[In the following review of Bad Characters, Tracy calls Stafford a "brilliant writer" but finds some of the stories in the volume too contrived. ]

There was a day when story-tellers could be roughly divided into two species, the writers and the confectioners. The distinction often was one of purpose rather than of talent. Confectioners could write as well as or better than their serious colleagues: it was merely that they wrote to order or with a cool eye for the public taste, a cat that invariably slips out of the bag as time goes by. And some real writers happened to triumph, for the wrong reasons, in the confectionery market as well: whatever highbrow may disparage Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, for example, it is unlikely to be a fellow craftsman, and along with the commonplace mind of Mr. Somerset Maugham goes artistry of a very high order.

Then certain glossies began to aspire to higher things. They took to publishing what they described as "quality fiction," much as rising tradesmen take to "gracious living," and with not dissimilar results. Now they wished to carry the authors they saw published in the little reviews or acclaimed by critical opinion, at the same time adhering sturdily to the faith of their fathers that he who pays the piper calls the tune. It became known that while they deeply cared for Literature they would be more likely to print it if it followed a type or formula or trend favored by themselves. Writers too had grown uppity and full of absurd and extravagant notions, like wanting to eat every day. Without intending to or noticing it many of them, and very good ones too, adapted themselves.

This bee has long been domiciled in my bonnet and now Miss Stafford has set it a-buzzing. How can a writer of her gifts so often resort to devices and conventions that belong properly in a glossy magazine? Surely, because with time and money the glossies have come to be thought respectable, like a bunch of retired Mesdames. Here is all a writer needs—observation, sympathy, humor, a great eye for a theme, a lively way with words and the capacity to break fresh ground; and yet time and again some twist or trick reminds us of that memorable Night at the Opera when the Marx Brothers introduced an alien sheet into the score of a Verdi overture.

The story "Caveat Emptor," a gloriously wicked account of a university in the Middle West where young women fit themselves to become wives and mothers, is an exception to this and so, until right at the end, we think "The Captain's Gift" is going to be. In the latter Miss Stafford does very difficult things with notable success. She describes a good gentle woman without loving her so obviously as to annoy us: she expresses the pathos of age in a troubled world and of innocence in an evil time without being sentimental or mawkish: the setting, a once-elegant quarter now turning into a slum, is well chosen and beautifully described. The Captain is the lady's favorite grandson, fighting the war in Europe, and his gift makes a surprise ending. It would be wrong to divulge what that gift consisted of but, sensational and forced, the one little stroke spoils a fine story.

I grizzle away like this because so much in [Bad Characters] is so fine. The portrait of dreadful little Emily in "Bad Characters" could hardly be better, and if her demoniac acquaintance Lottie Jump is something of a caricature she is a wildly funny one. The family scenes are true enough and vivid enough to cause many a shudder, and for good measure Miss Stafford throws in a swift lethal sketch of a judge, "the personification of recititude" and not, it would appear, her favorite species of man. But then again, with a sudden switch from true comedy to improbable farce she somehow knocks the life out of the story and reduces it to the level of hilarious anecdote.

In "The End of a Career" she plays brilliantly on an unusual theme, namely, the pathetic importance of her beauty to a beautiful woman and her attempts, increasingly frantic as the years pass, to hold on to it. Angelica is indeed true to life, the beauty who rejects all feeling, thought, activity or pleasure that is liable to wrinkle her face, dull her complexion or give her a grey hair. "Perhaps, like an artists, she was not always grateful for this talent of beauty that destiny had imposed upon her without asking leave, but, like the artist, she knew where her duty lay" and so submitted to the daily grind of creams, juices, oils, mud, masks, massages, vibratings, steamings and birchings by a Finn, leading on to the hideous tortures of Dr. Fleege-Althoff s beauty clinic before the final, inescapable, killing defeat. Unlike the artist, however, she suffers without reward, and her suffering is tragically out of proportion to her achievement, which really amounts to little more than being asked everywhere. Here too an outstanding story fails at the end, which mounts jerkily to a climax where it should have died softly away.

In "A Reasonable Facsimile" Miss Stafford does ample justice to a kind of dreadful young man whom many of us will have met. This wretch knows everything about everything, from Catullus to jazz, from mediaeval philosophy to food and wine, he reads innumerable languages, caps all quotations, writes long learned letters to renowned scholars on their own subjects, is never at a loss and never wrong: a stupendous bore, described by everyone as a genius, he makes at first meeting a great impression which fades a little at each subsequent one until at last we flee, howling, at his approach. This particular specimen fastens on a famous but lonely old man who hopes to find in him the son he never had and is gradually, painfully, disillusioned: a poignant tale for all the comedy, and one that is again spoiled at the end by a Saki-like device, extremely funny in itself but utterly out of key.

In these and all the others—except for a short novel, in which Miss Stafford has been unwise enough to attempt a European setting—page by page there is far more to admire than to criticize; and Miss Stafford is a brilliant writer.