London Front. By F. Tennyson Jesse and H. M. Harwood.
(Con- stable. rzs.) THIS is a collection of " private " letters written to America by Mr. and Mrs. Harwood and the replies of their friends, who
include Mr. Alexander Woollcott and Mr. S. N. Behrman. Full of embarrassing personalities—references to " Tiger " and " May " and " Tottie " (who is Mr. Harwood) and Muff (" our cat "), and addressed in such terms as " Dearest All " and " Fryn, darling," they give the reader the rather hot feeling of being the only stranger in an intimate week-end party which goes on and on (the publishers refer to Mr. Harwood's " superb economy of effort," but the family's efforts run to over 450 pages). The title is misleading, for the letters end some months before London did, in fact, become a " Front," and the references to the air-raid syrens during the first week of the war and getting Tonic up (he was a warden) and all the emotional bother—" I was the only person to wake and realise, with a sickening dropping of the heart that I had got Tonic into this "—seem rather silly today. The triviality, self-dramatisation and self-pity of the English letters (" And so farewell, my dears, while we wait to know what else is going to happen. Like Pater's Mona Lisa, we feel that upon our heads the ends of the world are come and our eyelids are a damned sight more than a little weary. I shall go on writing to you and I hope that letters will get through ") are fairly matched, it is only fair to say, by the trivialities and snobberies of the American (" I was in Washington with the Howard play and met many big-wigs, including your Lord Lothian. My real get-together, of course, was with my very good friend Felix Frankfurter, who is now in the Supreme Court.").
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