READERS of Miss Gertrude Stein’s delightful camouflage. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, listeners who have fallen under her spell during her American tour this winter, will both be amused if they can secure a short pamphlet entitled Testimony against Gertrude Stein, which has been printed in The Hague with other than pacific intentions. A group of Paris intimates — Braque, Mr. and mrs. Jolas, Matisse, Salmon, and Tzara — take turns expressing dissatisfaction with ‘the Stein’s’ record. They challenge her understanding; they dispute the accuracy of her details, and evidently there are times when they have the facts as well as the laugh on their side. Just who can referee this artistic squabble I do not know, but it does add to the spice of life.
Another Atlantic contributor of whom we are now given a closer view is Vincent Sheean. Personal History (Doubleday, Doran, $3.00), the autobiography which carries him to the halfway point in life, is as candid, as inquiring, and as experienced a chronicle as has come from any American born in the twentieth century. Sheean is a product of Illinois, with, as he says, ‘the map of Ireland in his face.’ He came into the world at the turn of the century; he was too young for a part in the war and too unconcerned to absorb much education until he found himself as a New York reporter in 1921.
Journalism is generally a passport for selfdiscovery, and so it proved in Sheean’s case. In Paris and on the Rhine he witnessed the bitter defensive Imperialism of the French; at Geneva he was shocked by the ineptitude of the League; a close view of Primo de Rivera in Spain left him little respect for dictatorship. Then an assignment took him to the Rif, where some valiant tribes were fighting for their life against the expeditionary forces of Spain and France. At considerable bodily risk, Sheean passed through the lines and into the stronghold of Abd-el-Krim, the first man of heroic proportions be had met.
His dispatches from the Rif established Sheean’s reputation as a free lance. New assignments were to take him to Persia, to Moscow, thence to China to witness the Communist uprising, still later to report on the Zionist Movement in Palestine. But it must be emphasized that neither money nor sensation was his motive; rather he was led by an insatiable curiosity about people and a very genuine quest fur self-knowledge. It has been well said that he is that whitest of crows, a romantic among reporters. A man is sometimes known by his heroes. Sheean has unqualified adoration for Abd-el-Krim, for Borodin, that Russian with ’the long view,’ for Madame Sun Yat-sen, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, and for that ‘flaming’ American spirit, Mrs, Rayna Prohme. He knew them all as friends, and for the latter he had a devotion highly sublimated. She had dedicated herself to Communism, and the calm certainty of her mind persuaded him to the very threshold of that allegiance. Then came her tragic death, which stunned and then diverted him back to the fleshpots of Europe. Never again was he to come so close to an act of faith.
I have heard Sokolsky deny the accuracy of Sheean’s chapter on China, and George Hyman shoot the Palestine description full of holes. But Sheean is a romantic, and unintentionally is won to whichever cause appeals to him most. I have also heard Sheean accused of moral cowardice for not following Rayna Prohme’s lead. He admits the possibility. But I prefer to think of him as a characteristic twentieth-century mind. He has that incipient wish to be of service, yet the aspiration is harnessed with chronic inability to find a fundamental conviction. Sheean wants to identify himself with the mass, he wants to help readjust our cruel inequalities, but he has little patience with the spotted reality of Communism, Fascism, or capitalism. So he continues in quest and in doubt. Are n’t most of us?
Speaking of Fascism, its power is revealed for you in a novel translated from the Italian, a novel which the Atlantic should have taken up earlier in the year. I mean Fontamara, by Ignazio Silone (Smith & Haas, $2.50). Here is the story of a little hill town in modern Italy, the recital of what happens to hillbillies — men and women who are squeezed, fooled, and traduced by modern tyranny. Special pleading, of course, written by an exile and ‘black-listed’ in Italy. But first and foremost this meat is good chewing: it has a foreign, salty seasoning of its own — strong fare, but not too strong for any healthy palate. I like the wry humor with which this persecution is set down, and best I like the way Silone illuminates those elements of loyalty so positive among the farmers and so cynically betrayed by the city slicker. The novel has been translated into fourteen languages; if other editions preserve the spirit of the book as well as this English version by Michael Wharf, readers will be lucky.
From the colony of German exiles at Sanary we may expect good books which Herr Hitler is too proud to read. One of the first to come is A Man Called Cervantes, — ’a biographical novel,’— by Bruno Frank (Viking, $2.50). Admittedly this character story of a young scholar, a wounded soldier, a middle-aged Ulysses, and a worn-out tax collector — one whose doings are as obscure as Shakespeare’s — has had to be deduced from the few paltry facts and from the internal evidence of his writing. Cervantes was a strong man; he had to be to survive the rigor of his experiences. The early student days in Madrid and Rome were easy enough; then came the battle of Lepanto, where he lost his left hand; then the long years as an Algerine slave; after release the thin pickings as a grub writer, and finally the bitter scrouging as a tax collector for Philip’s Armada. With fine color and with what I accept as authority, Bruno Frank sets the stage, showing us the King, the wan chivalry, the poverty and prodigality of Cervantes’s Spain. Against this fine backdrop we see the few known panels of Don Miguel’s stormy life; we apprehend how from the frustration of forty years he could have created the immortal figure of Don Quixote. The logic of the deduction, the warmth of the portraiture, and a fine sense of drama make this book a happy fusion of fact and imagination.
Beginning May the first, and thereafter at six-month intervals, the Atlantic will prepare a List of Recommended Books. This will not be published in the magazine, but will be available for distribution to institutions and to individuals.
