The Peripatetic Reviewer

THIS is writlen in the midst of the worst journey in the world. Moving, even if it be only five doors down the street, is a trip retracing half a lifetime; moving in the midst of snowbound Boston, moving the books and magazines (twenty years of the Atlantic), the clippings, letters, and papers which time has accumulated over a quarter of a century, is a grim, pensive business.

I am by nature an inveterate collector of papers. I like them around and I put them around. I am a beginner of diaries. I save scraps on which I have jotted ideas for articles or stories, lecture notes, theater programs (if I really enjoyed the play), letters that have given me a kick, and an occasional reminiscent bill. They begin to pile on my bureau top as I empty my inner coat pocket at the day’s end; there they gather for several days or weeks, until the mass begins to topple and my wife makes threatening gestures toward the scrap basket; then I submissively place them out of sight, sometimes under heavier objects, sometimes in drawers. This has been going on for a long time, and now they are all coming to light. All.

There is a good deal of sentiment in raking out these embers of the past. You can’t just shovel them into the ash barrel. I can’t. I still feel a touch of their warmth. Here is my best round at Ekwanok (83) and the bets won. . . . Here is the diary written so carefully my first two months in France the summer of 1917, and coming to a sudden stop the day we went into action at Verdun (and never resumed). . . . Here is the crisp result of my first College Boards: “Princeton University. This is to certify that at the examinations held in June, 1914, Mr. Edward Weeks received the following grades: —

English A. D

Algebra I. E

Latin 1. E

“A Excellent; B Good; C Passed; D Failure; E Bad Failure”

. . . Here is a dance program of the Emma Willard School (One Step — “Bachelor Girls and Boys”; Fox Trot — “Poor Butterfly”; One Step — “Hello, I’ve Been Looking for You”). . . . English 5 themes corrected in Dean Briggs’s hand. . . . Another pocket diary, this one begun on the cattle boat leaving Montreal. . . . “Cambridge Union Society, Michaelmas Term, 1922. Subject for the Seventh Debate at 8.15 P.M.: ‘That European Civilization has failed to justify itself.’ Proposed by Mr. D. H. H. Smith, Magdalene College, Opposed by __. . . “Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, The Beggar’s Opera, by Mr. Gay.”

A MASQUE OF REASON BY ROBERT FROST.

Reviewed by Mark Schorer

TOMORROW’S BUSINESS . BY BEARDSLEY RUMI

Reviewed by Leo M. Cherne

GREAT SON BY EDNA FERBER

Reviewed by Dorothy Hillyer

THE HEADMISTRESS BY ANGELA THIRKKLL

Reviewed by Frances Woodward

THE WISE-WRENN CORRESPONDENCE EDITED BY FANNIE E.

RATCHFORD

Reviewed by George Goodspeed

Letters. One from Dean Briggs: “DEAR MR. WEEKS: I liked your work yesterday afternoon but two things in it worry me a little. Except for the dialogue, your voice was not loud enough for so large an auditorium. If you can make it louder and keep its naturalness (I should be sorry if you lost that!) you will do better. The other thing which worried me was the amount of time which you took, I have been telling men that though I have known persons to be given a prize who speak too long, the safe thing is not to be over six minutes.” . . . “U. S. Department of Labor, Oklahoma City, June 11, 1920. DEAR SIR: Replying to your recent communication wherein you advise that yourself and others wish to come to the Oklahoma wheat harvest this year. . . . The wages will not be less than $6.00 a day with board and lodging.” . . . One from the president of an advertising agency: “MY DEAR MR. WEEKS: Thank you for your letter of April 11th. I may leave town at noon tomorrow, Friday, and if so of course it will be impossible for me to see you then in the afternoon. But if you are in town, will you be good enough to phone my office, ask for Miss Dunn, and find out whether I have left.” Wonder why I kept that twenty years.

“Will you stop mooning!” says that voice I recognize as Authority. “We’ll never get out of here at the rate you’re going.”

Why is it that women have such a phobia against men’s papers? It is not just a New England crotchet. On the old Southern plantations the wives swept away, burned up, and destroyed more historical records than the moths and mice together. Yet women keep their love letters, all tied up with red ribbon in a hat box. They store away in corners every bit of broken china and glass. They treasure baby shoes and Little Things and scraps of silk. But when a husband has an honest hankering for a pile of reverie, they are ruthless.

There’s something pensive about moving books. Here in this alcove are my first loves, the beginning library of a hard-up undergraduate, which I picked up for a few shillings at David’s Bookstall in the Cambridge market place. Here are the fifth edition of Boswell with the signature cut out of every volume and the copious annotations which I can read but not identify, the Malone Shakespeare which I first saw at the Bodleian, and the small leather Wordsworth I carried with me to the Lakes on that 600-mile bike trip with Morley Dobson. And I begin to notice the absentees. Who the devil has my copy of Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley, that small green volume which always strays from the set? I remember pressing it on someone who had never read it. But who? And my copy of Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men. I thought I had a first edition. “What’s this?” said Dave McCord. “A first of Seven Men?” “A first,” I said with a touch of pride. “With my name in it,” he remarked. “So that’s where it has been all these years!”

Here are the trail blazers, the books which I picked up that first winter in Greenwich Village — our rooms used to tremble every time the Sixth Avenue El rattled by — the books which were different and exciting to us then. The Cabala by a young Yale graduate, Thornton Wilder; In Our Time, a collection of short stories coming out of Paris by a former ambulance driver, Ernest Hemingway; a first, edition of The Waste Land (a man I worked with, an impecunious poet, telling me, “That’s the first book I ever stole. I just walked into the Sunwise Turn and swiped it. I had to have it.”); Mencken’s Prejudices and Katherine Mansfield and The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings; Masters’s Spoon River; and the three books Geoffrey Parsons spoke of in a morning’s walk: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, The Brass Chech by Upton Sinclair, and Frank Harris’s Oscar Wilde — each came with the impact of discovery.

It never occurred to us in the early twenties that books by and about the American Negro were an unknown quantity. The poems of Countee Cullen, the short stories by Rudolph Fisher, that talented young Negro doctor who died in first flight — these touched the surface. But the Negro was then the stock subject of slapstick comedy — witness the popular fiction of Octavus Roy Cohen. Books like Roland Hayes’s Angel Mo’ and Richard Wright’s Native Son were a long way in the future.

In my first experience as a juror, I was drawn for a murder trial. The case involved three Negroes, one of whom had been cut to death, and after years of search the supposed killer was before us. He was defended by a Negro lawyer with an eloquent, beautiful voice. “Gentlemen,” he would plead to our all-white jury, “I beg of you to put all thought of color, all taint of prejudice, aside. This man has had none of the advantages you’ve enjoyed. The only law he knows is the law of the savannas, the law of survival, the law of self-defense.” So skillfully did he play on our sympathies that our first vote was 10 to 2 for acquittal. It took many hours and a rereading of the evidence to see that in anger, meanness, and liquor the man had killed.

White sympathy for the black underdog has been undependable to say the least. Not until Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, and Dorothy Maynor had won us with their art; not until publicists like Du Bois, educators like President James E. Shepard of Durham, writers like Richard Wright and Roi Ottley and Robert Weaver, had stirred us by precept and print; not until the huge and by degrees enlightened employment of Negro strength in our war effort, did we white Americans begin to open our eyes to those embarrassing questions about the color line in democracy. Negroes with a right to the Purple Heart have an equal right to citizenship and education. Even in Mississippi; even in Tennessee.

To write the record of rough justice, a Negro must pull himself out of the slough of ignorance and rise above the prejudices of his own people and the mortifications of white supremacy. Even today few have come through the ordeal, and those few carry with them an accumulated bitterness. Black Boy by Richard Wright is, as Dorothy Canfield Fisher truly says, “an honest, dreadful, heart-breaking story of a Negro childhood and youth.” It is also a modern story, for the childhood began on the shores of the Mississippi in the year 1909. Richard’s father was a shiftless farmhand, a slave in mind if not in body, with no vestige of loyalty towards his wife or family. His mother was struck down by paralysis shortly after her husband had deserted her, and Richard’s boyhood was passed in the crowded homes of his relatives, where he lived on charity. He was usually hungry, often strapped and browbeaten by his elders, held back by the most illiterate prejudices, and — because he was a strong boy whose will would not be subdued — mortified again and again by white animosity.

Good schooling was out of reach. There was no one to befriend him. What he learned about human nature, he learned in the barrooms, as a water boy, in the hotel lobbies where he worked as a bellhop, in the doing of odd jobs which kept his head just above waler. He was goaded by curiosity and by the unshakable belief that some day, somewhere, he would be free to speak his mind. But that meant he had first to escape from his family in the South. And to escape he had to earn the hundred dollars which would take him North.

How far Mr. Wright has traveled since those early days in Memphis stands clearly revealed in the telling and terrifying passages of this book. Mr. Wright is not the first Negro to write of his emancipation with power and beauty. Father Hensons Story, for which Mrs. Stowe wrote the Introduction in 1858, is a Negro classic of the underground of that day and of the physical tyranny an American Negro could overcome if he had the mind and will. Like Father Henson, Richard Wright, traveled a painful road, though his torture was more mental, before he could come into the clear.

Indeed, Mr. Wright has come so far from his beginning that I am not sure that I always trust his hindsight. I find it hard to believe that a boy of four would so calmly and surely set fire to his family’s cabin, and that a boy of nine would have

heard no word about the First World War then being fought. In his concentration on the poverty, the foulness, and the terror in which he was brought up, the author almost completely ignores those tentacles of natural affection which must have held him and his mother together in their misery. There is a curious detachment in 1 his book, as if the author had so covered up his affection that it can no longer be revealed. “During the day,” he writes of one painful episode, “I overreacted to each event, my banked emotions spilling around it. I refused to talk to anyone about my affairs, because I knew that I would only hear a justification of the ways of the white folks and I did not want to hear it. I lived carrying a huge wound, tender, festering, and I shrank when I came near anything that I thought would touch it.” Readers should remember that such wounds have made this man indignant and tight-lipped. They should accept this book with all its imperfections as a stark, powerful proclamation that black ignorance is being dispelled in our time. What is white America doing to help?

The enormous suffering which the civilians of Europe have endured is a story which cannot be too often told to us in our unmarred country. Their endurance has reached the breaking point; ours has not. The more willing we are to “bear and forbear” the more able we shall be to cope with the short tempers and angry aspirations which burst into the open as the German oppression is removed. In his novel, Arrival and Departure, Arthur Koestler made a striking revelation of the exile state of mind, in this case exiles in Portugal. The next assignment is to tell Americans of the people who could not escape.

Robert St. John is an American correspondent who hotfooted it through the Balkans one jump ahead of Hitler. As he watched the German blitz mow down the Graustark equipment of the Yugoslavs, he gathered the material for his AP dispatches and his forthright and blazing chronicle From the Land of Silent People. In that experience one gathers that Mr. St. John himself turned from the cynicism of a hardened journalist to become the partisan of the underdogs of Central Europe. And this transformation of reporter to partisan becomes the theme of his short first novel, It’s Always Tomorrow. His hero, a tough young reporter from Chicago, loves liquor and secretaries, especially Yashna (“dark, with a strange beauty”); his characters, newspapermen all, have names which are strangely familiar — Leland, White, Sedgwick, Cecil — but no individuality; and his story, as it skips from Warsaw to Budapest to Paris to London, is too hurried and implausible to convey anything like the indignation which prompted his book of reporting. His account of the German strafing of the roads and his diatribe against the black markets are genuine enough. But for the rest this is a goulash of implausibilitv and autobiography, warmed over in a chafing dish, between assignments.

Apartment in Athens is the work of an American novelist, Glenway Weseott, writing at long range and out of compassion for the Greeks. Its subject is as timely as its sympathy. Here is the nightmare of German occupation told in the dreary, daily details of a single household in Athens. The story begins with a Prussian officer’s taking over the apartment in a manner as gross and as brutal as one can easily imagine. The Greeks under him are a family of four, a Milquetoast of a publisher (he must have had a darn good secretary to do his work!) who is soon reduced to impotent irony, his invalid wife who weeps at ihe drop of a hat, and two half-starved children in whom, one gathers, the hope of Greece resides. It is, I think, a proof of Mr. Wescott’s craftsmanship that he can maintain and even increase your interest in this unlovely crew. The story moves forward with an enveloping sense of revenge. The subjugation of the Greek household and the storing up of its minute hatreds are infuriating to see. It might have been pitiable, were there a person here worth caring for.