Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 6 February 1946 — Page 16

der u

£ . 2

ds Youth Un Ci By DANIEL

It is

Many of the ideas may be derived from such sources, but. the style is and witty woman place in Washingthe world but who that both she and

, » ® » MRS. CLAPPER treats Woodrow Wilson with reverence and Franklin Delano Roosevelt with respect— particularly for his New Deal ideas. She pokes fun at the interim presidents—Mr. Harding, Mr. Coolidge

most part sympathy. “My most vivid memories of Washington political life started with the election of 1932," she writes. The first chapter is entitled “A Warrior at the Helm,” and in it she recalls the G. O. P. slogan of those days—"Who But Hoover."

ing white rabbits out of a hat.

“A friend of ours called on Henry

ot Post-War Era,

per's Widow afraid

By Olive Clapper. 303 Pages.

M. KIDNEY

Y y\7ASHING TAPESTRY" d icts th both i, ' depic e scenes, YY grave STON I. which Raymond and Olive Clapper sed and often participated in from the administration of Woodrow Wilson through Franklin D. Roosevelt. written by Olive Clapper, widow of the famous ~ Indianapolis Times and Scripps-Howard columnist who was

idge under the charming title, “New England Contributes the Man of

the Hour." » ” ”

LOOKING at the domestic scene when President Roosevelt first took

over, Mrs. Clapper comments: “The mystery of current Amerjcans politics was the fear so many businessmen had of Mr. Roosevelt. They never tumbled to the fact that he was a mild man. The Teal gun at their backs was held in the hands of the unemployed—the illhoused, ill-clothed, and ill-fed suffering millions, who listened to the Huey Longs, the Townsends and the Coughlins. “It was these men who fed the sufferers - bitter medicine; Mr. Roosevelt, at most, used milk of magnesia . , . Roosevelt's bark was

. | worse than his bite, As an English

journalist put it, American conservatives were busy describing a roving domestic cat as a raging Bengal tiger.” #

~ ” ALTHOUGH the Clappers attended, White House parties, they never were invited to Hyde Park. Both admired much of the Roosevelt program—foreign and domestic. Olive supported him all four times and was active in Maryland Democratic politics. Ray was more intimate with his fellow-Kansan, Alfred Landon, than he ever was with F, D. R. But he supported the second term, went to Wendell Willkie on the third and indicated that he likely would stpport the fourth term in his dispatches from the Pacific before he was killed. i ! » " ” BUT IT was the regime and not the Roosevelts that attracted both of them. Mrs, Clapper thinks highly of Henry Wallace. She predicts that his career “may have the (greatest impact in the next ten years on our nation.”-

agriculture department fores checkup by the veterinarian. » - - SHIFTING BACK to the days of President Wilson, Mrs.

Tock:

HAS VALENTINE

When you look in the mirror

“He was the St. Paul of “Roosevelt's career,” she writes. Mrs. Clapper's hopes for the future are equal to her enjoyment of the past. She points to man's greatest fallures—war and poverty -and writes: “This post-war generation, having proved its valiance in battle, knows no fear. It is strong and unprejudiced. The world must be made more nearly into the image our young men and women visualized as they ‘fought. This is a debt owed to the dead as well as to the living.”

Farms Lure Veterans

Returning veterans are making heavy demands upon public libraries for books on small farms and businesses, according to the Amerfcan Library association. The average veteran seems to place a realistic emphasis on security and independence rather than on big returns and spectacular careers.

< BOOKWORM

and see stars in your eyes . . ,

and look into another pair of eyes, seeing the same stars, that's

POEMS IN A MOOD OF ECSTACY

Walter Benton's “This Is My Beloved,” dangerous to read if you contemplate resistance. But why resist? 200. /

LEAVE CANCELLED

Nicholas Monserrat'’s recapturing of the sweet sore row of an imminent part. ing, and the unforgettable hours that precede it. A story, if you like, but more 4% «a glimpse of two lovers unconscious of your gaze. am

AND IF YOU MUST | “There 4s, of course, forever 4 Amber,” 1.00 « £8

'S Bookshop on the Mezzanine Soli : ;

not astronomy . . , it's love. A lavish mood, which spends i ts inexhaustible capital, sometimes, in words that capture and hold forever some of that star-shine, .as an opal holds fire. For that other pair of eyes, the BOOKWORM directs your rose-tinted glasses to:

FOR THE VERY YOUNG

Whose hearts throb to the off-beat and to whom the rhumba 1s a little old hat + + » Sammy Kaye's “Sunday Serenade,” a group of his own selections of the poems featured in his broadcasts. 1.00

WHO KISS WITH LAUGHTER

Being mature, liking their honey spiced . . . or spiked will delight in Bemelman's “I Love You, I Love You, I Love You,” sketches with the double wit of peh and typewriter, an amazing 1.00 worth. And Macdonald's “The Egg and 1" following the adventures of two on-the desert island of a chicken ranch, 2.75

Bhai aa

“HE literary critic has a two-fold task: First, to

help the public. : ‘In these terms. Booth Tarkington set forth his views on criticism, 4 Himself the sort of connoisseur he has often depicted in his novels, Mr. Tarkington lives sure by paintings, furniture and objets 4’ art, chiefly of the Renaissance peri

” 8 = A CHAIN-SMOKER while talking, Mr, Tarkington has of face and voice. Patterns of fine lines about the eyes and temples change as his enthusiasm rises and wanes. When first asked about his own experiences with reviéwers, Mr. Tarkington said, “I haven't read any reviews of my books for many years. “1 did read reviews at first. Sometimes I felt complacent, sometimes injured. " “And I decided early In my career that reviews, while they may sometimes be helpful, tend \to make a writer self-conscious. ” - » “I FELT that a writer must do his own work. It should be his unhampered and uninfluenced self at work. If a writer thinks of what such and such a critic will say of his work later, he is diverted to that extent” from the work itself, and he may even do some writing with a specific critic in mind. oir “If a writer writes at anyone, he must write to the very best critic he can evolve out of himself. Many writers develop a critic in themselves superior to the creator in themselves, I believe a writer does best when his creative and critical faculties are balanced. » »” ¥ “THAT IS not to say that a critic cannot be helpful. Just as

help the writer; second, to |

the experienced actor can help the young actor by showing him what is specifically wrong in his performance, so can the critic who himself {3 w writer can “help we other writer.” In art schools, Mr. Tarkington said, students get practical and

over a copy of Mr, Tarkington's "Alice Adams." given a world premiere March 8 by the Indianapolis Civic theater.

fie

“Book Critic Musf Help

NOVEL INTO DRAMA . . . Booth Tarkington and his secretary, Miss Elizabeth Trotter, look

specific criticism from artists who have mastered technique. Writers, he added, can learn most from writer-critics .who..can point out “taeturiend tistakes. FIR, He cited Edgar Allen Poe as a “craftsman-critic.” He spoke of Mark Twain's essay on Fenimore

«EER

Miss Trotter's dramatization of the novel will be

Cooper, in which Twain pointed out the absurdities and inconsistencies in Cooper's novels as a brilliant example of a craftsman'’s

” - ~ “I HAD a letter recently from Kenneth Roberts, who was writ-

PLAIN TALK— At Last: A Sensible Book On Language

"THE 2 OF PLAIN TALK." By * Rudolf Flesch, New York. Harper, $2.50.

THIS is one of the clearest and most sensible and helpful books on language in the last 10 years. A re-write of his Ph. D.

THE FIRST READER

PICTURESQUE NEW ORLEANS

Life In the French Quarter and Another Mildly Exciting Story

Mifflin, $2.50.

bus Circle?

Perhaps the patina of age and the variety of habitations attract authors and artists first, Certainly

dissertation, “The Art of Plain Talk” sets forth Dr. Flesch's suggestions for simplifying language so that more people can understand more things.

People aren't so dumb as they seem, Dr. Flesch says. But even smart people have difficulty with such things as the following gem he quotes from the Federal Register: : “Ultimate consumer means a person or group of persons, generally constituting a domestic household, who purchase eggs generally. at the individual stores of retailers or purchase and receive deliveries of eges at the place of abode of the individual or domestic household from producers or retail route sellers and who use such eggs for their consumption as food.” 8 =» =» . CUTTING away the verbal underbrush, Dr. Flesch translates that ponderous sentence inte “Ultimate consumers are people who buy eggs to eat them,” adding, “You wouldn't have guessed it, would you?” ' Not content with assembling a chamber of language-horrors, Dr. Flesch offers practical suggestions for: simplicity and clarity. - Keep sentences short.” Cut out cumbersome stuff like “in view of the fact that” or “evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.”

id . LJ KEEP ACTION in mind: Who! does what to whom? Personal lan-

guage is easier to understand than. impersonal language. Avoid the kind of thing that makes official army correspondence 50 heavy and funny: “Reference is herewith made,” or “It is hereby ordered that..." Dr. Flesch gives exercises at the end ofgeach chapter. He adds an

appendix containing 1.is “yardstick formula” for figuring out readability. | The yardstick may need some | study. Briefly, it bases readability | on average sentence length and on the percentage of difficult words. | Dr. Flesch lists as difficult words those that contain prefixes or suf- | fixes (“heterogeneous,” “criminol- | ogy").

n ~ ” UNDERSTANDING so - called

learned English takes years of study. A sad thing is that the! students fall in love with what they've worked so hard to learn. So you get such things as tha fol-| lowing bit Dr. Flesch quotes from! The American Sociological Review: | “By heuristie schematisms and devices, we may be able to estab- | lish functionally a concept of the soclal individual which may meet thé requirements in investigating the dynamic variations within the ideal-typical patterns to which we should ordinarily selves.”

ternational language, as Dr. Flesch

work on simplifying it. *

“HARD TO FIND BOOKS"

Would you like to locate that book you read years ago? Let us find it for you—

One of Largest Stocks in Middle West 200 N. MER. (apitol Book Store. 6 Nola

address ourIf English is. to become the in-|

thinks it may, we've .all got to!

it is the decaying beauty of the French quarter in New Orleans that leads writers, painters and photographers to that locality. But as Mary King O'Donnell shows in her book, “Those Other People,” the fina] interest is in human beings, Her story deals with the preoccupations of a group that lives in the French quarter and follows their activities from morn to midnight. There are few incidents in it that are distinctly New Orleans; most of the action could take place on any street. . You start with Leah “Webster, aged 40, getting up with fond memories of an encounter with a’ fellow named Joe and determined to look for him. Nearby her brother George and his wife discuss her sudden infatuation for a man she never met before. Their little daughter Georgiana wonders about the people in the block, Catholics like Mrs. Tarantino, Baptists like the colored families. Mrs. Peralta could sit on. her doorstep all day long and see the world go by. A blinded woman named Dora Klopstock sits pl

to give her $1, inadvertently gives her $10. People go to church, to the store, to the beauty shop; the boys do tap dances in Pirate's alley; tragedy, intolerance, crop up. Life in New Orleans, as portrayed here, is a succession of casual incidents. They hang together be-

{cause a small number of people are

involved. But naturally there is no strong story-telling line. Let's call it a day!

- ” ~ "MOTHER AND SON." By Clarkson Crane. Harcourt, Brace,

$2.50. A MOTHER who thinks too

"THOSE OTHER PEOPLE." By Mary King O'Donnell.

a guitar — George Webster, wishing

Houghton-

. By HARRY HANSON WHAT MAKES certain sections of a city picturesque and capital subjects for stories? Why are the crowded streets of New York's Greenwich Village, just off Washington Square, more picturesque than Colum-

Why do artists prefer the ferries, docks and old, leaning houses of the waterfront to the big apartment houses on Riverside?

risk matrimony a second time is the chief reason for “Mother and Son,” a novel by Clarkson Crane, Helen Wheeler, at 36, has every reason to look forward to remarriage, but invariably her maternal anxieties stifle the free expression of her love for another man. . Three men are out to win Helen's consent while she visits her sister in Berkeley, Cal. One is a robust, blustering artist named Henry Moore, who plays fast and loose with her affections and keeps a mistress on the side. Another is an inhibited teacher of Latin at the university, Roger Bartlett. A third is a rich man, George Congreve, conventional and correct. Whenever Helen is about to let herself go she feels anxious about her son Drake. Her maternal attitude is also expressed toward the men, The story has floodlights on Helen and the son never becomes a character of consequénce. Henry Moore has a coarse strain * that seems overemphasized. The attempt to portray Helen's occupations in her sister's home leads the author to describe many trivialities, and the rest of the story bears out the belief that he is too much concerned with surface behavior, and does not portray the emotional crisis with sufficient force.

Civil War Photos

“Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man,” by Roy Meredith, fcheduled by Scribners for publication Feb. 11, includes 400 Civil war photographs by Matthew Brady. With a horsedrawn dark-room on wheels, Brady

had to make all his famous battle pictures using the old-time wet

much of the welfare of her son to |plates.

CARVER AWARD— Race Novel Best In Field Of Reporting

"MRS. PALMER'S HONEY." A novel. By Fanny Cook. New York. Doubleday, $2.50.

“MRS. PALMER'S HONEY,” a novel about race relations, i- the first winner of Doubleday’s George Washington Carver award. A race relations novel with no morbid or lurid elements may seem tame to people who expect another “Strange Fruit.” But “Mrs. Palmer's Honey” fis probably closer to the important facts and hence, in some ways, more profitable reading. It describes the evolution of Honey from dependable maid in white folks’ houses to leader in her Negro community's struggle for living space, education and jobs. = 5 » THE WRITER, a white woman who is a member of the St. Louis Mayor's Committee on Race Relations, has wisely avoided melodrama. But she does bring out clearly the countless irksome restrictions and humiliations forced on Negroes by white ignorance and prejudice. Her enthusiasm about the C. IL O. and the P. A. C. as aids to Negro progress will offend people who fear active and energetic labor and political groups.

‘Writers..And Pub

he Couldn't get them out of, He asked ‘me what he should make

them do. “My reply was: ‘Don't

do’.”

appreciator of a book he tJ . »

of Dickens' novel.

the same unction he had.

service.”

NOmMe..covesess

Address. . No

self what they would be likely to

“Riley was one of the best critics I ever knew, both of verse and prose. He was the greatest

RILEY once came to the Tarkington home after reading “Great Expectations” for the first time. Booth, a boy of 14, was fascinated by Riley's two-hour re-enactment

“You were so appetized for the book that you read it later with

“The reviewer or critic who can

impart a rich and valid delight to any reader has done a genuine

{or charge my regular account).

BOOK DEPARTMENT

“WEDNESDAY, FEB. 6, 1948

lic

THE 20 BEST—

make". your- |

Public Ubrary circulation.

gaged in compiling statistics

vious months;

tion and 10 best non-fiction

the Wilson Bulletin, lib; magazine,

Road,” Keyes; “The Black

“January Thaw,” Partridge, liked.”

books were:

Schlesinger; “The

| Drake;

“Glorestan.”

of the Heart”

Please send me the following books for which | enclose $............ 1

sense

PIMPIN EIN It sB esses tsettsttearsretatabensnsetannrant SEB es EIEN ster es eRe sages tesnar anne

CANRIIP INN NIE NP ATI reset tss assesses

Ayres & (Co.

January Big Month atl Library Herd

JANUARY seems to have been unusually big month for Cen

Library staff -members now en

lators for January in a report sulf mitted to H. W. Wilson Co. 1d

® » = ! ~ THE 10 busiest volumes of fi tion last month were: “The Ri

Costain; “Cass Timberlane,” Lew

Gauntlet,” Street; “Brideshead F visited,” Waugh; “The Friendly F suasion,” West; “The V orld Flash and Father Smith,” Marsha “Three o'Clock Dinner,” Pinckne and “The White Tower,” Ullman. In non-fiction, the 10 most acti “The Age of Jacksor§l Anatomy § Peace,” Reves; “Perennial Philo jophy,” Huxley; “Black Metropolis Schauffle “Fresh From the Hills,” Lyon; Man From Lebanon,” Young; Egg and 1,” MacDonald; “The Grebanier,” “How Lovely Is the Lea,” Gidding!

“To Orden Pe 7, FY SARL LILI (Yr AP AIL

Serer Nese ss sss rresenmaasdong

EE =S YD RB S§S ——.

ADO!

indications of remarkable activit} although they say it is too ear} to make comparisons with p

Central has listed its 10 best fid

cf |

“i

FLOOR

Some readers may accuse Mrs. | Cook of being much too left-wing, | a charge reflecting the uneasiness] the book may cause. | Id |

to be preachy. “Mrs. ‘ Palmer's Honey” is no exception. It's better |

as a piece of reporting than it is as a novel, |

"GEORGE AGNEW . CHAMBERLAIN'S

IT’S

- inform the reading

for BOOKS

STEWART'S congratulates THE TIMES upon its new book page. We who have served the book buying public for over one hundred years are happy to see the realization of another way to help and

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