Our Fortnightly Book Review

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 1, 17 July 1931, Unnumbered Page

Our Fortnightly Book Review

"Women and Children’ Last"

By

Beverley

Nichols

Ww his uew book, with characteristic ™ ebullient ‘wit, Mr. Nichols touches upon many inatters of mirth and moment; plain truths, mordant comment, romance and a touch of fantasy combining to produce a delightful literary pot-pourri. The title of the book, though made the occasion of provocative chat anent the sex with which the dauntless modernist has had many a tilt in the past, is due to the fact that the chapters on Eve’s ways and works come last in the series of sketches, The thin-skinned section of the eternal feminine, with energy and rancour, made vigorous protest against Mr. Nichol’s statements, all of which the debonair young author regarded as part of the fun of the fair. Intelligent women with a sense of proportion and humour, however, will delight in his uncanny intuition and sound conclusions when he states the case for and against their follies, frailties and philosophy. There are those who decry Mr. Nichol’s ability and achievement, and look with disfavour on the brilliant young iconoclast as he hurls defiance at whatever conventional gods there’ be that rouse him to wrath. "Toujours Vaudace" is his motto, and some amusingly scathing criticisms of his elders and betters in the literary field may well be forgiven for the sake for his originality, scope, and quick and ardent sympathy with the underdog. For Mr. Nichols is a humanitarian, though probably he would be the last to admit it, and is ever on the side of the lost, stolen or strayed. In the plainest terms he proclaims the barbarity of the hunt, and anathematises those genial citizens who go off abroad for annual holiday, leaving the household cat to prowl or starve in the gutter. And who but a lover of the blossoming earth could have written the elusive fragment "Wlowers in Winter,’ which concerns the jusmine which flings its sprigs of

dancing yellow stars across the gloomy atmosphere, and the Christmas rose that lifts proud,. pale. flowerets from mud and clay, ae "The Mirror" is a slight, but penetrating story of a Louis Seize mirror, with pouting Cupids linking arms amid garlands of tarnished rosebuds, the exquisite silver surface of which had reflected every secret in the life. of an old-time beauty, now forced to sell this one remaining relic of days of gay romance in a sordid pawnshop in a bystreet. ; "The Poison of Proverbs" makes hay with irritating cliches and catchwords dating from the sapient days of Victoria the Good;-and in "Some Obscure Heroes" Mr, Nichols holds a brief for the Man in the Street, for whom he protests a medal should be struck and inseribed with the words, "For Carrying On.’ And in a small homily on good manners he suggests that scoring over a servant, who is not permitted to answer back, is just about as gallant and amusing a feat as potting a pird in a coop. : "A Piece of Lace" is cynical and clearsighted; and "On Being Alone" an amusing sketch of a haven on the Continent, where he finds solitude divine, where no one can invite him to tea, cocktails, dinner, or wild and woolly parties, and where no one will ving the bell and ask him if he wants a vacuum cleaner or if "the men"? may come in for a minute to "look at" the curtain rods! . Very candid is the writer on the subject of the woman-who-wants-to-be wooed: "Women will never realise that making love, for a man, is akin to 4 hunt for a wild and swift-limbed.quar-ry, over the hills of time and through the woods of the world. It is not always that he would be hunting, there are other things; pauses to be made, dreams to be dreamed, songs to be sung. But for women there is only one thing, and the incense before her

particular star must always be burne ing." He will buy his wife, continues this engaging student of social affairs, a library, containing Meredith’s "Love in a Valley," "Wuthering Heights," and "Old Wives’ Tales," "the latter to re~ mind her that, even if I am a brute, IT am not such a brute as Sophie’s husband, also George Moore’s ‘Eloise and Abelard’ because it is the most beautiful love tale in the English language, and Gibbon’s "Decline and Fal? to giye her poise and induce a feeling of superiority when she is interviewing the Cook!" Description of a Gigolo: "His fine, fatigued profile outlined against @ crazy chaos of snow-white skyscrapers; his dressing-gown from Charvet, designed in triangles of orange and black 5 his cigarettes imported from Benson and Hedges, his clothes from Savile Row, and his terrier from Dublin, and looking, in its cushioned basket, aw though it wanted to get back." Mr. Nichols’s warm humanity keeps cropping up: "If one allows pity to enter for a brief space into one’s heart, that does not align one with the characters of Tchekov, who howl if anybody offers them a five-pound note and seream with horror if they see the sun. . . But every house, at some time or another, is Heartbreak House. Bvery street, at some desolate hour of night or day, is Sinister Street, and every man, however shallow he may seem, has’ known himself, at some turn of the clock, to be despised and rejected of men." :