In the Book and Literary World

Cat across the path. By Ruth Feiner. Translated from the German by Norman Alexander. 380 pp. New York: J. B. Lippincott Co. $2.50.

Ruth Feiner has made her home in London since the advent of the Nazi regime. Before her exile she achieved considerable success as a composer and performer of popular songs, and she has used her knowledge of the ways of band leaders and cabaret owners in her first novel, “Cat Across the Path.” If she had any great stake in Germany that she regrets, if she is troubled by any thoughts about the social or political conditions which made Hitlerism possible, she shows no symptoms in this frothy, romantic story. The German refugees are in an unfortunate position as novelists. There is little that they can add to the vast body of anti-Nazi literature, and yet they write without pertinent reference to the Hitler nightmare only at the risk of inconsequentiality, shallowness and seem#ng callousness. In the case of Miss Feiner’s novel it seems a great waste of emotional energy to pity the three people who get themselves into a tangle for none but romantic reasons.

Well, let’s chalk that up to prejudice, and get back to the novel itself. The early chapters serve to introduce us to as perfect an array of stock characters as we are likely to come across.

There is the pale young man with an inferiority complex, of dull, struggling middle-class fam## (the type ruined by the inflation), gifted with a talent for music. There is the heavy father, ### proverb-mumbler, reaction#ry ear-tweaker. There is the shadowy mother characterized only by her love for her son. There is the #lamorous young friend, also gifted musically, wealthy, kindly, sympa###, who tries to shake our pale young man out of his rut.

There is the old roué, Dr. Egon #iess, noted music critic and se#ucer of women, who is finally #riven into obscurity by a scandal a bit too thick even for him. There ## his lovely daughter, Sula, for #ears languishing in a girls’ school, who suddenly breaks away and mi#aculously steps from job to job in #his world of unemployment until #he meets the wealthy young man and falls in love with him.

Meanwhile our pale young man is living an agonizing #xistence. His father’s shop has been bankrupted, and his forbidden ##ursuit of a musical career has become the only means of his parents’ support. The very fact that #he can play a piano has had to be kept secret from them.

But at last his stream of excuses ### returning home at dawn from #he cabarets where he entertains ### dry, and is forced to confess. His father, instead of exploding, is ### by the thought that he ### let his son, the breadwinner, ### his terms. Our pale young man has lost track of his friend and former benefactor, who has assumed the name of Johnny Grove and become the Jazz King of Europe. With Sula attached to his #ntourage, Johnny is travelling from capital to capital and resort to resort. An American tour in the offing, however, makes it necessary to leave Sula behind. He must appear simon-pure to idol-worshipping. American womanhood. Sula takes his decision very badly, and rushes off in a tantrum.

#he comes upon our pale young ###an in a night club. The one ###isces about the friend and the other about the lover by whom each has been deserted, without realizing that they are the same person. The young man falls in love with Sula, and she, in a fiit of despondency, marries him. She manages to teach him some of Johnny Grove’s tricks, and he makes a partial success of his career. The grand climax comes when Johnny appears on the scene. It seems that everything is a mistake and that Sula belongs to Johnny and that Johnny will once more help our young man on his career. But the young man realizes that he has been patronized all his life and resents it. Crime pasionelle results.

By this time you have gathered that the cat across our young man’s path was black.

There are a lot of hack writers who could make a passable light novel out of this claptrap plot, but. Miss Feiner fails even to do that. Her only forte seems to be the gathering of clichés, and that, we must admit, she accomplishes with meticulous precision. Such is the book for which the publishers, with notable restraint, predict a success which will equal that of “Grand Hotel.”