On The Rack

Featured in the January Scribners is the first of four installments of "Tender is the Night," a Riviera romance by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mr. Fitzgerald is one of the many young men who were, in his time, driven to self expression as an alternative to going abroad in a tramp steamer; he is one of the few of them who has learned the mechanics of writing. Everything that comes from his pen has the same brittle competence. One sees the commas, the exclamations, the paragraphs, falling inexorably into place, and the people, the situations, the emotions, falling with them. His attitude, however, to these people at a Second Empire hotel is broader and deeper than his manner would indicate. "Tender is the Night" gives the uneasy impression of being a potboiler as Compton MacKenzie's Italian and detective stories give it; for just as Mr. MacKenzie cannot keep out of his froth, phrased as froth, some of his more sober merit, Mr. Fitzgerald gives us disturbing glimpses of a kind of writing different from any that he has ever done. Mr. MacKenzie does the other kind, often; perhaps Mr. Fitzgerald will do it some day, also.

Lincoln Steffens, in an interview with the devil, performs an amusing tour de force by identifying satan with that above all things which Mr. Steffens hates--the instinct of conservatism, the blind lust to save things which we do not understand or evaluate. More pretentious, and less satisfying, is a homily on the institution of marriage by Andre Maurois. M. Maurois fights hard to preserve his urbanity, but through it all glitters that most distressing of phenomena, the putter-to-rights, who is just as alien an element in magazines as he is in the drama, where he contents himself with engineering the situation that brings everything off. He is a clumsy device on the stage; he is clumsier, because more explicit, in the written homily.

Carleton Beals contributes a detailed criticism of the Montevideo conference, happily free of the old saws and penetrating on the real extent of the concept of good will. There is a salve, in story form, on the installment buying system by William Trufant Foster; and a very, very conventional restatement of the silver argument, this time called "Honest Inflation," by one Edward Tuck. The most valuable contribution to Scribners comes from V. F. Calverton. Mr. Calverton is concerned with a sane revaluation of Thomas Paine, and he shows that among the many ironies of Paine's life, the most bitter was his persecution for godlessness on the basis of "The Age of Reason," which is obviously the work of a very religious man, and was really called forth as a sane alternative to rationalism. Mr. Calverton has strongly marked the political contrast between Franklin and Paine; the smugness of Franklin's "Where liberty is, there is my country" sounds fat and disagreeable after Tom's "Where liberty is not, there is mine."