An Eye on the Modern Century: Selected Letters of Henry McBride

Whether the fare was Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts, Picasso's or Marcel Duchamp's paintings or Gertrude Stein's prose, critic Henry McBride (1867-1962) was noted for his friendly, upbeat acceptance of modernist art, literature and music in such avant-garde periodicals as the Dial. McBride could make it all seem cozy and friendly, in part because he enjoyed friendships with many vital creators during his long lifetime. As a youngish tourist, McBride is not brilliant: ""Botticelli is not so tremendous to me as he used to be."" Starting a journalistic career in 1912 at 45, he approved heartily of modern artists like Juan Gris, but saved his case making for his criticism. At times, McBride seems to have been a rotten judge of character: he found the young Nelson Rockefeller ""really a nice lad."" In 40 years of letters to friend Malcolm MacAdam, he camps it up genteelly, probably coming the closest to his real-life intimate talking style, joshing for example about Thornton Wilder's being the ""friend intim "" of boxer Gene Tunney. McBride hints elsewhere at the amusingly gossipy personality he clamped down on in public and which did not stray, even in the letters, into intimate detail. (Editor Watson refers to McBride as ""openly not heterosexual."") Students and less formal fans of modernism will want to check out this informal champion's quotidian, but they will find few of the kind of revelations that make for good hype. (Jan.) Forecast: If stores with solid selections of lesser-known modernist literature stock this book along with McBride's selected criticism, The Flow of Art (also from Yale), or with the recent Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America (Forecasts, Oct. 16) and Stravinsky's Lunch (Forecasts, Oct. 9), could attract a bigger audience than it otherwise might.