading about it.
Bodenheim will not cheer you up; rather will he wake you up. And for rhymesters who aspire to better verse or don’t know when to quit—here is an eye-opener that should not be passed by too lightly.
J. R. C.
Black Oxen. By Gertrude Atherton. (Boni & Liveright.)
The notion of rejuvenation is not a new one, and the theme of sophisticated womanhood reverting to romantic young love is not unprecedented. In Black Oxen Mrs. Atherton has successfully disguised the problem of the first with the accoutrements of the second.
The hero, Lee Clavering, is a scintillating “colyumist” whose literary worth is not restricted by journalism and whose ideals are not cramped by the Young Intellectual atmosphere of the Algonquin Group.
Mary Zattiany, the much-discussed heroine, is an American woman who married a foreign nobleman, dazzled the European courts and salons with her beauty and wit, and, after a process of re-upholstering, returned to New York, where she falls in love with the young journalist.