The Peripatetic Reviewer

SOON after my arrival in England I was told that creative writing had shriveled because of the war. But as I travel about I begin to wonder if the printed word was ever as far-reaching in Britain as it is today. I am not thinking of propaganda. I mean contemporary literature in its widest range: I mean what journalists and poets, novelists and scholars, editors and booksellers, have done and are doing to feed the inquiring and to refresh the taut minds of the British.

London has literature in its marrow — which is to say in its stones. Some of these stones have been tossed about and reduced to rubble; many of them will wear for centuries the scars of Göring’s bombers. But literature still crops out of them as irrepressibly as the purple willow herb and thistles, the yellow dandelions and daffodils, which have made wild gardens in the ruined cellars. No wonder the keeper of Kew Gardens is now writing a book about the flora of bombed London.

Even Hitler could read the handwriting on these walls. I am not sure he would appreciate the humor. Says the beautiful Georgian doorway of a house whose roof and interior are gone: “This house to let; in whole as in part.” Again and again in a cleared area you find a challenge like this: “Highest-class office building will be erected here after the war. For lettings apply immediately to-There is a comeback in those words, as in the hand-lettered sign which I saw at the entrance to a devastated church: “Service will be held as usual in the churchyard at six o’clock this evening.” In all, 766 churches have been damaged.

If you really want to see the heart of Old London, find a Scotsman who loves the city. The best and dearest guide of them all is James Bone, who has represented the Manchester Guardian on Fleet for forty years and lived for thirty-five of them in the Inner Temple. You remember the Temple, that conglomeration of courts where barristers and solicitors had their rooms. In the old days a man could lease his quarters for the length of three lives— for his own, his son’s and his grandson’s. Perhaps it was that lease of immortality, perhaps it was the quiet turf and the cool shade of plane trees against the old brick, that attracted so many writers here.

“Goldsmith did some of his best work when he lived in this Court,” said Mr. Bone, pointing not to a living building but to a huge vat of water. “Now, down this way is Crown Office Row,” he led the way, “and here Charles Lamb was born Rubble, topped by the skeleton of the Round Church. “Thackeray loved this place,” he said reflectively, as our walk continued. “And so did your own Sinclair Lewis, for he wrote Dodsworth here. But they’d not like it like this—” We came to Pump Court and the very stairs down which Mr. Pecksniff had sailed. We passed the big window the glass still in it, for a wonder — where E. V. Lucas used to sit, reading manuscripts for Methuen. Then we turned to watch the crew of a captive balloon (half of them women) hauling down their big gray elephant. “It could have been worse,”he concluded. “The Middle Temple Hall where Twelfth Night had its premiere still stands, and see that fine Elizabethan bit down there—undamaged! Dr. Johnson liked to walk here and touch these iron pillars for good luck. Touch them now and make a wish!” I did. For the Temple.

James Bone lost his books and many a famous drawing by his brother, Muirhead, when incendiaries gutted his rooms, but the magic and humor of his knowledge still walk with him. He leads you to those Wren churches which have miraculously survived, and to those older relics which came unscathed through the Great Fire — the fire Pepys saw three hundred years ago. We lunched in the Inn (circa 1600) where Pickwick had his rooms; we revived our legs with port, in that leather-walled wineshop, half as old as time, where the coal barons used to meet and fix their prices. Mr. Bone is the epitome of London victorious, and his book, The London Perambulator , — it is almost unobtainable here,preserves the beauty and humanity of Old London before the slugging began.

Once you begin to see the damage, that question is never out of your mind. How tired are these people? How much more can they take? The vitality on the Liverpool docks and in the Glasgow shipyards is amazing. But management and the shop stewards are tight-stretched, and who can blame them if some of the rubber is worn out of their system. On the train from Edinburgh to Hull when I saw workers’ families bound for the seaside on their first vacation since the summer of ‘39, I realized again how harddriven these people have been.

“How tired is tired?” is the question J. B. Priestley poses in his new novel, Daylight on Saturday. His story is centered in an aircraft factory at that particular time—October, 1942 — when the war seemed to have reached a stalemate and when, from boredom and fatigue, production figures were steadily sliding down. The novelist wants you to see men and women, a cross-section of human nature, under the goad of production. From Mr. Cheviot, the General Manager, down to Sammy Gamp, the crippled janitor, there are some forty workers in this book, each identified, each revealing in his own way the dislocation, the strain, and the craving which, taken together, have run them down like a watch that needs winding.

In his burly Yorkshire attack on the problem in hand, Mr. Priestley reminds me not a little of H. G. Wells. Like Mr. Wells, he enjoys preaching and will stop his story to do some. lake Mr. Wells, he bosses his characters outrageously. In a series of episodes, lively and most skillful in transition, he conducts the reader down the assembly line of the factory, pausing to watch, now Ogmore, the communist, now Elrick, the works superintendent, now Gwen, the ablest girl in the shop, now Sister Filey, the nurse on duty. This device is effective at the outset ; the characterization is swift as a flashlight, the talk natural, the clash of wills exciting. But the trouble is, there are too many characters — forty of them. Technically the novel becomes too obvious: you feel as if you were being transferred from trolley car to trolley car, each of which carried you just three blocks.

For refreshment and, I dare say, for courage and for hope, people are turning to books more avidly than in the Long Armistice. There simply is not enough print to go round. Modern editions of a popular writer like Mr. Priestley are sold out like hot cakes, and when the paper quota for that particular novel has been reached, no more copies are to be had. But the demand does not stop there. Bernard Quaritch and Maggs report that there never was such a demand for the standard sets and the beautifully made press books. Prices have doubled since 1938. The Complete Works of George Bernard Shaw—it might have fetched eight pounds before the war — went for twenty-eight last week. The Ashendene Press Edition of Morte d’Arthur has jumped from forty-two pounds to eighty; the Kelmscott Chaucer has gone from eightyfive pounds to two hundred five, and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom has risen from one hundred sixty pounds in July, 1940, to three hundred this summer.

In passing let me give you a tip. Now is the time to pick up first editions of a living writer second to none in these islands — the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill.

Library sets and first editions are at one extreme. At the other are the pamphlets, the little books of which there is a mushroom growth. I visited the oldest bookshop on Fleet Street — how they missed being burned is a mystery — and here, if you please, is an array of the paper-bound books that caught my eye. I give you their titles: Rough Stuff for Home Guards; Silent Killing, Diagrams Vital Body Points, A Manual of Commando Warfare; Can We Afford Beveridge?; Morse in Seven Days; Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt; Rebuilding Britain.

The most gallant of all the paperbacks are those printed by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, and the one which touched me most nearly was the thirtytwo-page chronicle of Air-Sea Rescue issued for the Air Ministry. My first week here I read a cheering but cryptic note in the morning paper: “One hundred and one airmen have been rescued from the North Sea and the Channel in the past fifty hours.” That was all. But how come? I asked my friends in the Ministry of Information, they dug up a copy of this pamphlet, and I had my answer.

Here, in masculine, vivid English is the true story of what the RAF and now our own airmen do when they are “ ditched" here is how the crew of a bomber brace themselves when the craft cracks into the sea; here is how a fighter pilot holds his nose, releases his parachute harness, and grips fast to his dinghy pack just as his feet touch the water. Here is the cozy story of those air-sea rescue floats, like cabin cruisers with a sloping ramp instead of a propeller shaft, up which your damp aviator drags himself into a cabin with heat, food, and a radio. Might he meet a German aviator inside? Well, it is possible, for there are many such floats moored throughout the Channel, and German pursuits are the underdog. Here is the ceaseless, the vigilant story of the Coastal Command who scour the water for those human pinpoints, and of the Royal Naval launches that pick up the SOS. One hundred and one airmen in fifty hours. When you see an aviator wearing a goldfish on his right sleeve, you will know that he has been pulled out of the ditch at least twice.

Nothing I can say will exaggerate the priority which the Air Force holds on the imagination here. People traveling the English trains do not read the comics. Not yet. They read books by or about the airmen. Once you have seen our Bomber Command or our fighters climb into action and then sweated out the time until their return, — once you have done that, the words take on a new meaning. And the English countryside have. For miles around they come to stand beside the hedgerows to watch the Fortresses or Lancasters take off. Hours later they reappear to count them as they come in. Do you wonder the stories of Flying Officer ‘X’ sold half a million copies! Do you wonder that people read The Last Enemy, by Richard Hillary (himself a casualty), and One of Our Pilots Is Safe, by Flight Lieutenant Simpson, and ask for more! I can see no sign of any saturation of interest in the men of action.

If there is a Lawrence of Arabia in this show I cannot yet name him for you, but that this singular breed of English free lance is still present in the fighting forces is attested by The Golden Carpet, a beautifully printed narrative just released in a limited edition. The author, Captain Somerset de Chair, M. P., writing in what he calls “the leisure of wounds,” has set down the play-by-play account of a flying column made up of Life Guards, Royal Horse Guards, armored cars, and a Bedouin desert patrol, a column nicknamed the “ Kingcol ” after its commanding officer, General Kingstone. In 1941 the Kingcol sprinted from the Mediterranean across the desert to Bagdad; it helped mightily in putting down the Iraqi uprising and it certainly enjoyed the proceedings. As when, for instance, the British switched into the Iraqi telephone system, thereby learning the truth and imparting the false about their opponent. The risks which the column ran were clearly recognized by the author, who was in fact the intelligence officer of the expedition: he does not minimize the reality in his enormous zest for what was going forward.

It is cheering to see the increasing appetite for American books on this side of the water. Readers are not only open-minded. They seem positively hungry for the diversion and information in our books. At first glance the familiar titles seem whittled down. Is John Gunther really as small as that, you say to yourself — but it only means that all English publications today are smaller and neater than our own. Personally I prefer the small size.

Generally speaking, it takes our books six weeks to cross the Atlantic, four months to pass through the printing and binding, and another fortnight to work up steam. That explains why Mr. Willkie’s One World was not off the press by August 1, and why our last year’s favorites like Cross Creek, The Moon Is Down, and H. M. Pulham, Esq., are among the ranking best-sellers today.

The demand for Americana does not confine itself as it once did to fiction about cowboys and gangsters. Robert Frost’s poems held the center of an Edinburgh window. A dozen people have spoken to me about The Epic of America. That book is an eyeopener; so is America: The Story of a Free People, by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. But this acquired taste for our American coffee in no way diminishes their love of fresh tea.

Words are to the British what music is to the German: they have, as Dorothy Thompson says, “ a passion for poetry and the world’s largest and best production of it.” No soldier poet of this war has yet touched the sonnets of Rupert Brooke. The matchless phrase-making of England in peril came from a prose writer, the man who said, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for one thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour”; the man who said this war “will revive and increase the stature of man”; the man who said, “Never before in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The Prime Minister.

We know for certain that the men in uniform are reading and some of them writing poetry with intensity, and I expect a brave showing from service notebook and prison camp when release comes. A recent Sunday Times had a noticeably fine lyric by Noel Coward, “Lie in the dark and listen,”a poem which speaks for every civilian lying sleepless and secure while the big four-motor jobs pass overhead on their nightly mission. I have been instantly impressed by the power, the imagery, and the hard core of the poems of Roy Fuller which open an anthology entitled New Writing and Daylight. Roy Fuller is a Flying Officer who has served in Equatorial Africa; his lyrics bring home the contrast or is it resemblance? — between savagery and civilization.

Of the older writers, I still place Laurence Binyon’s “Burning of the Leaves” as the most eloquent of recent English poems and Mr. T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” a close second. The Quartets are being sold individually in paper covers at a shilling each, in editions reaching up to 20,000 copies.

People here are reading for hope, hope being an expectation of change. They find it in the government’s White Paper on education. They find it in the County of London Plan, a remarkably competent volume about the rebuilding of London, by J. H. Forshaw, architect to the London County Council, and Patrick Abercrombie, Professor of Town Planning. And they find it in the Beveridge Report. For here are ideas to chin yourself on.

And most unmistakably people are bracing themselves with a new revival of faith. I felt this resurgence at Oxford my first week-end, and I there met the two men whose books have, in a manner of speaking, led the revival: Lord Elton, once a fellow of Balliol, now a Labor peer, radio speaker with an enormous following, and the author of a book which has run through dozens of printings, Saint George or the Dragon.

The other author, C. S. Lewis, a poet and fellow of Magdalen College, has written as delightful a series of devilish letters as I have ever had the fun of reading. His little book, The Screwtape Letters, tells in reverse English what an old devil and his young pupil really think of chastity, prayer, pacifism, property, and sex. This witty and sincere book (not to be confused with Moral Rearmament) has been deservedly popular here and would, I think, be tonic for us.

A true story in closing. The English censor went through my papers most thoroughly on my arrival. An unbound copy of John Marquand’s new novel stumped him a little. Why had I underscored certain passages? As I explained, I felt myself slipping back into the seventh grade. At the bottom of my pile were copies of the July Harper s and Atlantic. “Ah,” said the censor, “Harpers — a good show that!” Then he picked up the Atlantic with the flag across the cover. “The Atlantic Monthly,” he read slowly, pronouncing every syllable. “ Um — I never heard of that!”