In the Realm of Authors and Literature

This Wanderer, By Louis Golding. 307 pp. New York: Fanrar & Rinehart. $2.50.

One can always sit down with a book by Louis Golding with the comfortable knowledge that he will invariably achieve the effect he is after without straining the reader’s credulity. That is three-quarters of the business of successful story-telling. Golding is a craftsman of the old school. Superbly trained, he measures the precise effect he wishes to obtain, goes after it, and gets it. It is this complete imaginative fluency, this handling of illusions as deftly as a stage magician, that gives Golding’s stories the richness and enchantment of a modern Arabian Nights, albeit an Arabian Nights shot through with flashes of realism.

With some regret I must report that Mr. Golding has at least temporarily abandoned Magnolia street and his gusty scenes from the life of the Jews of Doomington. Only three of the twenty-two stories in “This Wanderer” concern Jews at all, and one of these but superficially. Golding was at his best in Doomington; he is equally at home in the several quarters of the globe in which these stories are set, but somehow his observations do not seem to be imbued with the same importance as when he writes of the few square miles in which he was born and bred.

REVERSES DREAMS

The title story is, however, set in Doomington. It concerns a poor Jew who dreamed all his life of the South Sea Islands until the day when, through the death of a rich uncle, he got there. Then he began dreaming of Doomington. “The Haunted Cinema” makes use of an ancient mode of Jewish humor—the device of the rich Jew concerns the legend of a great and bian village for a time, but is in the end outsmarted. Jewish stories are full of this device, but Golding gives it a new form which is not in the least hampered by a modern touch. In the old stories the rich Jew would be a money changer or merchant; in this he is the proprietor of a cinema who wants to use the building which houses the synagogue for his shows. He actually ousts the congregation, but it soon turns the tables on him in one of the best stories in this book.

LEGEND OF A GLASS-MAKER

The last of the Jewish stories concerns the legnd of a great and learned glass-maker to design a rose-window for a cathedral in the South of France long ago. In an effort to outdo his rivals, he turns to magic, and uses the blood of a young Jewish boy in his stain. For 500 years the weeping of the soul of “Le Pettit Rabbin” could be heard high up in the nave, until the church began to fall into ruins. And then the last Jew in a region that once had sheltered many Jews obeyed a secret voice which commanded him to release the imprisoned soul. Golding brings this story to a conclusion with great beauty and delicacy, and what is more, shows a remarkable knowledge of Jewish legend and history.

MAKE GOOD READING

Such stories as “The Man in the White Tie” or “Wimpole’s Woe,” while they are little more than clever spoofing, are entirely enjoyable reading. Golding devotes three stories to the bare-knuckle fistic champions of eighteenth and nineteenth century England. The best of these is “Black Frailty,” in which race-prejudice and vanity break a great buck Negro from Virginia who threatens to win the championship of England.

Finally, among the stories worth mentioning, is a group of three in which Golding, with seeming unconcern and startling success, conjures up illusions of a nature that involved comparison between him and a stage magician. In “The Tatooed Bird” he induces the appearance and atmosphere of a desert liason between a white woman and a native guide into a New York night club. In “Pompeii in Massachusetts,” by way of pointed satire on the follies and exhibitionisms of the extremely rich, he tells how a multimillionaire, vying to shame his moneyed friends, transports Vesuvius bodily from Naples to America—a harmless Vesuvius, so he thinks. But one fine night the imitation volcano belches out fire and destruction upon the millionaire’s foolish world.

TWO SERBIAN WOODSMEN

And lastly, there is a beautiful story of two brothers, Serbian woodsmen, who were born with the bones of the one’s right hand linked inextricably to the other’s left. At first there was complete harmony in the lives of the brothers, but then jealousy over a cheap vaudeville dancer, whom they met on their sole visit to a city, causes a bickering which grows into frenzy as it is aggravated by the close attachment. Finally one of the brothers murders the other and chops his hand free. He then pursues and finds the dancer—but the call of his brother’s hand, the hand which had clutched his for so many years without cease, is too strong. I leave the denouement to Mr. Golding.

“This Wanderer” can be recommended to any and all readers with confidence. It is sure not to tire you, and it probably will charm you. And perhaps someday Mr. Golding will write about Doomington again.