CONFESSIONS OF ANOTHER YOUNG MAN

By Bravig Imbs '27. Henkle, Yewdale, N. Y., 1936. p. 302. $2.50.

The fact remains that the best index to what went on in the literary world in the Twenties is the magazine transition. The next best thing is Exile's Return by Malcolm Cowley. The new book by Bravig Imbs contributes a few further amusing stories of the outstanding figures of the merry days, and it has some good anecdotes about some of the less well-known people who were part of the "experiment."

However this may be, the Twenties are behind us, and most of the good work done in those years has already found its audience and its place. George Antheil, who was once known as the "bad boy of American music" is well-established as a composer; Thornton Wilder and his students are fighting out the case of Gertrude Stein, with a great deal of dulness and much noise. Pavel Tchelitchew is still painting portraits of the Sitwells; Virgil Thomson is resting on his laurels for his music to "Four Saints in Three Acts." This makes it sure that the excitement is over, and all these people, as interesting as they may be are trying to recapture something which has disappeared almost entirely from the surface. Even the Sur-realists are swinging Left and the little magazines have at least one deep dark menace in every issue, flooding the country with propaganda, but it is more valuable and important than what is gone.

But the major interest of the book is the anecdotes, and if the anecdotes really meant anything, or contributed anything of importance to the problems which we face, it would be much easier to say that the book was worth something. It has two warped stories about Dartmouth, which, I imagine, Mr. Imbs thinks are true. The story of Dean Bill is not bad—it is quite possibly something which may have been said—and it ends with a note on the value of a college degree—but I am afraid that what is noted is not as true to-day as it has been.

"Confessions of Another Young Man" adds nothing to the reputation of the man who wrote "The Professor's Wife," and we shall have to wait until the biography of Chatterton is translated from the French to see what Imbs has to offer that is really worthwhile.