Sunday, October 13. 1%3 BOOKS I Wheeling & Dealing * In The Poker World THE CINCINNATI KID. By Richard Jessup. Little, Brown. 152 Pages, with appendix. f 3.95. By J. A. C. DUNN Like an icepick, the Kid gets straight to the viscera and stays there. The Kid is, by most stand ards, still a relative kid; but he came up hard. At 26 he is ready to meet The Man. “From thirteen to sixteen he began to feel the cards. They became more than just instru ments of making money for the movies or a new pair of shoes, which was a very common de vice used by all of his friends. Out of these quiet, very desper ate little penny games in alleys and on the decks of abandoned barges, on wintry street comers, the raw shoeshine boys’ poker began to grow and he began to grow with it and when he had grown old enough, he began to hope there was away open for him; and once he had discovered his feel for cards was real and genuine, an urgency began to rise in him and gain strength.” Unless some idiot ballyhoos him to death, Mr. Jessup will very probably develop even further the same "feeling,” but for words. You hope an urgency to do so is rising in him and gain ing strength. You wouldn’t do either party the disservice of calling him another Hemingway. Who needs one, to begin with; and Mr. Jessup does not quite have Mr. Hemingway’s effortless abruptness in any case. But he has something else. “The Cincinnati Kid” is “The Hustler” of the stud poker world, and let Mr. Jessup try to deny that. But it doesn’t matter. The story is much the same: the new young genius tangles in a mara thon poker game with the old hoary king of the deck, and the girl gets rubbed raw in the re sulting friction. The book is so visual that you find yourself cast ing the movie version, in some instances with the same people who played in “The Hustler”: Lutherans Hold Dinner Tuesday The annual Fall Fellowship Dinner of the Northern District of the Lutheran Church Women of North Carolina Synod will be held Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Augs burg Lutheran Church in Win ston-Salem. Dr. Mark Depp will be the guest speaker. A program of music will be pre sented by the Lutheran Church Women of Christ and Epiphany Lutheran Churches of Winston- Salem. Among those expected to at tend will be Mrs. Paul Stout, President of the Lutheran Church Women of North Carolina Synod, and Mrs. D. E. Perryman, Dis trict Chairman. EmYTHWe M BOOKS THE BOOK EXCHANGE What’s Going on at the Intimate Gore and Crime I In Old Book Corner | This week and lor the next two weeks The Intimate is going to offer a truly astonishing col lection of books on crime and the law. Beginning with 18th Century im prints. and running to the recent post, this gory eoßeetion consists of books and panyhlets, many illustrated, and all contemporary accounts of murders, trials for treason, and other grim evidences of man’s tahamonity to man-nad We think you'll enjoy looking over this collection—and we know that if you’re looking for an ab solutely unique Christmas gift for a lawyer friend, or 41 writer, this is a goed bet for yea. Drawings Hold Over The collection of luprednctbap of great drawings which we put out last week was sack a rearing sow THE INTIMATE BOOKSHOP 119 East Franklin Street Open Til 10 P.M. ■ v WF V RICHARD JESSUP George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason, the group. But when you get to the end, the story doesn’t really make any difference. There is very little of it, and the important thing is something very personal. It probably varies from person to person, but, like a n icepick, you know it when it’s in you. Your reaction will depend on where you have been stuck. Some people, non-poker buffs likely, will feel its long-range, emotion ally cancerous poignancy in the throat. Young people oriented to youth will take it square on the chin, or in the heart. Poker devotees will simply salivate all over every page. In the end you feel as though you have just spent several months in a gray tinted sort of subterranean world whose inhabitants are almost pathologically shy, who spend their days in an atmosphere of constant secret calculation, and who are known by names like Pig, Yeller, Big Nig, Old Lady Fingers, Die Shooters, Wildwood Jones. It all sounds reminiscent of Damon Runyon, but somehow it also sounds very real. It may well be. Mr. Jessup was once a * dealer in a Harlem gambling house. i Mr. Jessup’s writing is like a > halyard in a high wind: taut and lean. He does not let the pace of his story break away, but he does not need hurrying either. He , seems to be one of those unusual people who knows when to use the King’s English, and when to use a colloquialism. He is also 1 sensitive to how much people say at one time when they speak. His novelistic carpentry is craft ily deliberate, but his craftsman • ship is invisible. And how re freshing it is to find someone who doesn’t end a book by run ning out of story twenty pages before the end and plunging for refuge into a river of slop. rcess that we wired off ter more, and will hold the display over for another week. As we write this, the new supply Is still somewhere ob the road, and we’re keeping oar fingers crossed! If you haven’t looked these over, don’t miss them. We think they are the biggest dollar’s worth we’ve seen lately and you folks seem to agree with us. Miser OhH-Obai... Hottest titles on am own private best seller list are JOY IN THU MORNING, by Betty Smith (our* are autographed copies), SECURI TY, the little fhrffy bit hy the author of PEANUTS, and THE GROUP, Maiy McCarthy’s sensa lloml ncm fiovcL (Ed hooks are pouring hi at a faster rate than ever before. Dis tinguished coDectioas will be pat oat aa teat as we can process them, hut la the meantime there is what you might call a canstaat gentle rain of nice minor titles onto the 17c and 71c ahthms. Come troawsii haul fog and aha. Fitzgerald’s Biographer At UNC In Search Os Thomas Wolfe By W. H. SCARBOROUGH Andrew Turnbull has an af finity for monumental tasks. He has been in Chapel Hill for the past week working at one he intends to become the de finitive biographer of Thomas Wolfe. . The Wolfe scent has been in his nostrils for a year-and-a half now, and Mr. Turnbull ex pects to be following it for an other three years at least. Un der the circumstances one might expect his enthusiasm to Hag or at least to be of low intensi ty. If anything, Mr. Turnbull’s joy for the chase seems to be growing. For one thing he is now a veteran biographer; his life of the late F. Scott Fitzgerald has won praise and made for him a reputation as a meticulous scholar, a writer capable of blending drama, color and ac curacy into a literary genre all too often characterized by drab factuality. He has waded into the moun tain of legend and myth sur rounding Wolfe in hopes of find ing a man who at some point stood distinctly separate from his fiction. He has a theory that Wolfe the man is every bit as fascinating as Wolfe the illu sion and that no coherent, realistic picture of this man exists. To that extent he is a true biographer as opposed to a lit erary historian; he treats his subject almost novelistically in his writing, but the writing is based on cold fact derived largely from non-literary sources. He is re-creating Wolfe, not from Wolfe’s autobiographical novels, but from people who knew him— from thousands of scraps of personal reminiscence, from letters, from any source of di rect contact with the men. He hopes the end result will be a portrait as near life as it can get without actually breathing. In Chapel Hill Mr. Turnbull has been going through the large mound of Wolfe materials in the North Carolina Collection of the University Library for hints and leads. He has also been (seeking out and inter viewing people in the area who knew Wolfe, whether they knew him well and were friends with him for years, or knew him on ly slightly and had only one encounter with him. Already he has tracked Wolfe through Harvard Univer sity, where his unpublished manuscripts are lodged; he has been to Asheville, and to Eu rope where the few faint traces of his visits there have not been obliterated by war and time. Although Wolfe died 25 years ago, the Wolfe spoor is still heavy in the land. This means for Mr. Turnbull a tremendous ly complicated job of gather ing and digesting unnumbered, often unrelated bits of informa tion. Sometime within the next two years they will begin to coalesce into an entity. Mr. Turnbull took a couple of hours off from his labors last week to talk about them and biography as he conceives it. He has, he admits, been strug- Through The Ages With Cut-Out Patterns CRUSADES AND CRINO LINES. By Ishbel Rots. Har per and Row. S7t Pages. fijOO. By JOAN BISSELL Take Saratoga in the sum mer of 1840: it is the mecca for ’’pohticiano, dandies, office hold era, office seekers, fortune hunt era, anxious mothers with love ly daughters.” In short, it is tee resort. Place a fashion eon •ekHis girt of fourteen in this setting, and you have Ellen (Nell) Louise Curtis, destined to revolutionize the fasiiion world. Watching the ladies stroll or ride in carriages through Sara toga’s streets. Nell would mem orize the cut of their bonnets. After returning home, she would copy them, many of which had been made in Paris for the wives of wealthy plantation own ers who summered in Saratoga. By the age of eighteen, Nell had made arrangements to re ceive special training from the local milliner. She subsequent ly added dressmaking and de signing to her talents. In the 1850’s Nell moved to New York to test her skill on discerning ladies who would be highly critical of anything less than the beet end the best still came from Paris. Thus, Ishbel Ross lays the groundwork for Nell to meet William Jennings Demorest, a widower who was intensely in terested in fashions and mer chandising and who had already had some degree of success in selling women’s cloaks. Demo THE CHAPEL HILL WEEKLY gling with Wolfe. “How do you write a biography of an auto biographical writer you’ve nev er known,” he asked with a hint of rueul amusement. Then he told how; “I’m try ing to draw that fine line be tween Wolfe the person arid the projection of himself he gave in his novels. I want to do this by bringing out the people around him. You can’t do this by ‘let ting Tom say it.’ If you do, you get this fine mist of Wolfe over everything. I want to ind out what, the smaller man was really like.” One of the persons around Wolfe. Maxwell Perkins, who was Wolfe’s close friend and editor for most of his produc tive life, actually set Mr. Turn bull on the project. Mr. Turn bull had thought seriously about a biography of Perkins, who played literary godfather to many of the literary giants of the twenties and thirties. “But you can t hang a whole book on Perkins his life was too meager, he was too sub servient to the writers he edit ed.” In away Mr. Turnbull will do a biography of Perkins with in the biography of Wol.e. and Wolfe, who depended on Perk ins so much, will be the win dow. “I first read Wolfe in 1943. He is not an adolescent writer. ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ con tinues to be the book of Amer ican adolescence, but Wolfe's range went way beyond that; he could capture sickness and death and loneliness as no oth er writer. I'm sympathetic to a lot of the things people use to pan him. He was interested in life, and this was the import ant thing, not the structure of his novels. To apply the" stand ards of Henry James or of Flau bert is unfair. The novel was his best form, but he spilled out of that even. He is essen tially like Whitman in that.” Wolfe and Fitzgerald were polar opposites in most respects, but they seem to respond to similar treatment. Wolfe* by his own admission was a “putter inner” who attempted to cap ture life by recording as much of it as possible; Fitzgerald tended to be something of a "leaver-outer,” who exercised careful selection of material. "I welcome the difference,” Mr. Turnbull said. Mr. Turn bull became a biographer by a circuitous route to say the least. He was born in Baltimore under such circumstances that Fitz gerald became a neighbor dur ing his boyhood. But he had no thought of using his knowledge of the novelist until decades lat er. He took an undergraduate degree in English and French at Princeton, then served in World War II in the Navy. Picking up the academic skein again, he took a doctorate in European history from Har vard, worked in Europe for a few years and became a teach er in humanities at Massachu setts Institute of Technology. “But I had always been in terested in writing of some sort,” he said. “I was interested in a broad- rest’s work with ladies’ fash ions brought him into contact with Nell. Their marriage mark ed the beginning of a profitable association: what Nell could de sign, Demorest could market. A natural promoter, Demorest recognized the advertising ad vantages in publishing one's own fashion magazine. Conse quently,