Things I Don't Remember. By Jeanne de Casalis. (Heinemann. 9s.
6d.) Without Veils. By Sewell Stokes. (Peter Davies. 15s.) THIS lightweight—featherweight, I might almost say—collection of stories by Jeanne de Casalis shows an actress's eye for the little gestures and turns of phrase which make a character, but she has little sense of incident and not much idea how to begin or to end a story. The way she adds charming little touches of inauthenticity in her American story is striking—so is her fumbling with the fiction writer's greatest offence—pretending it is true.
Sewell Stokes's " intimate biography " of Gladys Cooper is pretty lightweight, too, though there are buried in its rambling pages quite a few biographical facts of the sort which helps to put an actress into her correct proportion. There is every sign that an autobiography would have been a livelier work. Miss Cooper seems perfectly capable of writing it in a buoyant style with little drops of acid, as this : "You'd think too, wouldn't you, that by this time even film fans had realised that a star off the screen can look very different to a star on it ? To say the camera can't lie simply isn't true. It's the business of a film camera to lie—and lie handsomely. I still remember what a surprise I had when I first met Mary Pickford."
G. 176
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