VOGUE'S EYE VIEW
Cecil Beaton's New York. Illustrated from drawings by the Author and from photcgraphs by the Author and others. (Batsford. tns. Ed.) THE lively jacket of this bOok, and Mr. Beaton's own reputation, make it natural that the reader should come to it expecting a picture book with a little not very important commentary' written around the pictures. The pictUres are, indeed, admir- able whether they are straight photographs or the ingenious compositions that have made Mr. Beaton famous or his drawings that make their point so well. But the text is not negligible. Mr. Beaton is deeply interested in the pictorial sides of life, especially those pictorial aspects that are the results of wealth and leisure or the aspects whose drabness or wretchedness is seen with the eye of a visitor from a pent-house. The political and social problems of modern New York, whether they affect the Bowery or Park Avenue, are not Mr. Beaton's business ; he does make a few not very acute or tecurate statements and reflections', on these themes but their triteness or even their falsity does not -matter. Even the probleffi of race hostility in New York, on which Mr. Beaton might have profitably told us more, is dismissed in a paragraph or two.
" New York contains more people than the other greateit cities of America combined." This is not true from the point of view of the mere statistical counter of heads, but Mr. Beaton's New York contains far more than eight times more people and places worthy of being photographed or written about than do all the big cities of America put together. The range of Mr. Beaton's camera and pen is wide ; the ghettos of the lower east side and The lavish apartments round Central Park ; flop houses and the smart hotels and restaurants ; Roseland and " 21 " ; the automat and the Colony. What is missing is the middle-class sections and suburbs ; they seem dull and no doubt they are. But the smart ladies and the smart hat- check girls, the " colyumists " and the artists, with all their haunts, including those temples of the Bona Dea which were secret to men until Miss Claire Booth got to work ; these men, women and places Mr. Beaton has studied with loving care.
The number of guides to the splendours and miseries of New York is large, but none of them has quite the quality of this one. Mr. Beaton's strong point is his serious frivolity. He does not think that " El Morocco " or the " Algonquin " are of world-shaking importance, yet he thinks that their curious life deserves serious description on its own terms. He never laughs or sneers at his models ; he is aware that "cafe society " is decidedly artificial and, without going to the rude lengths of Variety which once printed an attack on "Cafe, Society on the Cuff," he knows that its appearance of wealth is sometimes more deceptive than its appearance of happiness. - That seriousness has, of course, its drawbacks. It is a friend not an enemy of modern art who writes of drawings by schizo- phrenic children that " it is astonishing to find that compositions which would make demands on the energy and vitality' of ..a trained and mature master are blithely tackled by mentally unsound children." It is Mr. Beaton who tells us that the husband of Mrs. Harrison Williams is " an American Buddha" and that Mrs. Frederick Freylinghuysen " is guilty of such chic that it even permeates her faod:" But perhaps Mr. Beaton, who laments the American distaste for irony that he says he . has observed, is pulling his friends' legs. But Negro homosexuals, the manners of taxi-drivers, the dowdiness of the Metropolitan, the splendours of New York hospitals, all are set down here with clarity and a sense of proportion. Only an ungrateful reader will worry about statistics or be distressed to find, on the same page, the rhythm of a song by Miss Ethel Merman maimed and a puzzling reference to " Raphael's ' La Belle Ferroniere.' " Pedants who can leave their pedantry at home can enjoy themselves in Cecil Beaton's New York—if they don't read his parodies of Time and the New Yorker.
D. W. BROGAN.
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