_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.
It is, however, very satisfactory reading, for in his multiplex
catalogues of names and places the author gives the reader a vivid
sense of personal familiarity which is quite flattering. No doubt
this effect is obtained by mentioning so many aspects of contemporary
civilization that everyone must needs have come in contact with at
least some few of them.