The Alexandrian Mode 
Joseph in Egypt, by Thomas Mann; translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. 
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 
Two volumes. $5.00. 

IT IS a difficult task to review this extraordinary novel. The reviewer is impressed by the author's solid knowledge of the earliest civilization of mankind, by his subtle virtuosity, his irony, his smiling wisdom as an observer of human nature, but does not find within this lengthy novel the pure enchantment of great poetry. Upon conclusion he is torn between admiration and disappointment. Yet, strangely enough, in their criticism of this discordant work (the German original was published more than a year before the excellent English translation) the reviewers, here and abroad, have given little credit to such contradictory impressions. They use superlatives of praise or rejection; there is little approach to esthetic problems; the critics seem prejudiced by political emotions. 

Thomas Mann is a voluntary emigrant from Germany, fighting against the Kulturpolitik of the Third Reich and confessing belief in the restoration of democracy. So his new novel, though without any mention of up-to-date politics, is either ignored by sympathizers with Nazi Germany or passionately rejected. On the other hand, German Leftists and their numerous friends in this country are busy advancing Mann's fame. Most of the American reviews are sheer and obscuring flattery. Mr. Knopf, Mann's publisher, has no scruples in advertising that the "immortal" "Joseph" is "perhaps the greatest creative work of the twentieth century." An extreme statement, inasmuch as this is only 1938 and the creative forces of the next sixty-two years are unknown even to the smartest American business men, and there is nothing overwhelmingly "creative" in the "Alexandrinism" of Mann's latest novel, regardless of what virtues, art, refinement or wisdom you may discover in its pages. 

"Joseph in Egypt" is the third part of an epic telling the story of Joseph and his brothers. A fourth novel is supposed to follow. The author combines the story of the Old Testament with an extensive study of the history and mythology of the ancient Orient. But the simplicity of the Bible and the intellectualism of the modern "science of religions" are heterogeneous, and Thomas Mann does not succeed in transforming the two different fountains of his story into one organic whole. His diligent reading of all literature available, his profound occupation with Babylonian and Egyptian philosophy, are no doubt to be admired, but they are not transmuted into poetic form. Such an interpretation and presentation of past cultures may be interesting as a popular philosophic history, but has nothing to do with "creative" poetry. Especially in the first two novels these reconstructions and hypotheses dissipate the interest of the story instead of enriching it. (This criticism is only from the esthetic point of view; from the standpoint of Catholic theology there is still greater objection to Mann's historical and philosophical background.) The excessive overweight of unorganized knowledge, which seems so wonderful to the pet literati of faddish American magazines, is actually the chief weakness of the whole epic. I must nevertheless admit that in this third novel the story itself, covering ten years in the house of Potiphar, is of greater intensity than in the two former volumes. 

This third novel's design is: to show Joseph, the emigrant, the ambitious and at the same time God-fearing young man in the Egyptian atmosphere. The psychology of the Hebrew youth, who enters a world of superior civilization but inferior religious outlook, is presented with cleverness and experienced subtility. But Mann's picture of the Egyptian world itself seems to me far from satisfactory; it is oversophisticated and eccentric, lacking real flesh and blood. The solemnity of his Egyptians has not the monumentality of their architecture, but is antic and bizarre. If you listen to the absurd gossip of Potiphar's parents, you seem to be sitting in Bangkok's grotesque temples of porcelain fragments and not close to the dignified gigantic pillars of Karnak and Luxor. Also the fairy-tale figures of the two dwarfs—one benign, one malign—belong among the chinoiseries of Siam rather than among the rigid Egyptians, and the same may be said of the bigoted priest, Beknechon. 

The most authentic Egyptian figures are Potiphar with his sterile dignity and the faithful steward Monkaw, whose duty is the bathos of his life. Potiphar's wife becomes a modern occidental character. Her famous invitation to Joseph is "not the word of a strumpet but of a woman overwhelmed." The story which is covered by one sentence in the Bible is puffed up to 300 pages by the modern novelist. The bombastic conversations of the two lovers—with some touches of Freudian psychoanalysis—fit better into a morbid Park Avenue drawing-room than into the self-controlled atmosphere of ancient Egypt. Of course Joseph's chastity would find no parallel in a Park Avenue hero, but as a matter of fact the woman's desire is told by Mann much more impressively and credibly than are Joseph's religious ideas. 

What remains to the reader after struggling through these often boring two volumes? Many admirable artistic ornaments, but not an artistic structure. The mind is not enriched by a convincing picture of an epoch and of a nation. Instead the reader remembers brilliant observations and subtleties, a cunning unmetaphysical aspect of life, which Mr. Lin Yutang might consider "absolutely Chinese." Considerable artistic ability is wasted in a novel which as a whole is not a creative work of art. I am convinced that Mann's Joseph epic will not survive for future generations but will soon prove "out of date." The author of the "Magic Mountain" and "Death in Venice" is a morbid poet of decadence also in his biblical novels. —C. O. CLEVELAND. 

CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
Dry Guillotine, by Rene Belbenoit. 
New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. $3.00.

"DRY GUILLOTINE" is the story of a man who, condemned to the penal colony of French Guiana, refused to allow his life to be destroyed by its barbaric cruelty and his spirit to be demoralized by its moral degeneration and its constant crime. It is hard to see how a so-called civilized country can tolerate such unspeakable abnormalities as constitute the penal colonies of St. Laurent and its outlying islands, Re, Royal, St. Joseph, and Devil. If a book such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had power enough to help blast the slavery of black men from North America, I think this story of a man who refused to die will wipe out the slavery of white men in French Guiana.

In 1848, the penal colony was established in French Guiana to take the place of the slave colonizers liberated that year. Since then France has poured nearly 60,000 white felons into practical slavery; brought them to the dry guillotine to suck out their lives in abysmal misery, to destroy their souls in a hell of torture. Of course, these men were criminals and bad men. But, no matter how heinous their sins, how revolting their crimes, not one could deserve this slow torturous killing. Belbenoit had unusual opportunities to gather his material. H e served about fifteen years, saw much, heard more, and finally had access to the official records as archivist in the Governor's Office. The story he tells is almost unbelievable. The brutality and meanness of the guards, with black officers driving white men to hard and sickening labor in the marshlands of Guiana; the still greater meanness of prisoner to prisoner in petty graft and double dealing treachery; the terrible foulness of rampant homosexuality; the oppression and daily murder of weakened brothers by brutal degenerates; the misery of the lives of the liberes, free from the penal colony but condemned to perpetual residence in the neighboring Cayenne, are set forth in stark frankness. Even though written by a convict whose soul was filled with hatred and revenge, it bears all the earmarks of truth.

Four unsuccessful attempts at escape finally reach their climax in a rough canoe sailed for seventeen days on the open sea till it reached Trinidad. Of the six in the boat only one, Rene Belbenoit, reached liberty. Struggling through the coastal swamps, living with Indians, stowing away on tramps, he finally after two years reached Los Angeles, the only white man to ever pierce this country.

If your stomach is strong it is a great story. The startling thing about it is, how a Catholic country like France could allow these 6o,000 men to die without a priest. No priest, no church, no sacraments, in French Guiana—just a stinking hell. Here 's hoping Belbenoit's book does the trick of destroying it.
—JOHN P. MC CAFFREY

Intermission in Europe, by Vernon Bartlett. New York: Oxford University Press. $2.75.

A CHATTY, superficial autobiography of a British journalist and broadcaster, covering the post-war period in Europe. The author believes that war in the near future is improbable principally because of British rearmament and the desperate desire of the overwhelming mass of people in every country for peace. —J. O'C

CRITICISM

The Triple Thinker, by Edmund Wilson. 
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.75.

SOME readers are perhaps more familiar with the S purely political writings of Edmund Wilson whose celebrated conversion to Communism and subsequent repudiation of Stalinism have received much comment in the little world of the weekly reviews. There is danger that some readers might do the author of "The Triple Thinker" a great injustice, for as a literary critic he possesses an integrity which defies assault. W ith few exceptions the essays which make up the present volume are distinct contributions to American literary criticism and, were it not for the fact that "The Triple Thinker" is a collection rather than a unified whole, it would deserve to be ranked with Van Wyck Brooks's "The Flowering of New England" and Joseph Wood Krutch's neglected masterpiece of some years ago, "Five Masters."

Mr. Wilson does not aspire to say the last word, nor does he maintain that literature can be explained merely in terms of its social and political significance, but he does illuminate a work of art by referring it to the society of which it was, in a sense, a product. His essay on "Flaubert's Politics," for instance, sets forth the political significance of that novelist's fiction while insisting at the same time that none of his writings were designedlypolitical. "His [Flaubert's] informal expressions of his general opinions are as unsystematized and as impromptu as his books are well-built and precise." The essay on Samuel Butler is also distinguished by the same just perception of the different planes or hierarchies of criticism. The discussion of Bernard Shaw is a splendid exposition of one of the great paradoxes of our times. It is the artist, according to Mr. Wilson, rather than the philosopher of socialism, who is the devil of contradiction. "Shaw," he says, "was not only a political prophet struggling for socialist ideas, but an artist realizing himself through art."

No less valuable as a critical analysis is the piece on A. E. Housman, who impresses the author as a man who "has somehow managed to grow old without, in a sense, ever coming to maturity." The memoir on Paul Elmer More is as kindly as one might expect and the long discussion on the technique of modern verse is the least valuable chapter in the book. A biographical essay on the eccentric reformer John Jay Chapman balances a remarkable display of erudition in the article on the Russian poet Pushkin, two of whose poems Mr. Wilson translates. The concluding paper, "Marxism and Literature," is a rather superior and austere answer to the lunatic fringe of proletarian critics who, like Granville Hicks, attempt to measure literature by the yard-stick of the class struggle.

It is an odd and perhaps impertinent fact that "The Triple Thinker" more closely resembles the work of the neo-humanists in its tone, its logical method and sometimes its conclusion than it does the literature of the Left Wing.—Francis X. Connolly

The Greenwood Hat, by J. M. Barrie. 
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.75.

BRIEF and lively preface to this little book informs A us that it was printed privately a few years ago. It would have been well to have left it at that. A book privately printed has an audience of its own which enjoys the unenvied privilege of reading it. But a book flung to the public should be exoteric, depending upon qualities which the public understands and loves. "The Greenwood Hat" is Barrie at loose ends, and Barrie at loose ends is like a box of scattered matches. Each one has the quality of ignition; but it is hard to strike fire.

There are some pleasant pages about book stalls (only Lamb has written them so much better), a good account of a rapturous schoolboy whose house "captain " deigns to visit him, and an amusing chapter on the tiny theatre in Dumfries for which Robert Burns once wrote prologues, which never could afford new scenery, but made the Shaughraun's cottage do service for Glamis Castle and the Tower of London, and which gave to its audiences a bewildering array of plays. These are the flickering lights that brighten a tiresome book. Barrie could be trusted to strike fire here and there. If you read the whole of a story, or sat through the whole of a play, you found this out. He was the most uncertain and the most uneven of writers, but he was never consistently dull. Always when you least expected it came the leaping flame or the tense moment, transitory and convincing.

One flawless piece of work attests the author's power, "Farewell Miss Julie Logan." It is a little book, barely a hundred pages; but it holds all that Barrie could do best. The shadow of the supernatural hangs over it, the relentlessness of nature dominates it. The "locking of the glen" as the ice closes in, and the strange stillness that follows it forebodes the coming of the "Spectrum." And who could fail to welcome so charming an apparition? We are not wise to break barriers. They have been built for our safety. On that point Barrie was always plain. But he and he alone knew how intimate the unknown could be.—Agnes Repplier

Opera—Front and Back, by H. Howard Taubman. 
New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.75.

"LIFE" can keep on going to the party, but it need not go to the opera, for Howard Taubman has been there (and often, these many years that he has been the New York Times's music editor); and he has written about the life of opera with the reportorial accuracy of the candid camera. Indeed, Mr. Taubman's generous book has more than thirty pages of candid shots, his newspaper enjoying an " exclusive" "action" photo arrangement with the Metropolitan.

For sheer information, this book is nothing less than encyclopedic; its like has never been presented, even in part, before. For the opera, and not the circus, is " the greatest show on earth, " especially the Metropolitan with its three-ring repertory of French, German and Italian works (not to mention an occasional Deems Taylor in English, or Chaliapin' s Russian counterpointing the rest of the cast's French or Italian)—all within one week; any week; every week!

Mr. Taubman's book shows you how it's done; how this fabulous enterprise, compact of human equations, manages to function—not without friction, however, which accounts for a laugh on almost every page of the more-than-300 in this backstage survey. Toscanini's early days at the Met; the long and opulent period of Otto Kahn's "angeling" the company under Gatti Casazza'sgeneraldirection;singersfromCarusoto Tibbett, Farrar and Mary Garden to Flagstad—all figure prominently (and above all factually and realistically) in this engrossing account of opera as an art, a profession and a business.

In his chapter on how the company prepares its list of works for each season, with revivals and novelties, Mr. Taubman is guilty of an oversight when arguing that the Metropolitan, once a work is announced, never "lets it down," come what may in the way of "insurmountable" difficulties in bringing the work to the public with Metropolitan eclat. Two season's ago (Miss Bori's final one with the company, and the first which saw Edward Johnson out of the tenor ranks and into the director's office) the company, including of course these two artists in the title roles, never got beyond the rehearsal stage of Debussy's " Pelleas et Melisande," later announcing this singular work as a special post-season offering, and finally refunding the money to a public that grew larger and larger for this supreme achievement in polarizing music and drama. —Walter Anderson

Macmillan's Modern Dictionary; compiled and edited under the supervision of Bruce Overton.
New York: The Macmillan Company. $3.00 and $3.50.

THE IMMENSE task of preparing a dictionary is here successfully accomplished. A ll th e 100,000 words are together, including proper names, with no need of appendix. Space is provided for unusually large type by arrangement and the exclusion of illustrations. It includes idioms and the etymology of words. The vocabulary is brought up to date, but the international phonetic alphabet is not used in giving pronunciations. The book is sturdy and not bulky. —P. B.

HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY

The Secret Letters of the Last Tsar; edited by Edward J. Bing. 
New York : Longmans, Green and Company. $3.50.

THERE is so much to object to in this book, that one does not know where to begin. First of all, the title of it savors of a sensationalism which is out of place, when one remembers the tragic subject of it. It would have been far better to have adhered to the English version, and have called the volume quite simply "The Letters of Tsar Nicholas and Empress Marie." However, this is not as important as the abominable, and in some instances ridiculous, editing of these letters, and the confusion of personalities with which they are filled. Their editor evidently knew nothing about the Russian Court or its prominent personages. For instance, on page 83, I find Dr. Leyden, an eminent German physician who attended Alexander III during his last illness, and later on Grand Duke George Alexandrovitch, mentioned as a member of the Dowager Empress's household, which assertion would no doubt have immensely amused both of them if they had still been alive ; on page 87 the editor informs us that Ropscha was a suburban residence of the Grand Duke Wladimir which it never was ; and so forth. Whenever he comes to anything he does not know, the editor of these letters allows his imagination to run riot with him, which is rather a rash thing to do in matters of historic importance. And when we find General Alexeiev, aide-de-camp to the Czar, signing himself "Equerry General," we fall into the ridiculous, as must appear obvious to anyone.

In regard to the letters themselves, I feel inclined to believe they are not all genuine, because they contain certain things the Empress Marie could never have written. For instance, the letters undated, probably out of caution, in which she announces to Nicholas II the engagement of his sister, the Grand Duchess Olga, as something hard to believe ! This the Empress never could have done, considering the fact that the Grand Duchess 's marriage with Prince Peter of Oldenburg had been arranged years before. Then to call them children is just as absurd, for Prince Peter was thirty-five and the Grand Duchess Olga was twenty. And that the Empress should say she had to consent to the marriage, when in reality it was only the sovereign 's consent that counted—this fact alone would lead one to view with suspicion this particular letter. Another surprising thing is to find the Empress Marie writing to her son in Russian. She never learned Russian well, in spite of the fifty years she lived in Russia, and certainly did not write it fluently.

In regard to the contents of these letters, they only confirm what we already knew of the Emperor Nicholas II: his lack of heart, extraordinary indifference to everything taking place around him, and the autocratic tendencies he exhibited to the last, and which finally proved his undoing. The Empress shows a far better comprehension of the events in which she was concerned, and her letter concerning Finland and Finnish affairs sounds almost prophetic, just as her appreciation of the character of General Bobrikoff, Finland 's governor, is just and correct. If the Czar had listened to his mother, he might have avoided many pitfalls and mistakes!

Much unnecessary fuss has been made about this cor- respondence. The world would have lost nothing, if it had never seen the light of day.—Catherine Radziwill

RELIGION

The Right Reverend Dom Edmond Obrecht, O. C. S. O., by Father Maria Amadeus. 
Gethsemani, Ky.: Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani.
 

THIS biography of the fourth Abbot of the famous monastery at Gethsemani, Kentucky, was written by one of the monks of the order, with the assistance of other members of the community. Honored with an appreciative Foreword from no less a personage than the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, it is warmly commended by the Abbot General of the Trappists at Rome. In every sense of the words, therefore, the book is an ecclesiastical production—it is even published by the abbey; and thus issuing from the innermost courts of the Church, it well expresses that spirit of complete devotion to the high ideals of contemplative monasticism which it is the special vocation of the Cistercian, or Trappist, Order to foster and to illustrate.

How that vocation touched the spirit of a young Frenchman at a moment when he was strongly impelled to join the military service of his native country, and led him to become a priest and a monk and, in the course of time, an abbot ranking high among the modern leaders of the Catholic Church, is told with strong and revealing clarity and simplicity. The boy's father well expressed the value of such a life in his words to his son, when asked for advice as to his choice of a vocation: "I would rather see you in the robe of a Trappist lay Brother than honored with the baton of a Marshal of France." It is because such a true estimate of the values of life is held firmly by Catholic families throughout the world that young men and young women cheerfully, even joyously, turn aside from what others think to be the more agreeable and enjoyable and profitable paths, to enter the service of the Church—in the priesthood and the religious orders and congregations.

Why some of these servants of the Church should be attracted to the "active," while others choose the "contemplative," orders, is one of the great mysteries of the religious calling. It is probable that this biography of a great modern monk may be the agency to awaken in many American souls the desire to follow the example set before him in this fascinating book. This is all the more likely to occur since the author very wisely and very successfully deals with his revered subject not only as the great high priest which undoubtedly he was, but also he portrays the strong, human, living character of a very temperamental and individual man. In this way the influence of Abbot Obrecht will continue to exert itself, as he himself would desire it to do, in the service of his beloved order, which was in his eyes worthy of love and service simply because it was the well-tested instrument of the Catholic Church, which, in its turn, was worthy of love and service because it was the servant of Christ on earth.—Michael Williams

The Oxford Groups, by Maisie Ward. 
New York: Sheed and Ward. $.50.

MAISIE WARD (Mrs. F. J. Sheed) gives a friendly appraisal in pamphlet form of the value of the movement started by Frank Buchman, from the point of view of a Catholic interested in the conversion of the English-speaking peoples.—H. B.

SCIENCE

The Fight for Life, by Paul de Kruif. 
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.00.

IN HIS usual lively and stirring style, Paul de Kruif I has added another book to his shelf, making the general public understand better the successful fight against disease that the medical profession is conducting throughout the world. This volume tells the story of the war on maternal mortality, tuberculosis, syphilis, infantile paralysis, pellagra, all scourges of the first order, once looked upon as almost hopeless so far as prevention was concerned, but that are now demonstrated to be amenable to the discipline of preventive medicine to such a degree that it will probably not be long before they can all be definitely eliminated.

The expectancy of life has been lengthened to such a degree that one wonders whether we are not going to find ourselves in the course of the next generation faced with the serious problem of a world that has many more old folks in it than young. Youth has been the major element in our civilization down to the twentieth century. The question is what will happen to the human race when the majority is the other way.

The story of disease prevention and cure is indeed dramatic and De Kruif has taken advantage of every element contained in the situation to make this dramatic quality telling in its forcefulness. The book is scientific to a very striking degree and yet it is interesting to such an extent that it reads like a novel and one does not want to drop it until the end. De Kruif has created a new set of readers and his work promises to do a great deal of good. It is surprising how much has been accomplished in the betterment but which prove on further investigation to improvable but which prove on further investigation to present encouraging elements that will make life much more subject to the proper application of medical advance than has been the case so far.—James J. Walsh