The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

I TRAVELED along the Missouri Valley this early winter, just after an ice storm had tipped the trees with crystal. Then the sun had come out and in the twinkling morning air I saw the big cock pheasants rocket from cover to cover in the glades. For reasons best known to themselves, the pheasants have decided to take over the Dakotas; and they have been multiplying, and eating the crops, at a rate which has the farmer down.

In the low floodlands where the river spills over into the cornfields, I saw more ducks and geese than had ever entered my sight. The harvest hereabouts may leave behind as much as four bushels an acre on the ground, a delicious handout for the teal, the mallard, the pintail, and the Canadian geese which, as they were roused by our train, whirled up in flocks not of hundreds but of thousands. And they kept coming in like bombers, so steady and black against the December sky.

This increase in population is due in some part to the shortage of shotgun ammunition, but much more to the intelligent planning, since 1940, of Ducks Unlimited in Canada. This private organization of North American sportsmen observed the devastating effect of the drought (1929-1934), and with dismay they watched what the water drainers had done in Saskatchewan and Alberta. As the water was drained off the ancient feeding grounds, the ducks began to die in thousands, not from the lead pumped into them, but from botulism, the alkali poisoning. Unfortunately, there is no open season for water drainers, either in Florida or in Canada. But Ducks Unlimited went to work with a vengeance: they built dams, they restored the water table on Crown lands, and so helped to link the nesting grounds in Canada with the winter refuges we have been protecting on our side of the border.

Hunters went on to tell me of what has been done to protect wild life in the Montana mountains where the Missouri has its source. There the Bighorn have been threatened with extinction, and the story of how our rangers have trapped alive these rare, beautiful mountain sheep and of how the bucks have been distributed in new flocks to prevent inbreeding is now being written for the Atlantic. It gratified me to hear that beaver had been moved from mountain streams down to the slopes and lakes where erosion was setting in and have gone industriously to work in their new homes. The deer are being repopulated, the bear are being watched. At a time when men are at each other’s throats, there is a quiet irony in our tenderness towards animals.

In its serpentine course the Missouri travels some 2500 miles. It is one of the longest and steadiestflowing rivers in our country. When we are beginning to add up the exhaustion of our soil and minerals, we may turn to the Missouri Valley in search of a new frontier for industry. The first man to see this vision in detail was an Army engineer, Colonel (now Brigadier General) Lewis Pick. Working from his headquarters in Omaha before the war, he envisioned plans of flood control, irrigation, and water power which, if carried out, would make the MV A four to five times as large as the TVA. General Pick is now in Burma, building the Ledo Road, but the dream he left behind him may some day prove to be a bonanza to homecoming veterans. Conceivably it could bring some 200,000 new people to the Missouri Valley farms, 600,000 to the cities. But if dams and irrigation were to raise the water along the Missouri’s course, once again the Missouri’s ducks would be without a home.

IN THIS ISSUE

BATTLE REPORT BY COMMANDER WALTER KARIG AND LIEUTENANT WELBORN KELLEY, USNR ..
Reviewed by Major General Sherman Miles

WIFE TO MR. MILTON BY ROBERT GRAVES.
Reviewed by Eleanor Ruggles

ARTIST IN IOWA . BY DARRELL GARWOOD
Reviewed by Leo Lerman

MY COUNTRY • BY RUSSELL DAVENPORT
Reviewed by John Holmes

ONE DAY ON BEETLE ROCK BY SALLY CARRIGHAR.
Reviewed by David McCord

One occasionally hears the thoughtless comment, “What’s happened to American humor? Where has it disappeared to?” But it hasn’t disappeared. Fred Allen and Bob Hope have taken the humor of vaudeville onto the air. The New Yorker of Peter Arno and James Thurber is more laughable than the Life of the Gibson girl and the he saids and she saids. Walt Disney’s studio is another proving ground. And the most recent is the Army weekly, Yank, whose columns have developed the talents of Sergeants (once Privates) Hargrove, Breger, Stein, and Baker.

Sgt. George Baker drew his first picture of the Sad Sack, that droopy-looking draftee, in the Yank of May, 1942. Since then the Sack has become the personification of the Army’s little man, as much of a hero as Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill in 1918. Before he went into uniform, Sgt. Baker was one of the Disney artists. Anyone who studies the hundred and fifteen cartoons now published as The Sad Sack will note that his hero, the Sad Sack, resembles the droopiest of the Seven Dwarfs. Here, too, is the stylized group of villains so characteristic of the Disney imagination — a pouchy sergeant with dreadful teeth, the blistering colonel, the bosomy, grotesque women. The Sack is a man of few accomplishments. He is forever swabbing latrines or shifting refuse, his seat at a camp show is always in the last row, his affairs with the ladies always fizzle. On rare occasions when he reaches actual combat, he manages to shoot down the American plane instead of the German, or to wind up in a P.O.W. stockade when his fondness for German souvenirs causes the guards to mistake him for a Boche. GI’s write to the artist telling him of troubles they have been through (and which they hope he will pass on to the Sack) and again and again they petition that the Sack be promoted to Pfc. But so far, no luck. He continues to be the hopeless underdog with no stripes and no glory and no friends. The difficulties he survives are those of the average GI. Where Sgt. Baker’s sympathies lie is well illustrated in that single drawing entitled “Mechanized Warfare,” which shows a mountain road jammed with trucks, guns, tanks, all the way back to the horizon, all at a standstill, all waiting while the solitary figure of the Sad Sack plods ahead on foot with his mine detector.

No contributor to the New Yorker is more versatile—certainly none is funnier— than James Thurber. I rate him as the best humorist now writing, and I pray nightly that Hollywood will never find work for him to do. To define what is funny in Thurber is like trying to tack down a pool of quicksilver. I can only suggest his elusive essence, and specify those humors which I most enjoy in The Thurber Carnival, a selection of the best of Thurber’s nine books, dedicated “with increasing admiration, wonder and affection” to his editor, Harold Ross.

What takes me first is the novelty of these brooding bloodhounds, these lumpish men and their rebellious women — they strike me as new symbols of a hidden laughter. Their meaning is by no means as simple as their line: you come back to them repeatedly with pleasure and surprise. Thurber was drawing dogs — all breeds — while an undergraduate. There is a whole roomful of his pictures at Ohio State today. But dogs are not his obsession. In fact he writes about them rather rarely.

The story of his Secret Life, as a boy growing up in Columbus, Ohio, is one he tells straight with an array of homely, unforgettable details. The chapters on his English teacher, Miss Groby, his drilling, and his shortsightedness at O.S.U. are period pieces as authentic as a cast-iron dog. Then somewhere along the line, Mr. Thurber took a deep dive into Freud. That immersion gives point and depth and the twist of melancholy to his sketches of the drunks and the psychiatrics (“The Cane in the Corridor”); it provides what he needs when he, too, comes to write about the little man, as he does to perfection in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

Freud would surely have been a four-star general in Mr. Thurber’s “War Between Men and Women.” Thurber’s Interview with a Lemming, his parody of Salvador Dali, lead us into the land of Lear, the realm of animals, solemnity, and nonsense, in which Thurber talks to himself about the Owl in the Attic, the Cockatoo, stuffed, with its eyes shut, and Mr. Jennings’s Bear. Not since the passing of Clarence Day have there been funnier or simpler drawings than these. Mr. Day was Mr. Thurber’s peer, and when I remember that the one wrote against arthritis as the other draws with a fading sight, that, too, adds measurably to my admiration.

For years past, scholars have been steadily accumulating the source material for a copious and popular biography of Samuel Johnson. As letters and private papers came into the possession of collectors and college libraries, each added its sidelight to the whole; and when Colonel Ralph Isham acquired and brought back to this country the journal in blank verse, the letters and unblushing selfrevelations of James Boswell which had lain unsuspected by the world for something like a century and a half in a certain “ebony cabinet,” the impetus was at hand for an American scholar to enlarge on a subject more exacting and more challenging than any other in British biography.

Boswell’s Life is by common consent the best in the English language; thus it takes a brave writer and one with knowledge and style to dare the comparison. But this is precisely what Joseph Wood Krutch has done in his large and leisurely portrait, Samuel Johnson. In his modest Foreword, Mr. Krutch explains that his book is not addressed to scholars. What he has done is to draw from the vast literature now available about Johnson and his friends that detailed, continuous, and carefully reasoned story for the layman which did not exist before.

In Boswell’s Life, Dr. Johnson bestrides the story as he bestrode the age, a colossus from start to finish. But in Mr. Krutch’s pages we see the more awkward and much more human beginning. We see the bright, oversized boy, farmed out by his ineflectual parents; we see the maladies which were to limit his enjoyment of life and which contributed so to his black moods. We see his short, sardonic days as an undergraduate, and we follow with rising interest, and with what is for me a fresh understanding, his struggle against poverty, his love of Bohemian London, and his year to year advance from a drudging journalist to the Great Moralist. We see how his marriage with Telly, nearly twenty-three years his senior, threw him more and more on the town for congeniality. We mark the growth of his courage and self-confidence; we see his struggle with continence (which Boswell was later to emphasize “with that scientific cruelty characteristic of him ”); we see his life-long search for religious faith; we understand his loneliness and why he became “almost desperately sociable ”; we scrutinize and accept the reasons why Johnson “ must dominate any group of which he did not expect to become quickly the butt.”

In thus setting forth the makings of the man, Mr. Krutch writes with a happy accord of seriousness and wit, and he balances with accuracy the comparison between the eighteenth-century judgment and our own.

Not until The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Rambler, and The Idler, not until Rasselas and the Dictionary, had been written; not until Johnson was fifty-three and so well-established that a pension was being prepared for him —not until then did young Boswell walk into his life. The years that followed were the years of authority rather than the years of struggle, the years of the Club, of the conviviality with the Thrales and of the journeys to Scotland and the Hebrides, the years of acceptance and veneration. The story of those years is a more familiar one, and in telling it Mr. Krutch obeys a natural impulse and competes with Boswell more openly than he intends. But rivalry aside, in this rich, highly readable, and illuminating biography, he has not only enlarged our knowledge of the Doctor, but has left us with a greater affection for the Senior Partner than was ever inspired by the Junior.

I have been touched by the number of teachers and parents who have written or spoken to me about their left-handed children whose reading has been arrested by the left dominance. Many corroborated the danger signals which I had marked in my own nine-year-old, a few questioned my statement that one child in every seven was so troubled, but all were agreed that more patience, more time, and more knowledge would be expected of the adult.

Francis A. Caswell, Headmaster of the Dexter School in Brookline, Massachusetts, sent me interesting notations from a new book, Improvement of Basic Reading Abilities, by Donald D. Durrell, Professor of Education and Director of the Educational Clinic at Boston University. In his effort to dispel the mystery which formerly surrounded the basic tendency in reading, Dr. Durrell has this to say: —

Many children with reading difficulties show hand and eye confusions. However, surveys show that almost an equal per cent of normal readers have similar confusions. As to reversals, first grade teachers know that almost all children confuse on and no, was and saw, as well as b, d, p and q, but later overcome the difficulty. . . .

Almost all problems in reading can be traced to a poor beginning, with difficulty increasing as the child progresses through the grades. This does not mean that first grade teaching is exceptionally poor. It means that confusions and difficulty appear early in the reading process and that special effort should be made to analyze them and to provide for individual differences early in the first year.

From Dr. Edward Liss, of New York City, comes this suggestion which we should certainly follow:—

In the November Atlantic you, as “The Peripatetic Reviewer,” talked on a problem which I think merits more than the short notice which your able and understanding words gave it. The problem of reading difficulties is a very serious one and the figure which you quote of one in seven children, when soberly considered, implies a most common and prevailing handicap which, if it had been due to disease, would have aroused the medical profession and the public profoundly.

I should think that the subject merits considerable investigation and elaboration in an article in your worthy publication.

And from Howard Hayes, a reader in Brooklyn, New York, comes this observation: —

That was an interesting piece on “left dominance” and the trouble it causes in reading, and yet I wonder if your Harvard friend has considered all the dope?

For example, down here in New York, you’ll see Jewish people on the subway reading their papers from right to left. And I understand that all the Semitic writing runs that way. And then you’ll see some of the same people turn to an English language paper and read from left to right as we do. I’ve had Jews point this out to me with amusement. The Jew who can read both Jewish and English is therefore, in a way, ambidexterous. And so where does he come in with this right or left dominance theory?

But what is more profound is this question: If it is natural for a right-handed reader to read from left to right, and painful for a left-handed reader to do so. then how in the world did the Semitic peoples, who are probably as right-handed as we are, ever get the idea into their heads of making their writing go from right to left? What made them choose “the hard way,” if it is such, and what made us choose our way? And just to make it more confusing (for rights and lefts alike), why do the Chinese do their writing up and down? And what does that mean? And why do we Americans drive on the right side of the road while the English drive on the left? There may be less here than meets the eye.

I should say that there is more here than meets the eye. Mr. Hayes is talking not about children in a formative age, but about adults whose habits, be they fast or slow, are now formed. Why certain races prefer the right or left way of doing things is another and larger question than I had in mind. I should say that the Chinese system was organized to equalize the difficulty of direction, although the primary cause for their up-and-down writing may be traced to the type of scroll they wrote on in early days. Semitic writing unquestionably does travel from right to left and as a result, my scout tells me, the fast readers in Hebraic are the left-eyed, or “ambi-eyed” ones, and these are likely to be much slower and inefficient in reading English. Let’s have more evidence.