The Peripatetic Reviewer

by EDWARD WEEKS

IT is curious that war, which any man in his right mind despises, should call out some of the best qualities in our make-up. Under its spurs man is more inquiring, more coöperative, more sympathetic. His sense of compassion, his sense of humor, his willingness to sacrifice are quickened. This is as clearly revealed in the journalism of the war years as it is in the great reflective novels, like War and Peace, which come after. The wellsprings of humor and pity, the swift flow of narrative, are invigorating the American writing of 1943 as they did not invigorate our books of the Depression.

But the bitter paradox is this: that the response of our minds and the unselfishness of our spirit merge into a fierceness without which we cannot win the war. Over a long pull the prodigious effort required of a nation in harness becomes galling: in time soldiers and civilians both are afflicted with resentments and these break into active sores when the fighting is over. The feeling of grievance carries over into literature. Think of the vindictiveness now smoldering underground in Europe. Think how starvation has sapped the children and elders of Greece and Poland. Can neurologists measure the effect which blockbusters will have on the civilians who survive the bombing in Germany and Holland? What books do you think the French or Russian prisoners in Germany will write when they are freed?

Injuries and grievance such as these will inevitably widen the gap between European and American literature after the war. Mr. Somerset Maugham once remarked to me that defeat is a better theme for fiction than victory. But the physical punishment of domination and defeat as administered by the Nazis, and as they themselves will experience, is so exhausting that for a time only dizziness and pessimism remain.

The music of Shostakovitch, the Moscow Ballet, and the little we know of contemporary Russian books all attest, the vibrant nationalism of the Soviet Union; the creative process goes on there as it has not in Britain. In Russia there is the relativity of space and numbers with which to recuperate. But the tight little isle which is England lives so exposed and under such strain that only the rare poet or novelist can do his work. Yet despite their three-year fatigue the spirit and the expectation of change so discernible among the English people today gives promise of the revival of English fiction and poetry after the armistice. It is difficult to foresee anything like such an early return of idealism and buoyancy in the writing of Western Europe. When at last victory is in sight I wonder which will prevail among the United Nations — the determination so essential for peace or the resentment which can be so crippling at a war’s end.

One of our resentments is being slowly extinguished in the war. Our suspicion of the Soviet Union was never greater than in the spring of 1941. We were stunned by the implications of the Pact, we did not like the Soviet’s allusions to “The Anglo-French warmongers” and “the second imperialistic world war.” Stalin had publicly embraced Matsuoka, he had shaken hands with a German officer, Colonel Hans Krebs, saying, “We shall be friends”; he had refused to talk to Sir Stafford Cripps when that ambassador came with the warning that Germany was preparing to attack. That high point of Soviet-German friendship was reached just two years ago.

If today admiration and curiosity outweigh our suspicion, it is because of what has happened within Russia since June, 1941. Her dynamic change of heart, her unbelievable defense, of such enormous consequence to every enemy of the Axis, is a story the telling of which is just begun. One of the first books to tell it calmly, decisively, and with colorful detail is Moscow Dateline (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00). The author, Henry C. Cassidy, is a Massachusetts volunteer in our unofficial foreign legion: he served as foreign correspondent in Spain, he reported the collapse of Franco, and then as the head of the AP Bureau in Russia, he lived through the desperate and changing years at Moscow and Kuibyshev.

Mr. Cassidy was sunning himself on tlie shore of the Black Sea (a little troubled in mind by the nude bathers) when the loud speaker announced that Hitler had struck with 170 divisions, 10,000 tanks, and 10,000 planes. His trip back to the capital through the Caucasus and Ukraine was tortuously slow. But it gave him the chance to watch the country pull itself together, and the story he put on the wires under the caption “Ivan Goes Calmly to War” was the first hopeful note any American had Expressed from the Russian capital. The experts were then predicting a Russian collapse within five dais, within three weeks, within six months.

How those experts (and they included the German ambassador, the dean of the diplomatic corps) were fooled and why they were fooled Mr. Cassidy sets forth in a chapter modest, ironic, and discerning. He himself was early in his belief that Russia’s fight would be a long one. He was too young and inquiring to be didactic. Nor had he been embittered, as had so many veteran observers in Moscow, by a losing struggle against unbending Slav bureaucracy. He explored with an open mind, and this is why his chronicle is so alive, his pen portraits of Stalin and the other Russian leaders so telling, his judgment so clear.

To his personal impressions Mr. Cassidy adds facts, well coordinated and very illuminating. He tells you what it felt like to live through the bombing in Moscow, and then gives the final box score the damage to the city and the damage to the Germans when at last the street lights went on again in the winter of '42. He gives the numbers and make-up of the Russian army and adds personal touches to the survey in his trips to the front and his snatches of Russian humor.

He describes how the Blitzkrieg slowed down to a Verdun, destructive of German and Russian strength. He followed the Russian wave which swept the Nazis back from Moscow, and his pict ure of the road from Klin with its 25-mile graveyard of the Panzers is unforgettable. He tells you what the Muscovites thought of Churchill and “Garrygopkins” and Willkie. He quotes the letters he wrote to Stalin, and Stalin’s revelatory replies. And when lie left the Soviet in February, 1943, this was his conclusion: “On the basis of the present record I should say victorious post-war Russia would be socialistic but not internationally revolutionary; atheistic but not violently anti-religious; autocratic but not antidemocratic.” A book like this goes far to settle one of the biggest X’s of our times.

The picture of Russia Mr. Cassidy gives us is as objective as an American mind can make it. What a Russian thinks of his country’s resurgence is shouted at you in a short, turbulent volume, The Last Days of Sevastopol (Knopf, $2.50), which has been translated and cabled from Moscow by Ralph Parker, of the New York Times. The author, Boris Voyetkhov, is a young Soviet playwright who on the second day of the war against Germany began to write a play about the second front in Europe. The play was well received in the provinces, but Moscow would have none of it - not until the second front was an actuality. On his train trip back from the sticks, Voyetkhov told his troubles to a Red Fleet sailor with whom he was sharing a berth. Said the sailor, “If you want a world beater subject, come to Sevastopol.” The idea appealed to the writer; be was accredited and with great difficulty penetrated the military cordon just as Sevastopol was going into the last weeks of its siege. This is what he saw. A year ago W. L. White set down in dialogue form the story of the MTP boats in Manila Bay the story which had been told him in the officers’ quarters in Melville, R. I., by Lieutenant Commander Bulkeley and his junior aides. They Were Expendable set a new pattern of war writing. It caught the tones of voice, the emphasis, the indignation of men who could never have written for themselves so effectively.

He came in on a destroyer at dusk, running the gauntlet of the German batteries and planes, and his first impression was of an inferno. The city was burning and the glow was reflected in the bay. On the mole where he landed, cranes were unloading munitions, the wounded were being carried to the gangplank, and after them came the evacuees, the old people and children shepherded aboard by women volunteers all of this high-lighted by the flash of explosions and the burning homes.

The author found refuge in the Naval Headquarters, the nerve center of Sevastopol’s defense. There he watched the men in charge of the defense. He met the divers who were salvaging aeroplane motors, medical equipment — whatever could be dried and used — from the floor of the harbor. He visited Inkerman Quarry, that vast cellar subdivided by metal screens where hundreds of lathes produced the mines and machine guns daily needed in defense. He came to intimate terms with Tolya, the intrepid Chief of Communications; the young aviation general, “King of the Sevastopol Sky,” who survived a single combat with twenty-five German planes and who, as he adds, “perished quite unnecessarily soon after I saw him”; and that other officer with the monk-like face, whose duty it was to recommend the youngsters for decorations. He drank vodka with them, heard them tell their stories, later accompanied them on their dangerous rounds through the city.

The record pours out like lava — rushing, inchoate, careless of life. Here in lurid exploits you see the primitivencss which is part of Russia’s strength, her patriotism both stolid and passionate, and forever and always the din and confusion of war in a shattered town. Very Russian, turbulent, and heroic is this picture of a great city mortally wounded, making its last stand.

If a Russian’s account of the fall of Sevastopol seems to us chaotic and wasteful of life, what do you suppose a Russian would say about our last stand in the Philippines?

In his new book Queens Die Proudly (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50) Mr. White is again the unseen interlocutor. This time he is recording the experiences of some survivors of the 19th Bombardment Group — a pilot, a navigator, a bombardier, a gunner, and an “embalmer” who sit talking with the pilots wife under the wing spread of the Flying Fortress, “Swoose” (“Half Swan, Half Goose—It Flies’), The Swoose has been turned back to pasture, her flying days are over, and as he looks at her scarred, blistered wing, the pilot, Frank Kurtz now a Lieutenant Colonel with D.F.C. and Star, begins to reminisce about the autumn of 1941 when she was one of thirtyfive beautiful shining Forts newly landed in the Philippines.

Kurtz, who was then a lieutenant in charge of a single ship, had made a high-altitude test which had taken him over Formosa; and seeing that black, ugly base below him, he realized with a shock that it was much too close for comfort. Too close to our landing fields on Luzon. So did General Brereton. And after the alert on November 27 there was a growing anxiety in the minds of other officers. Lieutenant Kurtz heard the broadcast about Pearl Harbor while he was shaving. He was one of forty pilots and navigators waiting taut and profane in the operations tent while General Brereton tried to get permission from higherups to take off on a photographic reconnaissance over Formosa. Meantime twenty-four of the torts were lined up on Clark Field, and over at Iba the P-40’s sat wing to wing. There the Japs caught them and pounded them to blazes.

What held MacArthur back? What question of Philippine policy kept our planes grounded hours after the warning from Pearl Harbor ? We still grope for an answer. I suspect even a Russian would like to know.

When the smoke had cleared away, the 19th Bombardment Group were able to patch together five of their twenty-four beauties. There were another twelve down at Mindanao who had been spared from the onslaught. These were the planes and the men who fought the losing fight from the Philippines to Java to Australia. They had few or no pursuit ships to protect them, they lived in constant dread that the Japanese planes would spot their temporary fields, they carried out bombing raids of the distance from New York to Denver and lived — some of them — to tell the tale.

In these days when so much of our writing is sanguinary, it is good to cool the overheated imagination with the well-iced and incorporeal short stories of Isak Dinesen. They are champagne literature — dry, deliciously chilled, fanciful, and faintly amorous. The author is a Dane who left her homeland in 1914 to marry Baron Blixen, a white hunter and the head of a huge coffee plantation. During her seventeen years on the Dark Continent her thoughts flew to the Gothic Northern beauty of Scandinavia, and out of this nostalgia she wrote her first book, Seven Gothic Tales. Habits so formed are likely to guide an author’s hand, and today when she is once more living on her native soil her imagination still wings free of the caging present in search of a Fairyland of the Mind.

The eleven stories which make up her new collection of Winter’s Tales (Random House, $2.50) have in them a fairy quality and otherworldliness refreshing to the eye and most skillfully sustained. It serves no purpose to tabulate these narratives, to tell you which are my favorites and why. Champagne uncorked is soon no pleasure for anyone. But I should register this one caution: Don’t let yourself be mystified; don’t take too literally the opening pages of each new tale. The artifice is there deliberately. If you will give them a chance, those opening pages, misleading as they appear, will create their spell. Once you accept that mood, what follows is as inevitable as a strange dream and twice as natural.

It is anybody’s guess what a soldier will read. I remember four books friends of mine were reading in France the summer of 1917. The Californian had brought with him a small, finely printed book on Chinese jade, and in it he found complete distraction. Joe Lyons, who had been a salesman in Manhattan, hauled around with him a volume so heavy no one would touch it today — Apollo, or The History of Art. My driving partner, Harry Crosby, had The Oxford Book of English Verse, and I had Pickwick, the onionskin edition. Of course we had some Tauchnitz novels which we read and passed on; but those were our four staples, the bones on which we gnawed away, month in, month out. And lest we seem infidel, I might also add that among the four of us there was at least, one pocket Testament.

The enlisted man today wants technical books; the Navy personnel coming in to Boston, from the Atlantic run, again and again ask for books on mathematics or astronomy, books on aviation and naval tactics. We know there is an insatiable demand for the comics. But what they want in their off moments when they feel reflective is still anybody’s guess. Alexander Woollcott has made a good one in his compact little volume As You Were (Viking, $2.50), which he calls “a portable library of American prose and verse.” It is the lightest, most readable anthology ever designed for a soldier’s musette. All his life Mr. Woollcott was an ardent collector of Americana, of spicy anecdotes, and quite aggressively a collector of what he considered the best, writing of our time.

He prized a book like Huckleberry Finn from cover to cover. Other authors he prized more for their fragments, and he would defend his choice of this particular story or that poem, this vignette or that passage of dialogue, with an enthusiasm that always made me want to go back and reread what we had just been talking about. It is with this enthusiasm that he and his assistant, Joe Hennessey, fitted together the prose and verse which fill these 600 pages. Editorial notes and a Foreword happily explain the preference which he felt for these stories of Walt Edmonds, Steve Benet, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway, these excerpts from Ma Pettingell, Huckleberry Finn, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Oregon Trail, these lesser known fragments of Charles Flandrau, Ben Hur Lampman, and E. B. White. Mr. Woollcott has edited as if to answer the question. What makes an American homesick?