The Peripatetic Reviewer

CROSSING the continent HAS always been an education for an American. This is particularly true today when every train has its contingents of Army and Navy and its bevy of service wives and children; when the diner begins serving at 5.30 A. M. and never pauses until it is uncoupled; and when the stops at terminals like Denver and Ogden give you an hour or two to stretch your legs and to see what the war has done to this burg or that.

Some of the education comes in the talk which Americans always engage in so confidingly when they travel. Such talk today reveals the amazing good humor with which people accept any inconvenience; it reveals the rising spirit of the people and their need of firmer, clearer instructions from Washington.

Some of the education comes in through the window. But not enough. You need a book to help satisfy your curiosity about that magnificent, unfolding country. And there isn’t one. In the Army Pullmans I visited, more of the men were trying to orient themselves with timetables than were reading magazines or playing poker. But a timetable doesn’t give you the human answer to your curiosity.

A year ago my wife and I spent a memorable day coming down the Columbia River Valley from Portland. The conductor, seeing we were green, began to tell us what the river meant to him when he was a boy (his father had owned a ranch near The Dalles), and as he pointed out his trout streams, showed us the ancient cattle crossings, and prepared us for the Cascades where the Indians net their salmon, I got my first notion of what an American eye-opener could mean to a tenderfoot at the window.

As you crossed the Great Salt Lake this book I have in mind — this eye-opener—would tell you how much that body of water has shrunk since the first white man gazed at it, and how and why it was shunned by Indian and pioneer. It would tell you who built the bridge across and how long it took and how long it is. As you swing by the Wasatch Mountains, it would tell you of its fabulous minerals in that Mormon country, why they have not been taken out, and what the Bonneville Lake was like in the glacial age. It would show you where to look for the highwater marks on the slopes today. It would tell you what part of Wyoming resembles that in which Custer made his last stand, and would keep your eye peeled for some of the tough spots like the Humboldt, where the forty-niners “saw the Elephant” — and turned back. It would give you glimpses — with maps to keep you straight — of what this beautiful, incredibly big country was like in the beginning and of what it has done to the Indian and the white man since. Who will write it?

The exploiters of old, the “robber barons, have been on our conscience ever since the crash of 1929. To judge from his new book, they are on Louis Bromfield’s mind today. Until the war is over and reflective writing has caught its breath, our novels will be written under high pressure, with urgency, in short rather than long wave length. Mr. Bromfield is a case in point. He has published three novels in less than eighteen months. A veteran of the first World War, he did the best of his early work in the ferment of the twenties; the present war, finding him in his maturity, may call out his most vigorous writing. Certainly in Mrs. Parkington (Harper, $2.75) he has drawn his most attractive character in a decade.

Mrs. Parkington is the story of an old lady who at eighty-four is wise, clear as a bell, and still eager. Age occasionally spares us an elder whose sapience and heart take the sting out of time. Merging past and present with a hundred skillful clews, Mr. Bromfield draws a woman who has lived through many worlds, yet still anticipates with pleasure any new experience. Mrs. Parkington hailed originally from heaping Rock, Nevada, hut before she settled down she knew the answers to London, Biarritz, and New York.

Cius, Mrs. Parkington’s husband, “promoted” the United States up to the hilt fifty years ago. At his death he left his wife with approximately sixty millions and a scandal which she firmly suppressed. He also left her with the most inept grandchildren a woman ever had. Gus, with his magnificent plundering and generosity, is essentially a flashy person, and any criticism of Amory, his son-in-law — and a lesser plunderer, measured by Gus is necessarily flashy too. For I think it has yet to be shown that the Major Purkingtons of the 1890’s did more for thecountry or hurt people less than their sous-in-law of 1929.

Mr. Brumfield’s commentary is always lively, and whether he is mocking our wealthy imitation of the English, or scoring the decadence of the French or the blind arrogance of Wall Street in 1920, he enlists your sympathy, even though you may not completely trust his judgment. But the best philosophy in this book comes out in people like Celeste, the Major’s mistress; Mattie, the maid; and above all in Mrs. Parkington. With his swift facility, Mr. Bromfield always runs the risk of slighting Ids lesser people, of making them either types or caricatures, and in this case he never really animates the two sons, Herbert and Eddie. It is Mrs. Parkington who matters: she is the life of the book, and as you see the Prince defend her, or watch her face up to death during “ the dreadful summer, ” or on Gus’s yacht, or at Alice’s bedside, you realize that she is a woman of extraordinary independence and integrity.

An American historian in writing about ihe Adams family concluded that this Yankee clan, which produced two Presidents—John and “J. Q. A.,” in successive generations — was still producing exceptionally capable men. It was not, he argued, that the Adamses had outgrown —or ingrown — ihe country; it was that the democratic process of election had outgrown the Adamses.

How far demagoguery has gone to pollute and to jeopardize our system of “freely elected representatives” is the story within the characterization of John Dos Passos’s new novel, Number One (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50). Mr. Dos Passos, of the same age and war experience as Mr. Bromfield, has devoted his talent to the tougher, uglier side of American life, and in this book, written under the spur of emergency’, he brings you powerfully to grips with a hillbilly dictator, Senator “Chuck” Crawford (you can name him yourself) who loomed out of the Southwest. This story is warm, living proof that It Has Happened Here. And may again.

Chuck Crawford’s climb to the Senate is the direct result of mobocracy—the result of the direct vote and the devastating influence of the radio upon an emotional, credulous electorate. Chuck has one of those warm folksy v oices — a voice, as Mr. Dos Passos puts it, “which lulls, insinuates, and incites the mind.” Smart, unscrupulous, with his glad hand and his “Every Man a Millionaire” plan, Chuck is a far cry from John Adams. In any election today, which one do you think would win?

The man who carries this story is not the Senator — “Number One,” as his gang call him; it is his confidential secretary, Tyler Spotswood. Tyler has a good mind, a love of alcohol, and the know-how of Washington. He writes the speeches, collects the campaign funds, handles the publicity’, the private dinners, and the trouble generally. He is a good fixer. 15ut Tyler is just as gullible as the rest of us; why he should have believed in Chuck is never sat isfactorily explained, neither is his Galahad love for the Senators syrupy wife. These quixotic streaks in his otherwise reasonable make-up the novelist asks you to take for granted. Mr. Dos Passos would have you believe that at heart Tyler is as much of a reformer and as soft a sentimentalist as most Americans.

The limitations of the novel are three; First, you never care greatly what happens to any of the characters. Secondly, you never feel Chuck’s threat to the United States. It is regrettable that we never see Chuck’s power at. work in Washington, nor the wreckage which men like him have left behind. And for me, Mr. Dos Passos’s writing is still marred by his affectation in coupling words together. When your eye trips over “glassedin,” “hindingwire,” “twoyearold,” “coalgas,”“pulpitthumping,” you realize that the eye simply does not read English that way. This habit annoys me more than the coarseness. No, what stands out in this book is the humid, indignant indictment of state politics at their worst. But don’t console yourself by thinking that this warning applies solely to the South.

Helen Howe is one of the Big Three in the monologue league, and like her rival, Cornelia Otis Skinner, this spring she has put her wit and her dramatic power to the prose test. Miss Howe’s first novel is entitled The Whole Heart (Simon & Schuster, $2.50), and it is Mr. Fadiman’s opinion that no male is qualified to review it. I usually agree with Mr. Fadiman, but I really see no reason why this book should have such diplomatic immunity. The Whole Heart is a very clever sally in the eternal warfare between men and women - and why surrender?

Here is the story of what four women did to James L. Hurd, a New England writer, who began with integrity and, according to Miss Howe, compromised his way straight to success. Or, if you are in the other camp, it is what Jim Hurd, the best-seller anil radio commentator, did to betray the four women who loved him. Either way, a mixed jury would find unanimously that Jim is a halfhearted, wellmeaning skunk. Miss Howe has the letters and the diaries of the girls to prove it.

But the trouble is that when you read a novel told in letters, the letters are seldom real. In order to set her story in motion, Miss Howe obliges her first letter-writer, Mary Eeverett, to conjure up a repetition of details and conversation which give us Jim’s background but which are precisely the kind of thing people do not put in their love letters. The form is suspect from the iirst and it gets worse in the second section. Barbara, Jim’s wife, is a tough-skinned New Worker who has plenty of money and sex, loves notoriety, and is only momentarily infatuated with Jim’s rustic charm. Barbara would no more have kept a diary than she wotdd have been caught pushing a pram up Hark Avenue.

The truth is. Miss Howe did not quite trust herself as a novelist, and in her timidity she fell back upon her technique as a monologuist. Her sardonic allusions to current history, so amusing on the stage, do not create in print the fiction of only yesterday: they are too deliberately sarcastic, too self-conscious, The same can be said of t he four monologue-portraits, and it is a pity, for in the drawing of Constance, and in such scenes as the meeting between Constance and Mary, and in Jim’s speech at Symphony Hall, Miss Howe shows what she could have done, had she had more courage.

From Augusta, Georgia, comes a book which will refresh a good many Americans. Written in a leisurely Georgian drawl, (Colonel Effingham’s Raid, by Berry Fleming, (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, $2.50) is a honey of a satire. Mr, Fleming is a fastidious storyteller. His humorous touch has often been seen in Punch, and he has a native son’s knowledge of the Southern temperament—a knowledge which lias been enlivened in recent years by his experience as a columnist on an old Southern newspaper.

I happened to room across the hall from Air. Fleming in college. I have been wailing some time to see him write this kind of book, and it is a delight to watch him hit the bull’s-eye as he does. Colonel Effingham, Mr. Fleming’s hero, is a regular Army officer, a Southern ramrod, who on his retirement; from the Army, comes back to the small Southern city that had once been his home. He has no intention of lighting over the Lost Cause or of comforting himself with Old Bourbon. He has the habit of command and he wants to continue using it. How the Colonel takes the situation in hand, and what he does to that sleepy, intimate little city, is a story which no reviewer should give away. Enough to say that this is our native storytelling and our native humor at their best.

It is not simply coincidence that Mr. Bromfield, Mr. Dos Passes, and Mr. Fleming should have turned this year to an evaluation of the strength and weakness of t he American character. Authors and readers alike are seeking a positive reassurance of what America “can do,” and you will hear that keynote struck again and again in the books of 1943. We know what Artemus Ward did for that generation which held the Union together in the 1800’s; I suggest that Mr. Fleming may provide somewhat the same solace for ours.

California, which turned up those two white hopes of the 1030’s, Steinbeck and Saroyan, is sure to provide a new burst, of writing in the months ahead. You can see it coming. Some of ii will come from t he wounded in her hospitals. Some of it will come from the impact of the new population on the old (Richmond, center of the Kaiser Shipyard, has grown from 25,000 to 75,000 in a matter of months); these people are here to stay, and the native son is not quite sure what to do about it. Some of it will come from the women in the shipyards and airplane factories.

So keep your eye on California. Don’t miss Robert Easton’s first book. Happy Man (Viking, $2.50). It passes as a novel but should be taken as a collection of short stories about Dynamite, a cowhand who stepped right out of Remington’s draw ings into the present. Dynamite is a racy, sun-baked Westerner, who loves horses and who handles steers a good deal better than he handles women. Mr. Easton, his creator, worked on a ranch before he went into the Army and he must have known more than one Dynamite in the flesh. His colorful, authentic narrative is sure promise of what he can give us when the war Is over. I wish he had found a better title. I wish he had not used such an aw kward vestibule as his introduction. I wish he had not used so frequently the device of framing a story within a story. But once you have cleared these hurdles, you will find good, terse prose by a man who knows what he is writing about.

The war conies closer to you on the Pacific. Here you meet men and of fleers returned from the battle stations, and hear from them the “scuttlebutt” about Australia and the Islands. The wounded are here, and talking to them you are braced by their superb modesty, their eagerness to get another crack at the Japs.

The complexion of the towns has changed. Captive balloons, dozens of them, hover like silver decoys against tho blue. There appear to be as many ducks in San Francisco Bay as usual, and the air overhead is never free from the flights of interceptors policing the Golden Gate. The night, buses from Oakland are jammed with ship workers, half of them women in slacks and gayly painted tin hats. I have never seen so many women in long pants, but fashion has yet to camouflage the cabbage seat. Vast areas of the town have been camouflaged with paint and wire — so imaginatively that the effect is fascinating to one on the ground.

There is no disguise about what the people are thinking here. They show less strain than a year ago, when sabotage and invasion were nightmares to those who knew the damnation total of Pearl Harbor. There are repeated warnings that bombing will come and that San Francisco will be the target, but Californians sleep easier with the Japs removed and the knowledge that we now have so many pilots and planes available. What troubles them is not any thought of deleat. but the rumors which occasionally seep in from the East, of a negotiated peace with Japan. “Is that really what the East is thinking?” they ask. To them, the rumor is infuriating.

I have said that you feel the rising spirit of the country. To show what I mean, I have cut out this letter of a young aviator, Robert R. Kurtz, which appeared in the Inglewood Daily News:—

I’ve just returned from a 15-day Furlough and a very interesting 7000-mile trip. Stationed in California and living just outside New York City, I found myself faced with the prospect of hitchhiking coast-to-eoast and back or not going home at all. Since my wife was soon to have a baby, the decision was not a hard one to make although I had never hit the road before.

I reached home in four days— 100 hours to be exact — but it s not the speed of my trip that was important. Rather it was the spirit, the friendliness of all those American people who picked me up, who went out of their way time and time again, who always left me with a smiling, Good luck, soldier. I’ ve been in the Army a year now and have heard many a “beef from soldiers regarding the attitude of civilians toward the men in service. This may be true in some communities, but I can certainly attest, that it is not true of the country as a whole.

The author is an aviation cadet, aged twenty-three, now stationed in California. Good writing, soldier!