I WONDER if there was ever a time when the world was more dead set against war. And I wonder if other citizens, other veterans, share with me in the difficulty of bequeathing this abhorrence to those who come after. To study the pictures in the photographic history, The First World War, which has been edited by Laurence Stallings (Simon & Schuster, $3.50), is to be reminded, not of the wine, women, and medals, but of the utter waste of 1914-1918. The war albums of L’Illutration, whieh I possess, deliberately glorify the Allied arms, and quite naturally the pictures in Die Woche did the same for Germany. But this new collection of five hundred photographs speaks with universal compassion; these pictures come from all fronts. Some of them are beautiful in composition, others stark and pitiable. In their association, in their captions, is an irony which shocks the mind, as Mr. Stallings intended it should. History, says Santayana, is merely memory aided and directed. If our national conscience is ever to be protected from mob psychology, it will be because books like this are seen and remembered.
According to Clemenceau’s vision of the future, ‘European history is to be a perpetual prizefight,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes, watching the peace strategy at Versailles. In his capacity as financial expert and in his role as a teaching economist, Mr. Keynes has had occasion to compose prose portraits of certain statesmen and scholars. These portraits have now been gathered together in a small volume, Essay’s in Biography (Harcourt. Brace, $2.50), and are delightful both for their power of perception and for the preciseness and pungency of the English. I particularly recommend the short, brilliant characterizations of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in view of the new books by these two gentlemen appearing this autumn.
Somewhat belatedly I took down from my travel shelf the account of a recent expedition ot the Field Museum, Three Kingdoms of IndoChina (Crowell, $3.00). The task of narration has been divided between the two leaders, Harold J. Coolidge, Jr., the zoölogist, and Theodore Roosevelt, who directed the big-game collecting. My interest being in live people rather than dead pandas, I preferred Mr. Coolidge’s side of the case. His writing is very direct, and in two excellent passages — ‘White Water Travel’ and ‘The Splendor of Luang Prabang’— he gives one a brisk and visual impression of what is going on.
I wish on future explorations he’d give us a little more understanding of the food, the daily grind, the ‘homely’ details that are apt to lend themselves to humor — and I wish he’d not end so many paragraphs with exclamations. The book is well made and excellently illustrated.
In autobiography one new endeavor has appeared to rival, so some say, The Story of San Michele. The Arches of the Years (Morrow, $2.75) is its title, and Halliday Sutherland (a Scotch doctor this time) is the first person singular. He is, I gather, a hardy, fearless, and canny man. His practice called him again and again to Spain, it let him into amusing adventures throughout the British Isles, and it finally qualified him as a surgeon in the R. N. during the War. A born raconteur, he spins his story out of innumerable and fragmentary anecdotes. Through this screen of incidents we perceive vaguely — but only vaguely — the dimensions of the man himself. In the account of his education and in his description of Spain he speaks his own mind; but for the rest he relies on anecdote — and anecdote is not enough. It may be con jectured that, had he allowed himself fewer stories and more reflection, his book would have been better worth recalling.
Anthony Adverse is, of course, the big book of the summer. People ask timorously, ‘Must I wade into a novel of 1200 pages?' The answer is, ’Try it; the water’s fine!' Hervey Allen’s writing is extraordinarily buoyant; the action has a ‘lift ' to it, the description great gusto. Only on the count of its philosophizing have I heard this mammoth novel criticized. As one wag wrote me, its philosophy ‘is like putting on the suspenders without the pants.’ I wonder.
