PLACES TO GO
=i=
The book by Thomas Burke called _More Limehouse Nights_ was published in
England under the title of _Whispering Windows_. At the time of its
publication, Mr. Burke wrote the following:
"The most disconcerting question that an author can be asked, and often is
asked, is: 'Why did you write that book?' The questioners do not want an
answer to that immediate question; but to the implied question: 'Why don't
you write some other kind of book?' To either question there is but one
answer: BECAUSE.
"Every writer is thus challenged. The writer of comic stories is asked why
he doesn't write something really serious. The novelist is asked why he
doesn't write short stories, and the short-story writer is asked why he
doesn't write a novel. To me people say, impatiently: 'Why don't you write
happy stories about ordinary people?' And the only answer I can give them
is: 'Because I can't. I present life as I see it.'
"I am an ordinary man, but I don't understand ordinary men. I am at a loss
with them. But with the people of whom I write I have a fellow-feeling. I
know them and their sorrows and their thwarted strivings and I understand
their aberrations. I cannot see the romance of the merchant or the glamour
of the duke's daughter. They do not permit themselves to be seized and
driven by passion and imagination. Instead they are driven by fear, which
they have misnamed Commonsense. These people thwart themselves, while my
people are thwarted by malign circumstance.
"Often I have taken other men to the dire districts about which I write,
and they have remained unmoved; they have seen, in their phrase, nothing
to get excited about. Well, one cannot help that kind of person. One
cannot give understanding to the man who regards the flogging of children
as a joke, or to whom a broken love-story is, in low life, a theme for
smoking-room anecdotes.
"Wherever there are human creatures there are beauty and courage and
sacrifice. The stories in _Whispering Windows_ deal with human creatures,
thieves, drunkards, prostitutes, each of whom is striving for happiness in
his or her way, and missing it, as most of us do. Each has hidden away
some fine streak of character, some mark below which he will not go.
And--they are alive. They have met life in its ugliest phases, and fought
it.
"My answer, then, to the charge of writing 'loathsome' stories, is that
these things happen. To those who say that cruelty and degradation are not
fit subjects for fiction, I say that all twists and phases of the human
heart are fit subjects for fiction.
"The entertainment of hundreds of thousands with 'healthy' literature is a
great and worthy office; but the author can only give out what is in him.
If I write of wretched and strange things, it is because these move me
most. Happiness needs no understanding; but these darker things--they are
kept too much from sensitive eyes and polite ears; and so are too harshly
judged upon the world's report. I am no reformer; I have never 'studied'
people; and I have no 'purpose,' unless it be illumination.
"What we all need today is illumination; for only through full knowledge
can we come to truth--and understanding."
=ii=
Burke's new book, _The London Spy_, is described by the author as "a book
of town travels." Some of the subjects are London street characters, cab
shelters, coffee stalls and street entertainers. The range is very wide,
for there is a chapter called "In the Streets of Rich Men," which deals
with Pall Mall and Piccadilly, as well as a study of a waterside colony,
including the results of a first pipe of opium ("In the Streets of
Cyprus"). Mr. Burke tells a good deal about the film world of Soho and is
able to give an intimate sketch of Chaplin. Perhaps the most charming of
the titles in the book is the chapter called "In the Street of Beautiful
Children." This is a study of a street in Stepney, with observations on
orphanages and reformatories and "their oppressions of the children of the
poor."
Thomas Burke was born in London and seldom lives away from it. He started
writing when employed in a mercantile office, and sold his first story
when sixteen. He sincerely hopes nobody will ever discover and reprint
that story. His early struggles have been recounted in his _Nights in
London_. He married Winifred Wells, a young London poet, author of _The
Three Crowns_. He lives at Highgate, on the Northern Heights of London. He
hates literary society and social functions generally. His chief
recreation is wandering about London.
=iii=
There is very little use in doing a book about China nowadays unless you
can do an unusual book about China; and that, precisely, is what E. G.
Kemp has done. _Chinese Mettle_ is an unusual book, even to the shape of
it (it is nearly square though not taller than the ordinary book). The
author has written enough books on China to cover all the usual ground
and, as Sao-Ke Alfred Sze of the Chinese Legation at Washington says in
his foreword, Miss Kemp "has wisely neglected the 'show-window' by putting
seaports at the end. By acquainting the public with the wealth and beauty
of the interior, she reveals to readers the vitality and potential energy,
both natural and cultural, of a great nation." Three provinces are
particularly described--Yünnan, Kweichow, Hunan--and there are good
chapters on the new Chinese woman and the youth of China. This book has,
in addition to unusual illustrations, what every good book of its sort
should have, an index.
In view of the title of this chapter I have hesitated over mentioning here
Albert C. White's _The Irish Free State_. Whether Ireland now should be
numbered among the places to go or not is possibly a matter of heredity
and sympathies; but at any rate, Ireland is unquestionably a place to read
about. Shall we agree that the Irish Free State is one of the best places
in the world to go in a book? Then Mr. White's book will furnish
up-to-the-minute transportation thither.
The book is written throughout from the standpoint of a vigorous and
independent mind. It will annoy extreme partisans of all shades of
opinion, and will provoke much discussion. This is especially true of the
concluding chapter, in which the author discusses "Some Factors in the
Future." The value of the book is enhanced by the inclusion of the
essential documents of the Home Rule struggle, including the four Home
Rule Bills of 1886, 1893, 1914 and 1920, and the terms of the Treaty
concluded with Sinn Fein.
Whether Russia is a place to go is another of those debatable questions
and I feel that the same conclusion holds good. A book is the wisest
passport to Russia at present. _Marooned in Moscow_, by Marguerite E.
Harrison, is not a new book--in the sense of having been published last
week. It remains about the best single book published on Russia under the
Soviet government; and I say this with the full recollection that H. G.
Wells also wrote a book about Soviet Russia after a visit of fifteen days.
Mrs. Harrison spent eighteen months and was part of the time in prison.
She is an exceptionally good reporter without prejudices for or against
any theory of government--with an eye only for the facts and a word only
for an observed fact.
It is good news that _The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara_, by Rosita Forbes,
is to be published in a new edition. This Englishwoman, with no assistance
but that of native guides, penetrated to Kufara, which lies hidden in the
heart of the Libyan desert, a section of the Sahara. This is the region of
a fanatical sect of Mohammedans known as the Senussi. No other white woman
has ever been known to enter the sacred city of Paj, a gloomy citadel hewn
out of rock on the edge of a beautiful valley. _The Secret of the_
_Sahara_ is illustrated with pictures taken by the author, many times
under pain of death if she were detected using a camera.
=iv=
C. E. Andrews is a college professor who saw war service in France and
relief administration work in the Balkans. His gifts as a delightful
writer will be apparent now that his book of travels, _Old Morocco and the
Forbidden Atlas_, is out. This book, unlike the conventional travel book,
has the qualities of a good story. There is colour and adventure. There
are humorous episodes and there are pictures that seem to be mirrored in
the clear lake of a lovely prose. The journey described is through a
region of Morocco little traversed by white men and over paths of the
Atlas Mountains frequented chiefly by wild tribes and banditti.
Of all places to go, old New York remains, for many, the most appealing.
Does it sound queer to recommend for those readers _A Century of Banking
in New York: 1822-1922_, by Henry Wysham Lanier? Mr. Lanier is a son of
Sidney Lanier, the poet, and those who believe that a chronicle of banking
must necessarily be full of dry statistics are invited to read the opening
chapter of this book; for Mr. Lanier begins his tale with the yellow fever
epidemic of 1822, when all the banks of New York, to say nothing of the
thousands of people, fled "from the city to the country"--that is, from
lowermost Broadway to the healthful village of Greenwich. This quality of
human rather than statistical interest is paramount throughout the book.
I go back almost four years to call attention again to Frederic A.
Fenger's _Alone in the Caribbean_, a book with maps and illustrations from
unusual photographs, the narrative of a cruise in a sailing canoe among
the Caribbean Islands.... It is just a good book.
=v=
_Robin Hood's Barn_, by Margaret Emerson Bailey, should be classified, I
suppose, as a volume of essays. It seems to me admirably suited for this
chapter, since it is all about a pleasant house inhabited by pleasant
people--and surely that is a place where everyone wants to go. Margaret
Emerson Bailey is describing, I think, an actual house and actual people;
not so much their lives as what they make out of life in the collectivism
that family life enforces. At least, I seem to get from her book a unity
of meaning, the lack of which in our lives, as we live them daily, makes
for helplessness and sometimes for despair.
With even more doubt as to the exact "classification," I proceed to speak
here and now of L. P. Jacks's book, _The Legends of Smokeover_. Mr. Jacks
is well known as the editor of the Hibbert Journal and a writer of
distinction upon philosophical subjects. I should say his specialty is an
ability to relate philosophical abstractions to practical, everyday
existence. Those familiar with his essays in the Atlantic Monthly will
know what I mean. And is the Smokeover of his new book, then, a place to
go? It is, if you wish to see our modern age and industrial civilisation
expressed in such terms--almost in the terms of fiction--as make its
appraisal relatively easy.
I suppose this book might make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It
brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to
shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our
civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the
book you may experience some difficulty in knowing how to take it is in
the book's favour. And why should you complain so long as from the outset
you are continuously entertained and amused? You can scarcely complain ...
even though at the end, you find you have been instructed. In a world
thickly spotted with Smokeovers, Mr. Jacks's book is a book worth having,
worth reading, worth reading again.