An Exciting Chaos
The Star-Spangled Manner. By Beverley Nichols. (Cape. 7s. 6d.) THERE is real power in Mr. Beverley Nichols' new book. It is the best thing he has yet done. Perhaps America suited his temperament : at any rate, he has been able to see beneath the surface and report with his accustomed vivacity and more than his usual insight upon many aspects of the most interest- ing civilization in the world.
Mr. Nichols would like every young Englishman to pin this statement on his bedroom mantelpiece, " / am dependent for my future existence upon the industry of England. The basis of industry is the home market." He is convinced that young Englishmen do not realize these things. If you remind them " that Ford is producing fifty cars to Morris' one (I don't know the real proportion) all that they say is ' How terribly energetic of him.' If you tell them that America is about to found an Empire in the South, they only smile charmingly and say, ' What fools the Americans are to attempt anything so tiresome.' . . . Theirs is a delightful, obviously amusing attitude. I could say the wittiest things, in that vein, myself. But I dare not. Because I am afraid." American prosperity is not inevitable. It is the result of energy, enthusiasm, and advertising. When Mr. Nichols was at Fort Worth, a town of about a hundred and ten thousand inhabitants, he went to a local industrial exhibition and found it an amazing example of civic enterprise, with its streets of exhibits brilliantly lighted and crowded with business men. " The candy section alone contained more interesting material than all the dreary miles of bottled gooseberries and stuffed sheep " which were displayed at the British Empire Exhibition. Advertising to-day, says Mr. Nichols, " is as important to England as was ammunition during the War." All this has been said more weightily before, but not more wittily. And it will be read by many Young people who do not study statistics and trade reports.
But Mr. Nichols likes his America too well to pretend that he does not love England more. America has something to teach us, something we should learn if we would live as a nation of forty millions on a small island, but he is frank —sometimes vulgar—sometimes brutal—in his criticisms. Not always is he right. His psychology of American women, for instance, assumes that it is possible to generalize about the sex of that Continent. We believe that to be quite fallacious. The women of America, like those of Europe and Asia, have no common denominator but humanity.
The least successful and yet most characteristic essay, is that dealing with Colonel Lindberg, " the American Prince of Wales." Here youthful enthusiasm bubbles up, and we late Mr. Nichols all the better for it, but we get no picture Of the hero except that he must be poles away from the author. One of the best essays contains a bright thumbnail picture of Mr. Chaplin in his servant's pantry, mimicking a soap-box orator in Hyde Park. Mr. Chaplin is inspired by as deeil-
seaied a hatred of injustice and pOverty as any Communist, says Mr. Nichols (we should hope that Mr. Chaplin is fir sincerer), and " with his eyes blazing, hair awry, and clenched fingers," we see him calling upon the wrath of heaven in It speech which " is a clever argument as well as a superb effort of mimicry."
There is much travel and thought in these light pages, much shrewdness mixed with persiflage. An almost random passage must suffice as a sample of the method employed :—
" America has conquered Time. With a snap of her metallic fingers she has flicked the hands of the clock to any period of history she has desinad. Her surgeons have lifted thousands of ancient faces to the fresh skies of youth, her decorators have battered many a virgin forest into the wreckage of Age. The result is an exciting chaos. Which is not a bad description of the entire continent."
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