NON-FICTION

"Rasuldllah"

The Prophet.* The citizens of Mecca, about 610 A. D., were idly curious when Mohammed, a jovial but second-rate trader of their town, contracted the habit of repairing to a cave in the hills nearby, sometimes alone, sometimes with his elderly wife or a slave, to perform secret things for days at a time. Perhaps, it was thought, he was counterfeiting. But this Mohammed, a shambling wight of 40, was a standing, harmless joke. Epileptic as a boy, he had later acquitted himself with notable lack of distinction in the trading caravans. He was no fighter. A rich widow, years his senior, enamored of his stature and features, had taken him unto her, a slothful, pampered husband. If he were counterfeiting in his cave, he would probably do it badly and get caught.

But soon hopeless spinsters, Abyssinian slaves, beggars and poor cousins of Mohammed leaked it out that his vigils were to confer with the angel Gabriel, who was repeatedly confiding that of the sundry gods then worshiped in Arabia, Allah was the only god and he, Mohammed, was His rasul (prophet). The powerful Koreish clan in Mecca scowled. Mohammed's friends, now dubbed Moslems (traitors) found it best to keep his revelations secret. It was four years before their number was great enough for him to broach his mission openly in Mecca.

His intensely admired technique was this: with his stentorian auctioneer's voice he would bellow, snort and puff and a draw a crowd; well observed, he then swooped a blanket over his head, writhed, snored, groaned, popped forth drenched with sweat (even "on the coldest day") and cried out fresh news from Allah. Frantic scribes would hasten to scrawl his syllables, whether intelligible or not, upon palm leaves, leather, stones, bones, or the breasts of bystanders. Each utterance was a sura (verse); the collection became the Koran, a marvelous conglomeration of divine edicts, personal justifications of and promises to Mohammed, paraphrases of Jewish folklore and inscrutable foreign catchwords thrown in like sacred seasoning. Occasionally there came a flash of lofty poetry. Whether or not he was a fake medium, a paranoiac, epileptic, self-deluded, oversexed demagog, Mohammed was undoubtedly a grand and grotesque figure with a good memory and a shrewd pagan appraisal of Moses and Jesus as capable men who had founded religions by giving their subconscious selves free rein.

Islam. Allah, like his new servants, was nomadic and whimsical. Often as not He left Mohammed in the lurch, at first. The indignant Koreish drove the Moslems out of Mecca into the hills one winter. But soon Allah was well-behaved and sharp-eared again. He revealed a splendid opening for an up-and-coming prophet at ancient, paradisaic Medina up the Red Sea coast. There, Jews were noxious, Arabs uneasy. After cautious reconnoitering, Mohammed sent his band thither on the so-called Great Hegira. No harm ensuing, he followed later in holy triumph on his long-lived she-camel, Al-Kaswa, whom he permitted to choose the site of his new abode, a good browsing spot on the Medina town green. Up went the mosque on that spot. Bilal, a blackamoor, was first muezzin. Medina prayed seven times daily and reported for church on Fridays.

Followed years of gore and glory, for Mohammed entertained no silly qualms about bloodshed and brigandage for pious ends. He never went in for miracles, but calculated a paradise that Arabs would gladly die for, abundant in food, wine, ease and "full-bosomed" houris. Ignorant in most things (he once forbade the artificial fecundation of date palms, precipitating a famine), he violated Arabian chivalry by employing his brains in war; adopted entrenchment and always watched fights alertly from a safely distant hill. Militarily secure, he accomplished great pilgrimages back to the holy well, Zemzem, at Mecca. Before his death from pleurisy in 632, all Arabia was Allah's footstool, with good prospect of Syria, Byzantium and India being lined up for accessory furniture.-

The Man. His avocations were cobbling his sandals, darning his clothes, tarring his camels' feet, praying, marrying. His "divinely conferred preeminence" (as in the later case of lusty Brigham Young) brought handsome women flocking to him, from every part of the rocky, sandy peninsula. His frequent nuptials (not counting concubinations) were usually preceded by revelations, which only one of the wives, irreverent young Ayesha, ever presumed to suspect. He consoled a dying wife with the assurance that his arrival in heaven was eagerly awaited by Moses' sister (Kulthum), Potiphar's wife and the Virgin Mary.

Tall and muscular, he kept his hairless, perfumed bronze body immaculate, especially his teeth, "white as hailstones," which stood far apart from assiduous picking. He eschewed jewelry but put antimony on his eyebrows to sharpen his sight. He let a black wilderness of beard riot down to conceal one thin line of fur on his deep chest, but he clipped his mustache. On special occasions he shaved his poll. Divinely conferred, a large mole adorned his back.

His favorite foods were dates, pumpkin, mutton. He slept on his right side, with his most holy hand supporting his most holy cheek. No flies, it is said, ever alighted on him.

The Significance. Mohammed's presumable life has now been extricated, in flesh and blood, with diverting irony, from the pros and cons of scholiasts. Allah figures in the tale as Mohammed's yes-man. For a more serious and comprehensive study of Allah, Arabia and Islam (though not of Mohammed), read Doughty's tremendous Travels in Arabia Deserta--Boni & Liveright ($10).

The Author. Roy Floyd Dibble, a. gentleman of 39, obtained a Ph. D. at Columbia University in 1921 and later instructed there, in English. Soon after its inception, the American Mercury enlisted his caustic nib, as has the Century Magazine. Last year he caused widespread delight with a biography of the late and eminent pugilist, John L. Sullivan (TIME, April 20, 1925).

FICTION

Sage of Burwash

DEBITS AND CREDITS--Rudyard Kipling--Doubleday, Page ($2).

Mr. Kipling has not "kippled," in storybook form, for ten years. When he did so last week, it caused a minor sensation (see p. 10). It is a meaty volume, 14 short stories and 21 pieces of verse, all new to folk who do not follow McCall's Magazine and the Metropolitan.

Of the verse, there is little to be said except that none of it is sonorous, most of it is abstract, all of it is moralistic. Here is an old-time bard trying manfully to "whang 'is bloomin' lyre" to the rhythms of his youth. Truth, Love, Power, Glory, Toil, Faith, Hope and kindred "waiting seraphs" are invoked on the bare strength of their names. Of the lurching lot of lines, the best are those called We and They, a merry jingle by a child.

The stories, of course, are as good as ever. None surpasses the Sage of Burwash at yarning in dialects of all sorts. There are Tales of '15 and of '16--Tommies in France, jack-tars in the North and Irish Seas and on shore leave. One tale is laid in Spain: a favorite bull saved from the arena. Another arises' from Mr. Kipling's having ventured to cross the English "midlands" (London to Manchester), where his car broke and he was joined by an Omaha realtor. He has a lot of fun telling about it. Particularly welcome are some additions to Stalky & Co. (schoolboys), with the ingenious Beetle "swottin" (studying hard), and the imperious Stalky directing, their precious educational pursuits.

For Gluttons

MR. AND MRS. HADDOCK IN PARIS, FRANCE--Donald Ogden Stewart--Harper ($2).

It is hard to describe intentionally funny books. You either laugh, in this one, or you don't, when Will Haddock cannot get into the lavatory on the Cherbourg-Paris train; when "bastard" and "vomit" and "cockeyed liar" trip lightly from little Mildred's tongue; when Mrs. Haddock removes eggstain from her spouse's trousers and is told that the town they are passing through is Cabinets Gratuits. Most people, somehow, do laugh uproariously. Funnyman Stewart, a great josher, gets them so thoroughly off guard a few times that his weaker cracks keep them wobbling. Not the steadiest moment comes when Mr. Haddock engages Lecocq, the light-ning-change French detective, to shadow the evidently wicked Mrs. Haddock in her daily round of cathedrals and cemeteries just after little Mildred's attack of indigestion. Considerable latitude is taken by Funnyman Stewart these days in the matter of sudden and inexplicable appearances. It is all rather like Alice in Wonderland-- a book that has been thought funny for years. Gluttons for amusement will do well to investigate this latest Haddock excursion out of Author Stewart's native Legion, Ohio.

John Lord

The Story* is of that creature so exceedingly difficult to bring convincingly to paper, a genius. John Lord's mother and father were singers of note. His sister Edith never evinced anything above a talent for housekeeping, but in him, from his English schooldays, through his briefly brilliant writing days, to his premature and exceptional death, the intensities of his parents were fused to a new, definitely superior and self-sufficient original whose peer the U. S. had seldom seen. If you want to take John Lord realistically, think of a composite of Richard Harding Davis, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane.

Author Dewing's approach to her character is, like him, unique. The story is not told straight out; she pretends to collaborate with John's mother, evoking his image and career piecemeal from the recollections and letters of people who knew him; from news cutting about him, interviews, reviews of his books. (There is one review "by"

H. L. Mencken). The result is most vivid, so many unexpected angles appear, so cleverly arranged. There are letters from the mother's onetime butler to his wife in England; letters from a sea captain with whom John rounded the Horn; letters between John's meat-packing Chicago in-laws; letters and statements of his women, "good, bad, but never indifferent."

John Lord was with his mother in England after her divorce. He worried and awed his schoolmasters, surpassing at games and studies alike, developing an early admiration for Napoleon and others to whom victory came naturally. He took his successes simply; handled life as easily as his fine body. He had the quality of inoffensive aloofness, coupled with immense vitality and sure purpose.

His father, gay Seely Lord, who sang at the Metropolitan when Caruso was elsewhere, was delighted when John returned to New York to find himself the father of such a youth. There was something princely in the way he posed, astride an otherwise unmanageable black stallion, for Sculptor St. George; in the calmness with which he retrieved and accepted the handkerchief and door key dropped at his feet by his first woman, a reigning and inaccessible beauty.

After he published his first novel, a boldish tale for its day (1902), it was not adulation but inherent self-confidence that made him vault the footlights in Richard Mansfield's theatre one afternoon and offer that gruff celebrity a play. Mansfield commissioned him. With the aid of Silk Goshen, his mother's Jewish impresario and second husband, he spent a hermit year in a fishing colony off the Maine coast. The play was written and accepted, but what it was, except "about the Civil War," the world never knew. Mansfield died and for friendship's sake, John Lord destroyed his first play. Out of the same year, however, came a narrative poem of the sea, for which he received the International Prize.

Thus exalted, John Lord proceeded to write melodrama and farce comedies for Broadway, not to be flippant but in all honest gusto. And it was then that he pursued and married Bernice Harden, icy and feline. After he had consumed the inner fire she had for him, turned openly to Eva Freyne, a hard worldling, and written his greatest book, Bernice forced him back to her and delicately smothered his life--until the War. What the War meant to him, and why he did what he did in an airplane, are his ultimate revelation, made by himself in a letter which is better read than retold.

The Significance. This not only should be but probably will be one of the celebrated novels of the year. The author's real desire to interest, inform, amuse and move her reader is felt and fulfilled without visible effort. There is wit, grace, fine feeling and a style which, while lively, never begs applause. The people are so real that there will be endless discussion of who is actually who: Sculptor St. George is Sculptor Saint-Gaudens, and so on. If the fabrication of fictitious letters and other personalia are remarkable, the character relations are even more so, especially the courteous, humorous, almost tender friendship between the divorced senior Lords. There is no "diddle-diddle-dumpling" about My Son John. After the prevailing diet of pink-tea fiction, John Lord and his story are strong, black coffee.

The Author. E. B. Dewing, daughter of artistic Anglo-Manhattan parents, privately educated, was not very old when she presented herself to a startled publisher as the author of Other People's Houses, a novel which he was eager and fortunate to publish. That was 17 years ago when girls just out of their teens simply did not write novels, let alone good ones. She carried the thing further with A Big Horse to Ride (1911) and queened it in all the studios that counted. Then, abruptly, she stopped writing,. married and went out to Washington, to raise hogs and struggle with a husband of whom the less said the better. She bore two girls. The valley was a weird one, thinly settled with religious fanatics, half-breed Indians, escaped murderers. Not for three years did she return to New York, free again, with her girls to support. She worked on newspapers and the stage. She met and married Carl Bender, a Danish artist, who sympathized with her instinct for writing and encouraged the project of her present work. The New York to which she goes back in its pages is the New York of her girlhood, speculatively remembered. That she had lately to send Mr. Bender home to Denmark, an incurable invalid, did not lighten her labors. The Dewing girls, Mary and Elizabeth Ann, attend a Manhattan convent of English nuns.

* MOHAMMED--R. F. Dibble--Viking Press ($3). * Last year there were in the world:

Christians 566,201,000 Confucionists & Taoists 301,155,000 Mohammedans 219,030,000 Hindus 210,400,000 Animists 136,325,000 Buddhists 135,161,000

* MY SON JOHN--E. B. Dewing--Minton, Balch ($2).