The Peripatetic Reviewer

IF SIGNS mean anything, this Christmas Eve will be portentous. All year we have climbed up the long, rocky path from defeat and uncertainty to emerge at last into the clear, winter-cold starlight of Christmas Eve. We know that victory lies ahead, and this time we mean to have the staying power to ensure peace on earth.

“Peace on earth, good will toward men.” The ancient words still touch the heart. But I wonder how much good will can survive during the period of reconstruction. German brutality and Japanese treachery this time have lit a running fire of hatred which cannot be dampened as it was in 1919. Such detestation is only beginning to show in print. In England we see it in Vansittart ism — that credo for the suppression of Germany for at least two generations, which blazes fort h in Lord Vansittart’s Lessons of My Life, His thesis, “Seventy-five per cent of Germans have for seventy-five years — the figures are easy to remember been eager for any assault on their neighbors,” has been steadily gaining converts in Britain, though I have the impression that for the most part they are men and women over forty-five. What the young men and women in uniform believe has not yet been disclosed.

Here the Hamburger Theory, the grinding of German Imperialism into little bits, has been preached most vigorously by Mr. Rex Stout and Mr. Clifton Fadiman, and with no less authority by such German refugees as Dr. F. W. Foerster and Thomas Mann. We have not yet made up our minds as to how Germany should be treated, and the fact that we have no scorched earth may make us more tender-minded than our allies. But there has been a searching of conscience and a constant testing of opinion ever Since the publication of Dr. Brickner’s book, Is Germany Incurable? The problem is being threshed out in pulpit and on lecture platform; it is the table talk in a million homes, and our resolution will firm up when we know more accurately what the Big Three have in mind. Here again we have no sure knowledge of what the men in the armed forces are thinking. “But this time,” as a friend of mine said, “the bombers put teeth in any covenant. We have the police power and we shall use it!” Perhaps the best temperature reading of our formative opinion is to be found in the outspoken debate conducted by the Saturday Review of Literature for May 29, 1943.

Even in this relatively unmolested country where no bombs full, literature is subordinated to the war. The war has changed the format, the paper, and — most of all — the content of our books. Since Pearl Harbor the reflective, the Freudian, the stream-ofconsciousness writers have been muted; in their stead we have reportorial narrative, swiftly observed, rapidfire, full of action. The novelists were the first to realize that there could be no “writing as usual,” and many of them have now been dispersed to the seven seas. The men and women whose first novels should be breaking into print are in uniform. In autobiographies like Connecticut Yankee by Wilbur L. Cross and The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway, in novels like The Big Rock Candy Mountain of Wallace Stegner, in history like The Year of Decision by Bernard DeVoto, we are harvesting the last of our peacetime crop. And now, as in 1918, peaceful Americana, whatever their power or beauty, are taking second place to the more insistent books of war.

In war, changes occur so rapidly that we have hardly had time to add them up. If one were to draw up a balance sheet of the profits and losses in literature for 1943, I believe the following entries would appear on the plus side of the ledger.

MORE PEOPLE READING. The Old Corner Book Store of Boston does approximately one per cent of the nation’s business. For the month of November, 1943, this shop reported a 60 per cent increase in book buying as compared with the year previous. I have heard similar reports in Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit. As in England and Russia, it is increasingly difficult to keep popular books in stock.

WHAT THEY READ. They prefer books of fact to books of fiction. They swallow a bitter dose like Under Cover; they weigh Walter Lippmann’s U. S. Foreign Policy; they prefer Mr. Willkie’s survey, One World, to Clare Luce’s “Globaloney.” They recognize the most stirring prose of the year in Churchill’s Speeches.

THE LEADING CURIOSITY is for the vigilant reportorial writing of men attached to the troops, like Ernie Pyle, Richard Tregaskis, John Hersey. We have a tender heart for aviators when they write as vividly as Flight Lieutenant Richard Hillary or Lieutenant Colonel Beirne Lay. And we have a conscientious sympathy for the new books by Negroes and those extending our understanding of India, Burma, and China.

GENEROSITY. At Michigan State University I first encountered a movement which seems to me as generous as our rebuilding of the library of Louvain in the 1920’s. The faculty members in East Lansing were making a collection of books, both scientific and in the humanities, for replenishing the parched or destroyed libraries of Europe. This work is being taken in hand by many another academic community under the direction of the American Library Association. The Rockefeller Foundation has made a grant of $200,000 for the purchase of scientific periodicals, and the big university libraries, such as Widener, are sifting out duplicates for restocking the empty shelves abroad. A war chest of a million volumes destined for Europe has already been collected in England.

BOOKS FOR THE ASSEMBLY LINE. Mechanically this is the most remarkable development since the war began. Paperbound reprints ranging from classics to mysteries are reaching Americans who literally never owned a book before. Pocket Books, Inc., has printed seventy million copies in three years. Beginning in October, the Council of Books in Wartime has been delivering a million and a half paperbacks each month to the Army and Navy: at the end of the first year of operation we shall have shipped eighteen million volumes to our men overseas. The books are small enough to fit in a uniform pocket. Their text is unabridged. Here at home both Woolworth and Sears, Roebuck are finding it profitable to sell reprints in a big way. We have Henry Ford to thank for this larger literacy — he taught us mass production.

NEATER BOOKS. They have to be — neater in size, smaller in type, and lighter in paper. Compare your gift books this Christmas with that spacious classic of the Depression, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The big fellow is very handsome, but he used up a lot of paper and a lot of room. The smaller margins make it difficult for librarians to rebind. Nevertheless I believe we may come to prefer the neater format.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES. Skepticism is out for the duration. If it returns with the veterans, it will be because we have bungled the peace. While the fight is on, both soldiers and stay-at-homes are responsive to the lift of poetry. British poets, having had a longer time in which to readjust themselves, have already risen to the response, and in The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon, John Masefield’s long poem Wanderings, the poems of aviation by John Pudney, and the lyrics of that prisoner in Germany, John Buxton, is a body of war poems which will be remembered. Ours will come.

With this avidity for poetry, but on a more popular level, goes a craving for the faith and consolation offered by the religious novels, The Song of Bernadette, The Robe, and The Apostle.

Now what are the lasting assets in that column? We find that American readers at home are of a more serious and inquiring mind; we find that the publishers, applying the lessons of mass production, have made the best of their books available at the lowest common denominator. But mark this: most of these books were old books, seeking new audiences; only a small fraction of them were new books, written in the anxious uncertainty of 1943. That year was not productive of many major contributions to literature. Why?

Perhaps we shall find the answer if we recall what happened to authors and books in 1917-1918. In the Introduction to his anthology, Men at War, Ernest Hemingway writes these hard-hitting words: “ In the last war there were no really good true war books during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason . . . is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers would be if they wrote critically since the latter’s meaning, if they are good writers, is too uncomfortably clear. The last war, during the years 1915,1916, 1917, was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought. Of those who fought many died and we shall never know who were the fine writers who would have come out of the war who died in it instead.

“ But after the war the good and true books finally started to come out. They were mostly all by writers who had never written or published anything before the war. The writers who were established before the war had nearly all sold out to write propaganda during it and most of I hem never recovered their honesty afterwards. All of their reputations steadily slumped because a writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

“A writer’s job is to tell the truth. If, during a war, conditions are such that a writer cannot publish the truth because its publication would do harm to the State, he should write and not publish. If he cannot make a living without publishing, he can work at something else. But if he ever writes something which he knows in his inner self is not true, for no matter what patriotic motives, then he is finished.”

These are fighting words, and they aroused Stephen Vincent Benét, who read them shortly before his death. “I don’t happen to agree with Hemingway’s thesis,” he wrote. “J don’t think that writing propaganda for a cause you believe in necessarily vitiates Milton, who did a good deal of it. If you don’t believe in what you write, that’s something else. If you do believe in what you write and yet write badly, sloppily, untruthfully, that’s your fault. If what I am writing today as propaganda will hurt my eventual reputation as a writer — very well, then let itMaybe, later on, some of the things I have written will make me squirm — OK, I have squirmed before. It seems to me that the Government has as much right to call upon me to use such special abilities as I may have as it has to call upon a chemist to use his. Anyhow, I just can’t sit on my integrity (as a writer), like a hen on a china egg, for the duration. And maybe even if I did, nothing could hatch.”

This is not a head-on contradiction, for each man has truth on his side. Madrid surrendered on March 28, 1939, and For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in October, 1940. Thus the materials for Mr. Hemingway’s last novel must have been observed and the actual writing begun in the closing stages of the Spanish War. And in so doing the novelist did not jeopardize his integrity by the too liberal application of the propagandist’s brush. But in defense of his case it must be added that the novel was conceived and published without any restraint of censorship. In these two opinions you see the decision which has faced virtually every professional writer in this country since December 7, 1941. It is useful to have them in mind as we review the literary debits of the past year.

THE DRYING-UP OF FICTION — or perhaps I should say, of good fiction. Short stories of distinction are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Most of the stories now published are lacking in range, depth, and versatility. They narrow down to two stock situations: Boy Gets Girl in a Uniform, or Boy Gets Nazi Underground. The reason is clear: writers of talent have been silenced. We have had nothing from Hemingway for reasons which he has explained, and next to nothing from Eudora Welty. Louis Bromfield has been writing polemics, Oliver La Fargo is preparing the history of our Ferry Command, Clifford Dowdey is on a writer’s project in Washington. So it goes. And so it goes in England — where Geoffrey Household, Peter Fleming, and Evelyn Waugh are in uniform. There only “Flying Officer X” maintains the peacetime standard with his stories of the RAF.

NOVELS THIN OUT. There were approximately two hundred fewer novels published this year, but the thinning out of their quality is even more noticeable. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected nineteen books in 1943; only four were novels. Tn my judgment four books (including only one of the Book Club’s selections) stand out above the field — and it is a thin field at that: —

So Little Time by John Marquand
Indigo, a Novel of India, by Christine Weston
The Apostle, by Sholem Asch
The Big Bock Candy Mountain, by Wallace Stegner

The distraction of the war is steadily reducing the manpower in fiction, leaving the field to the feminine writers. There may be men who, as Mr. Hemingway suggests, are writing and storing up their manuscript against the return of free speech. But I don’t know of any. Most of them simply are not writing.

PAPER SHORTAGE. This is habit-forming, and most, of the habits I am afraid are bad. A publisher with only a limited quota of paper is naturally tempted to keep his popular titles in stock. Which obviously works to the disadvantage of the now writer and still more so to the unorthodox. Again, the shortage of paper and the rising labor costs have given some publishers a pretext for raising the price of their books. More new novels were priced at $2.75 last year, and more thin books were at $2.50, than in times past. As a general rule, prices have remained constant, but I dislike to see, even in exceptional cases, the price of clothbound books climbing back to 1929 levels.

ANTI-SEMITISM. Perhaps we in Boston are hypersensitive on this subject, but I have the strong impression, gathered from many trips around the country, that anti-Semitism everywhere is on the rise. Some of the more evident sources are identified in Mr. Carlson’s Under Cover, but the trouble is that the contagion of the near-beer Nazis and crackpots is too readily passed on by the careless-minded. There are too many half-serious references to the Protocols and the “Jew-in spired war.” There is too much publicly expressed resentment against the Jewish candidates who are top-ranking in the Officers’ Training Schools. There are too many scurrilous jokes handed on from salesman to salesman. Broadsides like the following are sneaked into metropolitan newspapers: —

When we get through with Hitler,
And Hirohito too,
Johnny Doughboy has a fighting date
With the G—d—fighting Jew!

The feeling spreads from civilian life into the services. On June 21 of this year a General Order was issued from the Bureau of Personnel of the Navy rebuking the editors of their service papers for reprinting Jewish jokes which were not as harmless as they looked. In Here Is Your War you see how sincerely Ernie Pyle combats the smear story that a Jew won’t fight. This anti-Semitism is not yet a sizable blot in our literature, but we must watch out.

LACK OF EDUCATION. This is an imponderable which might have a serious and debilitating effect on the writing to come. The colleges today have so little of the humanities to offer, and so little time in which to teach that little, that there is a real risk of discouraging those potential scholars, historians, essayists, and critics who ought to return to their books when at last they are out of uniform.

CASUALTIES. Here is the irretrievable loss, the loss of writers who had it in their power to give us so much more. I begin the list with two Atlantic contributors whose deaths Occurred last December.

Raoul de Roussy de Sales. A brilliant analyst of ailing democracy and a Frenchman whose American blood and understanding qualified him as one who would have been enormously influential in the difficult reconciliation to come. His book, The Making of Tomorrow, and his diaries to be published in 1944 under the title The Making of Yesterday, are unquestionably works which will tell our history and our anguish to later generations.

Katharine Butler Hathaway — stylist and valiant lover of life, whose death cut short the most ambitious adventure an invalid could undertake: the writing of a three-part autobiography. In style and substance her posthumous volume. The Little Locksmith, is a satisfaction in itself and a promise of what we might have had.

Alexander Woollcott, who will be remembered as an affectionate and provocative raconteur, for the pioneer work which, unaided and over twelve years, made him the most skillful voice on the radio, and most of all for his championship of authors. In the words of Walter Lippinaun: “Only the best critics are able to write convincingly and persuasively when they praise. Woollcott had a sharp taste. But he had gusto, he really liked what he praised, and he cared much more for the men and women he liked than he worried about those he did not like.”

William Lyon Phelps. Again, a champion rather than a writer of good books. Billy Phelps came in for a good deal of disparagement from my generation because of the superlatives — ”So-and-So is in the full plenitude of his powers”; “Fine book. Quote me to the limit” — which he handed out so generously in his busy years. But in any summing-up one must remember what he did to revive Herman Melville and Samuel Butler; one must remember the “Browning or Bust” school which he inspired at New Haven, and the prevailing good nature in his career.

Stefan Zweig. A refugee writer and master of the short novel, as evidenced by his Amok, Mr. Zweig, who took his own life in Brazil, was the embodiment of that wandering legion who have been buffeted from pillar to post since first their persecution began under the Nazis.

Eric Knight. An Anglo-American novelist, he wrote This Above All in the United States, intending it as an abjuration for the veterans who would emerge from this war as he had emerged from the last. Then, feeling the irresistible call, he enlisted in the U. S. Army and was promoted to the rank of major before meeting his death in an airplane accident in Dutch Guiana.

Remain Holland. Authorof Jean Christophe, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1915, M. Rolland is believed to have been sent to a German concentration camp in September of this year. The rumor that he was dead, put out perhaps as a feeler by Radio Algiers, was promptly denied by the Nazis. Pacifist until 1939, and lifelong Socialist and Communist, M. Holland awaited in Vezelay, France, the arrest which he was sure would overtake him. He worked to the last upon a volume of reminiscences of his childhood and a treatise on the last Quartets of Beethoven. It is to be hoped that he was able to place these manuscripts in friendly hands.

Laurence Binyon. Scholar, far traveler, and poet, as Keeper of the Prints in the British Museum, he perceptibly widened appreciation for the arts of India, China, and Japan. His war poems, For the Fallen and The Burning of the Leaves, are a part of England’s inheritance.

Stephen Vincent Benét. Poet, who will long be remembered for his epic John Brown’s Body and for his singing ballads; short-story writer who, in The Devil and Daniel Webster, invoked a new magic of fantasy in American prose; patriot who, in The Burning of the Books and Litany for Dictatorships, fought with the pen beyond the staying power of his frail body.