The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

LAST summer I had something to say about my collection of trees — the prime oaks, the wineglass elms, the swamp maples which make the autumn landscape in New England a sight unequaled, the great beeches and chestnuts and lindens which I have seen in my travels and still revisit in my mind.

Since I wrote those words last. August, three things have occurred to make me realize how vulnerable are even the most deep-rooted of our landmarks. I have learned this from letters which have come to me from fellow arborists in California, I have seen it in the hurricane which hit New England on September 14 and in the tail of the hurricane which finished off our cripples on October 20, and I have dreaded it as I have heard of the invasion of the Dutch Elm Disease along the Connecticut River valley.

Can you imagine what New England farms and villages would be without the American elm? Can you imagine Chestnut Street, Salem, or Williamstown or Old Deerfield without those ancient spreading beauties half as old as time? It would be a bad dream, but one which we may have to live with. Listen: spreading out from its beachhead in New York City, the Dutch Elm Disease has already killed some sixty thousand elms and caused the sacrifice of nearly six million more. From the Hudson River valley, beetles like paratroopers have carried the fungus from tree to tree, establishing infections in eight states and towns west of the Connecticut River. The battle to save our American elms is no longer something for other states to worry about. “The enemy,” as the Massachusetts Forest and Park Association says, “is in our own backyard.” Twenty-five years ago we rallied too late to save our chestnuts from the chestnut blight. This time we have to take the offensive. And that costs money. If you are in sympathy, send your check to the Massachusetts Forest and Park Association, care of Charles Francis Adams, State Street Trust Company, Boston, Massachusetts.

LEE’S LIEUTENANTS, Vol. III • BY DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN Reviewed by Richard Ely Danielson

FOREVER AMBER • BY KATHLEEN WTNSOR Reviewed by Frances Woodward

EVERYBODY’S POLITICAL WHAT’S WHAT? • BY BERNARD SHAW Reviewed by Oscar Handlin

ANNA AND THE KING OF SIAM • BY MARGARET LARDON Reviewed by Katharine Sunsorn

EARTH AND HIGH HEAYEN • BY GWETHALYN GRAHAM Reviewed by Isabel Currier

THE YOUNG SOLDIER • BY C. E. M. JOAD Reviewed by Bernard Iddings Bell

THE ROAD TO SERFDOM • BY FRIEDRICH A. HAYEK Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin

STORY OF A SECRET STATE • BY JAN KARSKI Reviewed by Charles W. Morton

I have never seen a redwood, and that admission brought me some exciting letters from California. Ernest G. Bishop sent me colored photographs of the Krauss Redwood Grove, an avenue of magnificent giants which have been spared from lumbering operations, but Hunderstand that, other giants are directly in the path of the lumbermen. And who is to save them? The fight for these ancients is again too big for one state to handle by itself.

“They say that in California,” wrote John Masefield, “ there are still many giant sequoias . . . which were growing in the time of David, and were fine trees at the time of Christ, and were really worth looking at in the time of Shakespeare, and are world famous today, and are still not at their best. I lay awake last night thinking of it with a kind of awe, of that enormous blind calm power and will to live. ... I went afterwards to see those trees. . . . They are not like trees, they are like spirits.” If you are as keen as I am to keep that heritage uncut, I urge you to read a remarkable booklet published by the University of California Press, The Redwoods of Coast and Sierra, by James Clifford Shirley, Ranger-Naturalist of the Yosemite National Park, and there you will find incredibly beautiful photographs and all the incentive you need to join the Save-the-Redwoods League.

Lovers of the cedar and oak have noticed that I have no Cedar of Lebanon in my collection. David Brock of West Vancouver, B. C., writes: —

When you deny any acquaintance with Lebanon cedars you almost deny ever having been in England, and it seems to me you’ve been there all right. My own visits to England have been anything but comprehensive tours; yet when I finally found what a Lebanon cedar was, I realized I had been seeing them everywhere. The ones at St. Albans stick in my mind particularly, and there were good ones at Kew. I read somewhere or other that if you want to see these trees at their best, there is no use trying Asia Minor; you have to go to England. I’m willing to bet that you’ve seen all sorts of them. Deodars are also true cedars, I think, but in this part of the world at least they are spindly things at best and I don’t know why people bother with them. If Lebanon cedars grow well in England, they should do well here (and in Washington and Oregon), and I wish a few people would try them. What we call cedar out here is usually a thuya, and occasionally a cypress.

And Howard Russell of Wayland, Massachusetts, says: —

If you enjoy a truly noble oak, you don’t have to go to the Middle West. Journey to Dighton some day and get them to show you the great Council Oak, beloved of the Indians and still standing with an enormous spread (when last I saw it) on the edge and in the midst of a great cultivated field that I have no doubt was well tilled by those so-called “savages” long before our forefathers touched a plow to it.

I wonder if the Council Oak came through the hurricane unscathed. That big blow cost us so much. We lost our prize English elm in the Public Garden, and many of the big ones along Commonwealth Avenue. And from Llewellyn Howland I hear that New Bedford and South Dartmouth are a shambles. “To see the trees one planted in youth, when time stretched ahead, — a limitless promise, — swept away in one hour by blind fury is pain of no mean caliber when one is seventy.” To which all of New England answers amen.

Somerset Maugham, the ablest English novelist of our time, and A. J. Cronin, the best of the Scots, have this in common: both were trained as doctors and each, I believe, would acknowledge that his power of characterization derives in no small part from his medical experience. In The Citadel, which is Cronin’s story of a doctor and which may have in it elements of autobiography, it seemed to me that the novelist was at his best in depicting the humbler Scottish folk. And this is natural enough if one remembers that Dr. Cronin’s early practice was with Welsh and Scotch miners, rather than on Harley Street. Similarly, it is in a small and provincial community that Cronin the novelist finds the human nature and the warmth with which to kindle the best of his novels.

The Green Years is the story of a boy against a forbidding world. It is the story of a growing up in which the eagerness and self-consciousness, the folly, the innocence, and the disappointment of Robert Shannon evoke, as it were, the echoes of our own past. Robert is eight when we first see him, an orphan and a Roman Catholic newly arrived from Ireland to be taken in hand, rather grudgingly, by his penny-pinching, Protestant grandparents. Robert has the endurance born of poverty and the refuge of Catholicism, which is all his dim parents have bequeathed him. But once his sniveling is passed, he begins to find his feet in this little Scotch village where the odds are so much against him. He is taunted for his religion, he is humiliated by his hand-me-downs — the awful green suit cut from his grandmother’s petticoat and the high button shoes of Kate. Because of the small-minded tyranny, his love of books and birds must be enjoyed in secret; and even in a moment of liberation, as when he and his friend Gavin land the big salmon, his joy is soon quenched by the dour grandfather. Robert lives in a state between high hope and bleak defeat, and the poignancy of his boyhood has been caught with sure, sensitive skill.

The story is lived as Robert lived it, and always in keeping with his maturity. The courtship of Aunt Kate and her boilermaker, which Robert watches with such innocence, is very different from Grandpa’s affair with Mrs. Bosomley, and this in turn is different from the chastity of his own devotion to Alison. As the boy grows, so his understanding deepens of the men who really help him — of Reid his teacher, of Murcodd, of Father Roche and, best of all, Old Cadger Gow. These men have shaped him well, and I think it a shortcoming that the book closes before we can watch him run his course.

The strength of the story lies in its Scotch honesty and aspiration; the weakness, it seems to me, is its lack of force and subtlety, especially in times of crisis. It is curious that this novelist with medical training should dispose of death so quickly — Robert’s parents simply dissolve in the Irish mist leaving no trace of themselves behind; and in another mist we see the last of Gavin, with a whiff of melodrama which shakes our faith.

I have often wished that I might have seen this country as Audubon saw it, with the trees in the deep forest and the birds in the trees. I suspect that that same hankering stirs the imagination of most American settlers in the twentieth century. What did the country look like before it was cut and plowed? What did the country feel like to the first pioneers? These questions seem to have occurred to Herbert Best and his wife, who have taken over an abandoned farm on a forested hillside in upper New York State. And by way of answering them, they have woven together their present living and their imagining of the past in a pleasantly homespun novel, Young ’Un.

Young ’Un is the story of a tiny settlement shortly after the Revolution, when the Indians had been subdued and when the fur traders, some of them, were beginning to settle down. But Old Man Post was one of those trappers who could not be tethered for long. He was never much of a hand at farming, and when he ran into bad luck he simply shouldered his rifle and made for the deep timber, leaving behind him his three half-grown children, his oxen, Peter and Paul, and a farmhouse now smoldering in embers. Young ‘Un is the youngest of the three, half girl, half tomboy, and wholly delightful. Hers is the story of what the three Post kids have to do to keep alive.

The first thing a novelist must do as he reaches back a century and a half is to decide whether his characters will talk in the ancient idiom or whether he will simply trust his descriptive passages to give the feel and flavor of the antique. Mr. Best is in favor of homespun English and I must warn you at the outset that it has to be read slowly for its full enjoyment. Mr. Best works hard to impart the true flavor to his antiquarian dialect. But I question whether the quaintness doesn’t challenge the reader’s credulity, especially when, as in Mr. Best’s case, the author is always tempted to take the rosy, pastoral view of what is happening.

Young ‘Un and her brother and sister have a backbreaking, uphill struggle to plant their corn and to get a roof over their heads before snow falls. But so cheerful are the neighbors (all except the villain, Ornery Sin Higgins) and so resourceful are the children (Dan could outsmart Paul Bunyan) that you never have even a momentary doubt about their happy ending. I should call this a deloused version of the American frontier, very wholesome for the young in mind. As we look back at these people through rosy spectacles, it is easy to picture them with more grace and comedy and less inconvenience and coarseness than they truly possessed.

In his Present IndicativeNoel Coward wrote as fresh and ingratiating a self-portrait as I have ever known from the theater. Playwright, actor, and musician, his talents have entertained us delightfully for two decades. His autobiography was both candid and modest; he made fun of himself, and he made us see without venom the rivalry and the affection which are so much a part of the stage. During the war his talents have often been employed for the armed services. As an entertainer for hundreds of thousands of the British soldiers and sailors and for the wounded in countless hospitals, he has unquestionably endeared himself to the British imagination. I wish I might say as much for his Middle East Diary.

Middle East Diary is the personal chronicle of the trip Mr. Coward made in the summer of 1943 as a one-man musical comedy. He acted in wardrooms and on the decks of battleships, in the old theaters of Malta and Cairo, in the open — and without a mike — before two thousand men under a boiling sun, and in the hospitals of Iraq, Basra, and Bagdad.

This diary is not a one-man but a two-man performance. There is the Mr. Coward who writes as if he were a British naval officer; there is the Mr. Coward who seems to have been bitten by Kipling every time he thinks of the Empire; there is the Mr. Coward who uses nicknames with this arch touch: “At ten o’clock I went to call on General Eisenhower armed with a letter of introduction from Dickie. [Admiral Lord Louis Alountbatten, G.C.V.O., C.B., D.S.O., A.D.C.]” There is the Mr. Coward who is, as he says, “photographed inordinately,” and who, as he describes the fripperies of Cairo or contrasts the traveling American Senators with the King of Egypt, or remarks that “our natural resilience as a race is remarkable,” is rather a trial to American eyes.

And there is the other Mr. Coward who, as he describes his performance in Malta Harbor or indulges in one of those “awful little personal post mortems” after a performance or acknowledges his nervousness and his fatigue and his unspeakable admiration for the wounded, is very human, very likable.

Noel Coward’s art lies outside his diary just as Ernie Pyle’s art is to be found in every word he prints. Ernie Pyle is one of the literary phenomena of this war. A little, balding wisp of a fellow, he was well past the age of a roving reporter and, so you would have thought, well beyond the age of combat. Yet for two years and more he has gone in with the American men again and again in every major invasion: North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. He has seen them through the toughest spots and written about them with an observation and a sympathy unrivaled by any other reporter, American or British.

How does he do it and what does he do? He asks questions and he writes down names. He has the rare gift of remembering exactly what a man says and how he says it. He generates the warmth and friendliness of an open fire, and boys who have read his copy come running when they see his small, inconspicuous figure.

For to them he is the Man from Home — and more than that, the guy to whom they can talk without pretense. So they have talked and he has written, and to many homes, this ruthless winter, his new book, Brave Men, will bring the fortitude, the intimacy, and the mutual dependence of our fighters in Europe.