Northwest Passage
by [Doubleday, Doran, $2.75]
KENNETH ROBERTS in Northwest Passage summons to life out of the neglected pages of American history the figure of a man who was the epitome of that witless and unheeding form of courage called valor, which may be folly but which is nevertheless an ennobling thing to see and to record. The book is built around Major Robert Rogers as seen through the eyes of Langdon Towne, who strove to catch in pale pastels the portrait of a nation still unborn, and who could shoot an Indian as easily as a slow-flying partridge and feel an equal pleasure in the act.
But Major Rogers is the heart of the book. In him tth man met the occasion. He was one of those individuals able to multiply himself; to make out of ordinary men his own duplicates, fit to endure what he endured and to achieve what he achieved. Whether he led his Rangers against the St. Francis Indians, or home again against the odds of nature and of man; whether he sought the King’s ear in London, or rattled his chains in a log cell at Michilimackinac, or guzzled in Fleet Prison, he was always the master of his scene. No man can walk for twenty-odd days through the New England wilderness in October with a bullet through his ribs; but with Rogers to lead him, Captain Ogden did. Men cannot march for days through waistdeep swamp with nothing to eat but a handful of corn; but with Rogers to lead them, and Indians behind them to lay a red-hot axe blade between scalp and skull if they lagged, the Rangers did.
Northwest Passage is a great historical document, which historians will acclaim; but it is much more than that. It is a great novel, since in its pages an era comes to life, complete with people and with things. Jonas Hight, the print seller, is as vivid as the stinking rabbit pie which the Board of Overseers at Harvard served in Commons in 1759. Mr. Roberts’s Indians kill and are killed in a bloody butchery without palliation, untainted by Cooper’s pale sentimentality. Stoodley’s Tavern served lobsters and ale that even in cold type can be tasted; and the flip that Captain Carver and Captain Tute made out of rum and beer flavored with cinnamon and stirred with a hot poker will dizzy the reader’s senses.
The book is full of good eating and drinking and fighting; but most of all it is full of living people. John Singleton Copley, who let the vices of his countrymen blind him to their greater virtues. High Sheriff Thomas Packer, the man who hanged Ruth Blay. Jennie Coit, the white girl rescued from the Indians, who left her rescuers to go shamelessly back to Indian loves again. Ben Franklin and William Hogarth and Edmund Burke and all that pleasant company at Doctor Campbell’s London dinner table, who when they were fed to the chins demanded that Rogers tell them how it felt to starve; and who propounded the conundrum, ‘Why is Doctor Johnson’s conversation like a lady’s leg?’ Natty Potter, whose only virtue was that he had a daughter; and Ann Potter, and the brave beauty of her love for Langdon Towne. And scores besides; but most of all, Major Robert Rogers, whether in triumph or disgrace still towering over other men.
Here is a book that cannot be easily and briefly ‘reviewed.’ It is too big. Cap Huff’s hot buttered rum was a drink so potent and enduring that a full evening of it would stay with you as long as a coonskin cap. Northwest Passage is a book that will stay with you even longer. When Kenneth Roberts wrote Arundel, he produced a novel which for most writers would have been a culmination. In Rabble in Arms, and to-day in Northwest Passage, he has proved that Arundel was no more than a promise now bountifully fulfilled.
BEN AMES WILLIAMS