Morleyana

THE Morley "essay" is a peculiar literary form, neither fish, flesh, nor, fowl. It combines a bit of Chesterton with a good deal of Winchell, and now and then a touch of Mencken or Edgar Guest, to make a distinctive type of chatty writing. As a rule, his sketches are neither very amusing nor very dull. His most recent collection. "Internal Revenue", follows the norm, save that less of it is amusing and more of it is dull.

Mr. Morley's genius is reportorial rather than creative, analytic rather than synthetic. His forte is to break up nothing into its component parts. The big discovery of his life was, the saleability of trivia, set down in nice short sentences, and embellished by an occasional bright idea. So, from the fact that a French filling-station attendant in Quebec had never heard of Socony gasoline, to the no less interesting fact that sufficient okilchao will produce a walking pass-out sans hangover, he notes down everything which makes an imprint on his consciousness in his little brown note-book, later to be transcribed into essays and transmuted into shekels. There's lots of the Morley personality injected, because Morley is a genial, big-hearted, good-living man, and people like to hear about him and what he thinks of apple pie.

"Internal Revenue" contains a widely assorted group of impressions, experiences, and other scraps gathered here and there between Bermuda and Hawaii, plus a few literary appreciations and a rotogravure section. The rotogravure section contains photographs of treasures culled from the author's scrapbook--holographs, playbills, autographed pictures, manuscripts. The best part of the book is the chapter titled "Briefcase", containing essays on literary subjects, beginning with a delightful appreciation of Louis Hind's "100 Second Best Poems" and ending with an almost moving discussion of Remarque's "The Road Back". The worst part of the book is that headed "Three Newsreels", in which the contents of three issues of a New York newspaper are listed with pitiless cruelty (to the reader), unrelieved through twenty-five pages of triviality and insipid humor.

It is not to be denied that Mr. Morley gives a picture of the American scene which might well be intensely interesting a hundred years hence. But it seems doubtful that any one will be reading his books even twenty years hence, and at present Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Menken giving life to observation by an injection of thought, reduce Mr. Morley's work to the status of momentarily enjoyable small talk by a nice, whimsical man with an engaging manner and not much else.