The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EAWARD WEEKS

LITERATURE is where you find it, and it is my belief that more of it is taking shape in Washington today than in any other spot on earth. The Hub was our first literary community; Philadelphia, Hartford, Chicago, and San Francisco have each had their moments; and since the 1880’s New York has been the show window of our publications. But Washington was not thought to be conducive: the small talk of the politicians and gossips destroyed the reflective atmosphere. Actually its literary tradition goes back to the days when John Adams was swimming in the Potomac and when the capital was little better than a tavern in a swamp.

The business of government has produced two of our greatest diaries—the Diaries of John Adams and of his son, J. Q. A. It has produced a philosophy of state in the marble prose of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson (look at Jefferson Himself, by Bernard Mayo); in its fiery moments Washington was the crucible from which poured Webster’s reply to Hayne, the “ Battle Ilymn of the Republic,” the Gettysburg Address, Walt Whitman’s “Drum-Taps,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d.” In calmer days, Washington cultivated the histories of Bancroft and the biographies of Marshall and Lincoln by Senator Beveridge; it stimulated the dissenting opinions of Justice Holmes and was the harbor in wInch Henry Adams wrote his Education and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

Now, under the magnetism of this war, writers of every caliber have been drawn to the Capital — which is why you see so many editors walking its streets. Where else could you find so many formative books in mind or on paper? Here is the poetry of Archibald MacLeish; here are books on foreign policy like Walter Lippinann’s; here are the Grew Diaries, the Addresses of Thomas Mann; here are the war stories coming back with every shipload of wounded; here are the innumerable now-it-can-belolds waiting only for the indiscretion of peace; and here are the wives and widows who, like the famous Mrs. Chestnut, keep a vivacious record of the male antics. Here is My Day.

This will continue when we move into the reconstruction. Lnder Mr. MacLeish the Library of Congress has taken in famous consultants from abroad — Thomas Mann in the Germanic languages, Alexis St. Leger Leger for the French — and opened up a two-way street to Latin American culture. Here are the American Negro Studies of F. Franklin Frazier and also the collection of American folk music so skillfully recorded by the Lomaxes, father and son. Add together the general resources of the Library of Congress and its Law Library, the Folger Collection of Shakespeariana, the Army Medical Library (now building), and the Holmes Memorial Gardens for the evening walk, and you have a creative workshop in American literat ure.

Literature in Washington will always be up against the noisiest kind of competition— I mean the sound and fury of political prose. This is what we hear when we listen to the Potomac, and the din drowns out the less strident pronouncements. I am sorry that it never occurred to Mr. Pulitzer to give one of his awards for excellence in political writing.

IN THIS ISSUE

THE LOST WEEKEND BY CHARLES JACKSON.

Reviewed by Gorham Munson

WALT WHITMAN: AN AMERICAN • BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

Reviewed by Clifton Joseph Furness

LEND-LEASE: WEAPON FOR VICTORY BY EDWARD R. STETTINIUS, JR. Reviewed by Gorham Munson

LIANA • BY MARTHA GELLHORN

Reviewed by Lucy Tompkins

A BELL FOR ADANO • BY JOHN MERSEY

Reviewed by Milton Hindus

A IREASURY OF SCIENCE • EUITED BY HARLOW SHAPLEY,

SAMUEL RAPPORT AND HELEN WRIGHT .

WRIGHT Reviewed by Harland Manchester

THE STREAM OF MUSIC • BY RICHARD ANTHONY LEONARD

Reviewed by Leo Leruian

At a time when what is written and spoken in the Capital is of such consequence to us all, it might not be inappropriate to confer the following Potomac Prizes: —

For the Best Speech in Congress
To Speaker Sain Rayburn, for his rebuke to the House on December 9.

For the Most Inf uriating Warning
A posthumous award to Lieutenant Colonel William E. Dyess for his Death March on Bataan.

For the Biggest Monkey Wrench in the Works
A toss-up between Senator Johnson’s statement that we shall supply 73 per cent of the invasion force and Senator Hugh Butler’s exaggeration of Pan-American grief.

Prize Boomerang
To C. Nelson Sparks for his One Man — Wendell Willkie.

For the Most Chicken-headed Prose
To Everett L. Dakan for trying to lure Jap internees to Ohio and Michigan farms with these honeyed words printed in a government publication, Midwest Frontier, on the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor: —
“Believe it or not, some fewT tenants and seasonal workers do not bathe! They think it is unhealthy. We need you people to change our ideas about this. You have a lesson to teach Ohio and Michigan farmers in sanitation. It is a contribution you can make to our way of living. . . .
“We need your faithfulness to your task, your willingness to work and your appreciation of a job well done. There are a lot of workers in the Middle West, in Ohio and Michigan, who are not careful, painstaking and accurate. Thisyou can teach them.”

D is ho nor able Mention
To Congressman Rankin for open ridicule of Jews in the debate on the Soldier’s Vote.

Just as Priestley reminds me of the younger H. G. Wells, so the novels of Susan Ertz seem to me in the direct descent of Galsworthy, though I should add that she has yet to reach the warm, spacious plateau of the Saga. In Anger in the Sky, Miss Ertz’s newest and most readable story, you find a houseful ol English people, very plausible in what they do, very touching in what they feel; you find a prevailing sense of justice, and you find a constant endeavor to light up the understanding between Britain and the United States.

Anger in the Sky is the clearly featured story of an English evacuee community which threatens to burst the seams of the old country house Mendenhall. Rightly enough it begins in the kitchen, where they are preparing to serve thirty slum children from London, their teachers, and the more elderly blitz victims Mrs. Anstruther has taken in. The children are a care seen but not heard. Vivid and more problematic are the elders: Mr. Grayson, the rasping, Socialist teacher; Sir William, the aging embodiment of Law; Madame Vibourg with her acid Vichy distrust; Viola, the hospital-shocked daughter of the house. It is Mrs. A. and her eager seventeen-yea r-older, Stacy, who keep tempers from breaking and who create the sympathy in which loneliness and grief are subdued.

To Mendenhall on Christmas Eve comes an American purchasing agent, Elliot Tally. Elliot has blancmange in his veins, and his presence reminds us of how nearly impossible it is for an English novelist to do justice to our temperament. The strength of this story lies in its warm-blooded picture of that classless community which England has (temporarily?) become in its own defense.

They are a people we are only dimly beginning to understand — the unconquered. Their starvation of mind and body, their disillusion, and their twisted idealism set them light-years away from our more ordered experience. In Arrival and Departure by Arthur Koestler, we have one of the most powerful analytical studies yet made of the refugee’s mind. To a country which I read to be Portugal comes Peter Slavek, once a student and revolutionary, who, after two years of political inquisition, has been released by the Nazis.

He wants to fight back and he cannot understand why there should be such an interminable delay before the British accept him. In the long wait he is saved from starvation by Dr. Bolgar, a woman psychologist of his own race, and he is solaced by Odette, an attractive French refugee. Peter had never cracked when the Nazis had tortured him. “He had all the best qualities of his generation: their balance of skepticism and devotion, and unsentimental self-sacrifice.” But when in Lisbon he has suddenly to choose between his mistress, Odette, and the call to England, his mind, which has been tense for so long, is ruptured. From this point on, his past and his future are in the hands of the friendly psychiatrist as she works to restore his self-control.

Arrival and Departure is not for the tenderminded. Nor is it in every respect a successful novel. I should call the ending no better than nominal. But for three quarters of the distance an American will recognize in Peter the unconquerable indignation, the tortured mind, and the suspicion horn of hardship which have bewildered us in Italy and will continue to do so as we strike north.

It will take courage and something more to carry us through this spring, — and the Nazis are banking on the hope that we shall not have that something more. The tenacity of men in a common cause, men of different blood, language, and experience, is what must hold us together as the casualty lisis come in. This tenacity is the keynote of a timely, stirring novel, The Sea Eagle, by Janies Aldridge, a novel which reaches back to those early, desperate days of defeat when the Germans, the ironheads, were driving the English and Australians out of Crete.

When the last scarred destroyer had pulled away, there were still survivors in the foothills, — Australians for the most part, — who took refuge in the fishing villages. The story begins with a pair of Aussies intent on one thing and one thing only: how to slip by the ironheads and take ship for Egypt. Unwillingly and at first uncomprehendingly, Angus Burke, the hard, round nut of a man, and Stone, the red giant from Down Under, are caught up in a village fight against the Metaxists, the Greek party which sided with the Nazis. With captured German mortars they lead the invasion as the price of their own escape.

The peculiar strength of this masculine book is in its ability to transmit first understanding, then humor, then the fiercest loyalty, man to man, so that under the vicious fire of the machine guns on the beach the truth is demonstrated that all wars, all rebellions, arc one this spring.

There are several compelling reasons for reading George Santayana’s Persons and Places. It is the most tranquil book of this stormy year; it is the fresh, spring-like distillation of a philosopher; and the shading, the irony, and the sheen of its English make its prose a joy to read aloud. Finally, here is a man piecing together a superb monument to Mediterranean culture at a time when thousands of other men are blowing the land and all that stands on it to bits.

George Santayana is an American who never belonged, lie came close to us because of his American cousins and because, through a twist of circumstance, his Spanish mother (whose first husband was a Sturgis of Boston) preferred living in Boston on her Sturgis inheritance rather than in Spain with her second husband. Santayana’s father was a Spaniard, and though the boy spent, his formative years on our side of the water, studying at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College (where for twenty-three years he lingered on to teach the gospel of Plato), he missed a true affinity with us because in his heritage, in his instincts, and in his austerely cultivated tastes, he was Spanish to the core. lie left us for good in 1912, and as the years passed he has felt very little tug to return.

Persons and Places is that rarest of biographical achievements, a book written about youth with the sapience and unmistakable clarity of age. It is almost incredible that these pages, so charged with the eager curiosity, the misgivings, and the loneliness of a young alien, should have been written by a man fast approaching eighty, a man who is still living and, one hopes, still writing in the sanctuary of a convent near Rome. “ I at least,” says the philosopher, “have found that old age is the time for happiness, even for enjoying in retrospect the years of youth that were so distracted in their day.” Unless the Nazis interrupt him, there will certainly be a second and perhaps a third volume of this classic autobiography.

It is, I suspect, the prerogative of a philosopher to hold people, even people he is fond of, at arm’s length, and this capacity of Santayana is beautifully exemplified in the portraits of his parents, which may seem unfilial to American readers. Consider these snapshots of his mother: “She was more attached to her women friends, to one or two of them, than even to her husbands”; “In my mother I think determination rather took passion’s place. She decided what was best and then defied all difficulties in doing it”; “My mother above all loved liberty, self-government, and silence.” When pressed to join the Plato Club of Roxbury, she declined. “The President and host of the Roxbury Plato Club would not take no for an answer. In what then was she interested? What was she doingf To this my mother replied . . . without smiling: ‘ In winter I try to keep warm and in summer I try to keep cool.’ ” I doubt if any American biographer of our time would be capable at once of such objectivity and understanding.

Speaking of himself, Santayana says, “I never acquired or liked the American art of perpetual joking.” That little admission hints at the detachment he always felt, even when with American men lie admired. He lacked the loyalty and the inclination to sink his roots with ours, and it follows that when he came to judge our life, his hands were not big enough to grasp the experiment in civilization to which we are committed. If we have a culture, Santayana never found it. “America in those days made an exile and a foreigner of every native who had a temperament like mine,” and in that admission there is, I think, the hint of his failure. American readers will not find ready sympathy for us in these pages, nor an understanding in depth. What they will find is a kind of dart-throwing criticism which at times comes so close as to seem ungrateful; what they will find is the urbane criticism of a most distinguished Mediterranean philosopher, judging us with the standards of the past and not particularly concerned about our future.