First Person Singular

It was E. V. Lucas who first defined letter writing as ‘the gentlest art’ and who then brought together his inquisitive and intimate compilation of the darling and indiscreet utterances in English literature. Mr. Lucas filled those square little green and gold volumes of his, The Gentlest Art and Second Post, with literary tidbits; he arranged them in moods rather than chronologically, and as a result his selections are juicy, capricious, laughable, and tender. It he followed any guiding rule, it was simply this, that a good letter must be as natural as it is unexpected in its contents.

M. Lincoln Schuster is every bit as able an editor as Mr. Lucas, and he too has spent years delving into the correspondence of the past. His Treasury of the World’s Great Letters (Simon & Schuster, is at once a labor of

love and the blueprint of an eager and orderly mind. There is nothing haphazard about Mr. Schuster’s omnibus. The letters he has collected have been set up like little flares along the march of history. He has picked them for their power of illumination, not because they are willful, teasing, or for their delight in the trivial. And to make the procession as clear and comprehensible to us as it is to him, Mr. Schuster speaks parenthetically between these voices of the great past in a series of editorial notes which add sagacity and continuity to the volume. This book is like a bottle of the most agreeable tonic, to be dipped into whenever our minds need the solace of history.

The Dutch are a practical, hard-headed people. Place in their midst a captured English officer, an intellectual with an urge for monastic contemplation and a passionate attachment, which he cannot subdue, for his host’s wife — and you have the makings of a dramatic situation, as Charles Morgan so skillfully demonstrated in his bestknown novel, The Fountain. The French, whose country Mr. Morgan inhabits tor his new book, The Voyage (Macmillan, $2.50), are also hardheaded, but with more resilience and grace than the Dutch. Unfortunately this time the author does not inject an alien Englishman into the scene: thus he forgoes any effect of contrast and instead makes the story depend solely upon his ability to animate the French scene. The result, I am sorry to say, is not wholly successful: it lacks that sinuous virility which made Mr. R. C. Hutchinson’s Shining Scabbard so unforgettable. Mr. Morgan is a good deal of a mystic, and the essential conflict upon which he bases his nineteenthcentury novel, the conflict between the simple, saintly countryman Barbet and the willful gamin Thérèse, should be full of sparks. Instead it is too full of words. Despite the felicity of style, the lovely description of the wine country, and the evident delight in the old French way, this story seems to me arrested by prolixity, and that is a pity, for Mr. Morgan is a writer of quality, wanting only more emphasis and spirit to make this work stand out.

It is natural to size up Howard Spring against Dickens: each knew poverty and what it does to the spirit; each is prolific with his characters, and to dispose of them each resorts to melodrama; each is devoted to large-scale, large-hearted narratives. Dickens, be it added, drew from a fund of humor denied to Mr. Spring and was more deft in concealing the direction and motive power of his plots, but I doubt if there is any other living Englishman who would emerge so well from this most strenuous of comparisons.

Fame Is the Spur (Viking, $2.75 is Mr. Spring’s best book. I put it miles ahead of My Son, My Son! It is the steadily expanding story of a reedy youngster, born — illegitimately — in the slums of Manchester, warmed in his indeterminate years by love of his stepfather and the faith within the Wesleyan Chapel, and then, as he gains in self—confidence, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, outgrowing the tiny house in Broadbent Street, outgrowing the Chapel, the Confines of Lancashire, the loyalty of friends, the cause of Labor, the love of women, until in the end he is the Viscount ot Handforth, Minister of His Majesty’s Government — such a different part of speech from little John Shawcross, sharing a back bedroom with the Old Warrior.

You know at once that this is a story of ‘can do — a mature Horatio Alger. For Mr. Spring telegraphs ahead everything that is to happen; he continually checks John’s — or rather J. Hamer Shawcross’s — career against what he wrote in his diary as a boy and what he orated as a Labor M. P. But so cleverly does the author weave the yarn back and forth that our curiosity rises even though we know the end. What we want to know is how it happens and what it does to the man. The characters in the book would populate a small town, and the beauty of it is that they are so individual. The humanity of that murky, industrial beehive, Manchester, has been painted with warm reality. The power of oratory, the ambition that feeds on itself, the hypocrisy that follows so surely after compromise — none of these diminish our interest in John’s career or detract from the reality of the English background. A book full of pleasant, uninterrupted reading.

Last month I put to the vote the question of whether the miniature reviews without signature, ‘condensed, candid, tight-packed,’ and extending to as many as thirty-five new books a month, were preferable to the full-column reviews which in the old days used to compass perhaps ten books a month. The size of the vote has been gratifying, and, although the ballots have not all been counted as yet, here is how opinion stands at the moment: —

In casting my ballot in the book-review poll may I especially request you to keep the reviews unsigned. It is fun trying to guess who wrote them. Unsigned articles in the Atlantic are an old tradition, dating back, I believe, to the first issue. Now that the essays in theContributors’ Club are signed, the readers of the magazine no longer have the pleasure of the chase. Since you have listed the names of your reviewers, the reader need only familiarize himself with the style of each in order to enter the contest.

Much more important to the reader who is in no haste to read the latest books are the articles about books and authors that have been appearing in the body of the magazine. The articles on Dickens, Richard Wright, and American novels of 1939 are cases in point. They provide the reader with a basis for understanding the man and his work. — Nixon Mumper, New Cumberland, Pa.

I, for one, heartily endorse the brief reviews. The New York Times kindly furnishes a précis of each book, useful if one does not intend to read further. That effort having been expended, the Atlantic takes the cream of the review, the critic’s personal opinion. So far, very good; but an anonymous opinion bears little weight or interest. I should like to see the brief reviews continued, with identifying initials. — Joyce M. Seelye, Worcester, Mass.

I, for one reader, like the ‘new’ policy of reviewing many books in short paragraphs. I do not give a fig for signatures to them. Writers with signatures are more apt to be ‘pontifical,’ and readers expecting signatures are more apt to be awed by ‘pontification.’ This feature is the most interesting in the Atlantic. I always read it first. — Alexander M. Lackey, Swarthmore, Pa.

Since you ask, let me say I much prefer the short and numerous book reviews. Living, as I do, in the country, out of touch much of the time with ardent readers, it means much to me to have the Atlantic’s opinion of as many books as possible.

I do like to know who writes the reviews. Why can’t the short ones be signed? — Eunice Hunter Clark, East Stroudsburg, Pa.

I want to express my hearty endorsement of the present policy. Reasons: yours, as given or implied. I would also instance these, which you certainly haven’t overlooked: (1) greater objectivity and incisiveness in reviewing (as in your salutary ‘dissenting opinion’ of Adler’s How to Read a Book); (2) greater appeal to publishers, with fewer of them feeling discriminated against by your not noticing titles at all; (3) greater flexibility, giving books worth one hundred words or less only that space, while a title like Maurois’s The Tragedy of France gets measurably more space; (4) distinctiveness in method (almost all reviewing in America is ‘signed reviewing,’ yet there ought to be room for the kind of semi-anonymity provided be your present corps of reviewers). I hope the Atlantic doesn’t shift back to the conventional signed reviews. We need the ’books-of-the-month’ reviewed by experts who can speak plainly, discriminatingly, and briefly, without the almost inevitable shading of judgments that goes with the longer, more descriptive signed review. — Carlton F. Wells, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Disagreement is the spice of life. When readers feel that the Atlantic has done an injustice to a book, let them speak out.

The reviewer must be strangely lacking in appreciation of the delicate charm of Mrs. Flexner’s A quaker Childhood. With his suggestion that it should have been privately printed because its interest is limited to a ‘special audience,’ consisting of ’her family, friends, and Quakers of the old school,’ I totally disagree. I am neither a member of her family nor a friend, nor a Quaker of the old school or any other. In our family it was read with the greatest interest and enjoyment and has been recommended to our friends. — Mrs. S. A. Hurlbutt, Stamford, Conn.

Because of his preoccupation with words, a poet is likely to be finicky about those applied to his own work. To your reviewer’s comment on my new book, Pattern of a Day, I have only one objection — his use of that word ‘neutral.’ The time has long since passed when I

— or any other American — can afford to be neutral! — Robert Hillyer, Cambridge, Mass.

You reviewed The Wave of the Future, by Anne Lindbergh, as if it were a new swing record or a detective story. Was this or that rhythm more titillating, more pleasing? The grave implications you left untouched.

The particular menace of this defeatist document is that it allows the unwary or the lazy-minded to rest comfortably in the melodies of their own souls. Democracy is threatened. If the Lindberghs and our complacency are not too strong, we may yet have another chance. Mrs. Lindbergh speaks of a world revolution. Is it not your duty as editor to question publicly the goals of that revolution, led by Mr. Hitler, and to brand The Wave of the Future as a book disbelieving in the ideals for which America once revolted? — Helen Fveritt, Ipswich, Mass.

EDWARD WEEKS