The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

OUTWARD bound, my train pulled into New Haven and I got out on the platform for the customary stretch. A detachment of Negro draftees, duffel bags on shoulders, started climbing aboard and one of them, as he passed, called softly to our Pullman porter, “So long, Sam!” Sam grinned, but sadly. “That’s waste!" he said. “That boy could play the piano like nobody’s business. Two years, here, he’s been studying—” “A-all ABOARD!” came the shout from down the platform, and we climbed on.

In his way, Sam was right. No telling whether that boy would come back with enough limber in his fingers to be the musician he might have been. Kreisler did, twenty-five years ago. But the odds are against it. Then under the sway and spell of the train my mind turned, as it does so often, to thinking of those who planned to write, and who will come back wanting to. I wondered whether they will return, as my generation did, to those centers of English where one could find the quiet and the self-confidence for the book ahead. That’s what T. E. Lawrence found when he went back to All Souls. That’s what attracted men like Robert Sherwood, Philip Barry, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Hillyer, Charles Brackett, Foster Damon, and John Dos Passos to the Harvard of 1919.

In the Cambridge of reconstruction I remember, there were three magnetic poles in the field of English composition — Dean Briggs, “Copey,”and Professor Baker. Those of us who aimed to write prose or verse applied to either of the first; playwriters were caught up in the fervor of “47 Workshop.”

You cannot teach a man to write, but you can certainly speed up his apprenticeship. You can speed up his facility, cure his clumsiness, train his ear for dialogue and his eye for transition, and, most important of all, help him find his medium.

No other country gave such emphasis to undergraduate writing, such encouragement to journalism. Whether this was simply the logical development of our public schools or whether the demand was created by the enormous growth of our magazine industry is for historians to decide. But this much we do know: that thanks to American teachers who were throwing off sparks in the twenties and thirties, our young correspondents in this war have produced better journalism and better books than the Richard Harding Davises and Irvin Cobbs of 1917.

The University of Michigan is an almost perfect example of how the sparks fly. Professor F. N. Scott was the man who established the tradition of writing at Ann Arbor. He began in 1903 and he retired in 1927. One of his first and brightest pupils was Avery Hopwood. Hopwood graduated in 1905, and in the years before and after the First World War he cleaned up a cool million with his comedies on Broadway. On his death in 1928 he willed $313,836.10 to the University to encourage “the best creative work in the fields of dramatic writing, fiction, poetry and the essay.” Since that time the Hopwood Awards have become the biggest plums and the keenest stimulant in collegiate writing.

TEN YEARS IN JAPAN • BY JOSEPH C. GREW.

Reviewed by Ellery Sedgwick

THE TIMBER BEAST • BY ARCHIE BINNS.

Reviewed by Milton Hindus

THE CONDITION OF MAN • BY LEWIS MUMFORD

Reviewed by Daniel Bell

THE IDEA OF NATIONALISM • BY HANS KOHN

Reviewed by George N. Shuster

PETER DOMANIG • BY VICTOR WHITE.

Reviewed by Robert W. Anderson

MEDIEVAL AMERICAN ART • BY PÁL KELEMEN

Reviewed by Leo Lerman

They have attracted to Ann Arbor graduates and undergraduates with something to say — poets like John Ciardi, novelists like Mildred Walker (Dr. Norton’s Wife; Winter Wheat), Iola Fuller (Loon Feather; The Shining Trail), and Maritta Wolff (Whistle Stop; Night Shift). They have already stimulated the publication of numerous novels and volumes of verse, and they have brought to this specialized teaching a man who can really wear Scott’s shoes, Professor R. W. Cowden. The Hopwood will provides that approximately $8000 in prizes must be awarded every year. Young veterans of Guadalcanal, Anzio, and China will be shooting at that for years to come.

The job can be done even without the cash if the Mark Hopkins at the end of the log is good enough. As a traveling editor, I have had the refreshment of meeting these sparky teachers the country over. Men like Barry Cerf at Reed College, Professor Koch and Phillips Russell with their Playmakers at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Hudson Strode and his fiction writers at the University of Alabama, Wilbur Schramm, the delightful spark plug at the University of Iowa, Frederick Mulhauser at Pomona, Carroll Towle who makes English sing at Durham, New Hampshire, Theodore Spencer and Wallace Stegner at Harvard of the 1930’s, Edward Davison at Boulder, Colorado, Edith Mirrielees at Stanford, Theodore Morrison at Bread Loaf— these are the teachers whose standards will be remembered by our writers in uniform.

Down in the deep South, Hudson Strode began the teaching of creative writing in 1937. His classes at the University of Alabama have been small,— fourteen is the top enrollment, — and in the prewar days about half his students wrote novels, the other half short stories. Now in an attractively arranged collection, Spring Harvest, Mr. Strode has brought together the fifteen stories by his Southern students which have pleased him the most.

Early in my reading I realized that this was no honeysuckle veranda with a guitar softly strumming; I realized that I was in the presence of a very earnest company of young men and women, intent that I should see the South as they did. If these stories have a prevailing quality, it is that of good, rich melancholy. One is asked to commiserate with the squatters on the washed-out land, the poor kin so proud of spirit, and those whose loyalty has been twisted in defeat. In the hands of Robert Gibbons and Edward Kimbrough commiseration and grievance do not blur the narrative, but in the more introspective pieces the mood stands the story still.

It strikes me that these young authors are singularly without laughter: it strikes me that they have evinced very little real enjoyment of the people they are writing about (it is almost as if they opposed their characters rather than stayed by them); and it strikes me that although these fifteen short stories were written between August, 1941, and August, 1943, in only one of them has the surface been ruffled by the present war. It is to Professor Strode’s credit that these young writers should have been so sure of phrase and so intensely preoccupied with the plight of the South. I note that five out of the six men represented are now in uniform, and I am willing to bet that when they return to their writing they will bring with them a more evident pleasure in human nature and a more deeply experienced indignation than are here evident.

To the Viking Press, who have made Saki such a delight to reread, I hereby award the Atlantic Palm for the neatest and most attractive book of the year. Their pocket edition of Dorothy Parker’s stories and poems is a prize example of what can be done to save paper and still produce a book which is easy to read, light to hold, and good to look at. Note also that the price is but $2.00 for a volume of some 550 pages. Shows what can be done when you take the pains and have a lady in demand.

More sharply and more wittily than any man or any other woman of our time, Dorothy Parker has expressed the spirit of Manhattan, The New York she wrote about was not the varied, fabulous, Bowery New York of O. Henry. Hers was the uptown New York, the New York of F.P.A.’s “Conning Tower,” of “21,” of Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, of Robert Benchley (with whom she once shared an office), of “Wit’s End” (which was her name for Alexander Woollcott’s apartment), and of the early New Yorker where her review of A. A. Milne set an all-time record for hilarious bloodshed.

Her poems came first — deft, ironic, with that backlash which one begins to expect in the last two lines. They were the light retort to the allout lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Then in Life and in Vanity Fair there appeared those lists of persons, places, and things which Miss Parker loathed. She was a good hater, and the reader laughed self-consciously as she snipped off his foibles. Finally, and with increasing confidence, she began the writing of the dialogues and short stories which form the chief substance of this book.

Have these stories as much endurance as Katherine Mansfield’s? It is hard to say. We who reread them today do so with a sense of recognition other readers will not possess. That, we say, is the way New York looked and felt in the twenties and early thirties. Yes, that’s the way people talked. The observation — especially of women — is as sharp as a scalpel, and the loneliness in the city, the inability of her people to get through to each other, is beautifully conveyed. But as we see the work in toto, with its laughter, its wit, its silly sophistication, and its heartburn, we realize that there are limitations, the chief of them being a lack of depth and a lack of cordiality.

Islands have always represented a special kind of sanctuary to which the hard-pressed could escape in time of war. I don’t know how much the population of Tahiti increased after the crash of 1929, but there must have been thousands of Americans who moved there in imagination even though their debts kept them at home. All during the 1930’s Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall and Robert Dean Frisbie kept the candle of solitude glowing in Polynesia. And the gleam of their books, Mutiny on the Bounty, Dark River, Hurricane, and My Tahiti, was like a beacon to a world in trouble.

This year James Norman Hall has come back to the mainland, bringing with him a short novel, Lost Island, which tells what the war has done to even the tiniest atolls in the Pacific. As the editor of this book, I am of course wholly partisan; so I shall only say that in his compassionate understanding of the natives and the European refugees, Hall has written a story of impending doom that breaks upon the mind with the accumulating force of a great comber.

But there is another side to this shield: what the experience on these islands has done to our men in combat. Howard Hunt is a young graduate of Brown, who majored in English literature and studied writing, who served on a destroyer until he was invalided out of the Navy, and who last year traveled forty thousand miles by plane and ship through the Pacific on a round-up for Life. His new novel, Limit of Darkness, is the first I have read that shows beyond question what the corrosion of the tropics and the tension of flying can do to our aviators in a hellhole like Guadalcanal.

It is the story of twenty-four hours on Henderson Field — a typical day, from the sweaty awakening to the midnight strike on a Jap base. The men know — you know — that casualties are inevitable; and if you have had editorial experience, you can probably spot in advance some of the characters who will not come back. Mr. Hunt writes without ever raising his voice, and his narrative is as natural and straight forward as a clock ticking. He shows you the heat, and the chill of malaria; he shows you the mosquitoes, and the rats, and the soggy food; he shows you the gripes, the unexpressed loyalty, and the hunger for home of the flyers on edge. Except for one glimpse of an army nurse, women are admitted to the story only in flashbacks of a rather sentimental nature. It is the men in action who count: McRae, the skipper, once a test pilot, now a leader with frayed nerves; Eliot Forsyth, once of the Ivy League, once a lady-killer; and best drawn of all, Lieutenant (j.g.) Ben Lambert, the single surviving pilot of a torpedo squadron, who lives for two things — to fly, and to kill more Japs. In each of these the corrosion of war is at work to an extent they could never explain, should they come back. A book like this will stretch your imagination.

The worst rabble-rousing I have heard in the last month comes from Tulsa, Oklahoma. It appears in a double-column editorial by Richard Lloyd Jones, the president and publisher of the Tulsa Tribune. Here is the first paragraph: —

It is a good thing for all of us that we didn’t have the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, and all the cynical periodicals of their equivocating and purposeless kind, when America was being made. It is a good thing for all of us that at America’s beginning we had no peddlers of punk hooks such as are the leading book publishers in and about New York City today.

With this brass-knuckle beginning, Mr. Jones begins to swing out in all directions. He blackens both eyes of Yale and Harvard and then lumbers back in our direction to give us another one-two. I quote: —

But all the major book publishing houses and a too considerable portion of our unenlightened periodical editors ballyhoo the writing talent that advocates we change into a Soviet or socialistic state.

Having laid out Macmillan, Scribner, Dutton, Knopf, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace, Norton, Harper, and ourselves all in one lunge, Mr. Jones slugs Sinclair Lewis, “ the babbling writer who never knew the monumental romance of his native Minnesota,” and Van Wyck Brooks, who has “presumed to describe American life and literature.” Then Mr. Jones draws himself up beside the Statue of Liberty and shouts for the freedom of the press: “The Light in Liberty’s torch is so great a human need no false users of our presses can snuff it out.”

This is phobia writing. It cannot be excused as the blind emotionalism with which some men react to the war. Tulsa is not beyond reach of Emporia and Atchison, Kansas. But it never occurred to Mr. Jones of Tulsa that neither William Allen White nor Ed Howe would ever have indulged in such cheap and snarling journalism. It never occurred to Mr. Jones that he was abusing the freedom of the press. It never occurred to Mr. Jones that his ignorance adds up to this: “I am a true American and all editors who think differently are traitors,” and that he was being just as un-American as Hitler was when he burned the books. It may not have occurred to Mr. Jones, but I hope it occurs to the people of Tulsa.