The Peripatetic Reviewer

WE ARE speaking of dogs and of what makes a good one — speaking in terms of the family, not of the show ring or hunting, and with the strong prejudice we each feel for our favorite breed. Dogs became loyal to man as far back as 5000 B.C. Alone of domesticated animals, they prefer us to their own kind. In gratitude we have taken care with their breeding and have given them a mixture of love and discipline which in rare cases amounts to education.

Since I was city-bred, my experience has been with the smaller breeds. There was “Teddy,”the Airedale who saved me from drowning in Lake Hatley. Alone on the dock at the age of three, I reached too far for the string of my submerged boat, and he was after me almost as soon as I splashed. There was “Mr. Dooley,” a white bull terrier who used to take me to Miss Jones’s School and came back the eight blocks to fetch me at noon (no motors in those days). And there was “Smoke,”the black and white Boston bull, the first dog I shared with my brothers and sisters. He had measles with us, spots and fever; he swam and played through those happy summers at Bay Head; he was a spunky, laughing friend whose death was long a scar.

Then came the years when Princeton was Mecca. One Easter when my mother was sick, our cook vamoosed and it fell on me, the eldest, to locate an accommodator. I found one at last who was willing, but she explained that she couldn’t leave her two-dayold puppies and their mother. I bought the pups on the spot and they came along, one jet-black, the other brindle. They gave promise of being bulldogs, and that night they were christened “Nassau” and “Tiger.”

The summer of their puppyhood their paternity was still in doubt. My family — all seven of us— were then crowded into a tiny cottage at the seashore. There was a miniature hedge in front and the pups loved to play in its shade; they would tunnel under it from opposite sides and then yap at each other through the roots. This yapping, unchecked for an hour, would get to my father, who was never the least irascible of men, and I can remember one Sunday dinner when his patience snapped. He flung open the screen door to the porch and shouted, “Stop it, you damn little fools! Stop it!” There was a momentary pause, enjoyed by the neighbors; then the yapping continued. Whereupon he seized my German silver napkin ring and flung it at the hedge. The scufflers emerged and by common impulse burst into one of those irrepressible puppy sweeps. Round and round the cottage they tore, and each time they flashed by the door, Father let fly another napkin ring. Great sight.

We raised “Nassau” and “Tiger” to mongrelhood in those border years when the automobile was driving the horse — and the dog — off the roads. But our pups had too dim an intelligence to appreciate the speed of a car. To them it was simply a challenge for a race. No shouts of ours could keep them out of the road: they had to learn the hard way, and “Tiger” went first on Newark Avenue. It was sheer luck that ripened “Nassau” into fat middle life. Never to the end did he learn to look and to choose his openings as do the Boston dogs who trot over to the Common on their own today.

My fifteen-year-old cocker, “Mickey,” black as the ace of spades except for the white hairs at his muzzle, lies sleeping by my foot as I write. He, too, fancied himself as a hunter in his salad days when his senses were more alert. One summer we were living in the Red Cottage, bounded on the south by a vegetable patch and on the east by a moraine and then the beach. Rabbits used to make free with the carrots and lettuce in the garden — so free that one sunset I pointed “Mickey” at the cottontail which was plainly visible from our doorway. He was off like a yipping arrow, and the chase led over the hill and into the woods. A half hour later there was his scratch at the screen door. No rabbit, but in his jaws the half-eaten carrot the rabbit had left behind.

This tickled our sense of humor, not his. But “Mickey” does laugh, unquestionably. He laughs in an October orchard as we play apple-catch-applechase. The apple he retrieves is his and he rolls on it at once to make sure I understand. Then with it between his paws he lies there laughing. Even now when his teeth are gone, he knows he can keep the apple, dodging and darting until for my sake he drops it accidentally on purpose. This is his sense of humor, and it tickles me. We have played this game on the beach with the fishermen’s corks, we have played it inside with hickory nuts and grapes (a Malaga grape, you understand, and he would never break the skin), and we’ve played it with rocks — smooth rocks. But the apples in the orchard are the best.

“Mickey” laughs, as all dogs do, in expectation. The words “Go out,” with a rising inflection, bring that canine grin and the special indrawing of breath which means anticipation. Similarly, “Oh-h" with the question mark big in it will bring him quickly to see what is at my feet, grinning. “Mickey" laughs at the prospect of squirrels up a tree: it is enough for me to touch the bark and peer into the foliage. Up he goes as high as he can leap; for, all his life, squirrels have been the Unattainable.

Dogs talk while they fight, but most of their private conversation is inaudible. I remember William Morton Wheeler telling of a walk he had taken with one of his dogs and how on their return the two who had been left at home sniffed the news from tip to tail. A dog’s sense of smell is mysterious and baffling to those of us whose olfactory senses are all but atrophied. I wish I could read the west wind sweeping through the woods with half the accuracy of “Mickey” as he stands with his nostrils twitching. We have either forgotten or never invented the words to describe those shades of experience which he is taking in. Our supply of good smelly adjectives is pitifully meager, as any writer soon discovers who tries to take us into the canine world. Virginia Woolf was keenly aware as keenly as one of us could be—of the scent and the nostril when she wrote Flush. And Kipling, master of the sensuous detail, certainly did his best in that unforgettable short story, “Teem.” But both were up against it: both were faced with a shortage. Perhaps this explains why there are so few good dog stories. I can recall only a few: Bob, Son of Battle; Lad by Albert Payson Terhune (another lover of the collie); Sir W. Beach Thomas’s memorable Letter to My Dog; and in part those telling pages of the Forsyte Saga in which Galsworthy speaks of Balthasar.

Stronger Than Fear by Richard Tregaskis is a novel dedicated to the Infantry, “the soldiers without armor, who are the vanguard of every attack.” It is the personal story of Captain Paul Kreider, who has twice been wounded, decorated with the Silver Star, and then returned to command a company of his old outfit. He knows the law of battle averages as well as anyone, and he is too honest a fighter not to notice the sergeant’s glance or to read the inference in the colonel’s voice when instinctively he begins to spend more time in Company Headquarters than on the line. This story picks him out of his drugged sleep just before the jump-off. It follows him into action with the knowledge that he has to “ride on the platoons" if B Company is to hold its place. Here then is the internal struggle between caution and demand as it ceaselessly revolves in his mind, and here is what he does to lead his men in the risky confusion of house-to-house fighting in Germany. A rare picture and an authentic tribute by one who knows.

The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks, on the other hand, is the story of those who do no fighting save within themselves, the men long in uniform who have been bogged down at home, the men who suffer from frustration and suspicion, the men who were never intended to be soldiers, the men whose ignorance and whose brutality have been aroused to violence not by the beaches of Okinawa but by the callous boredom of the interminable regimentation which is war. This is the sordid story of men to whom the claustrophobia of camp is a nightmare, men cut off from their wives and from normal living, men whose only and transitory reward is a few hours’ leave in the tawdry night-spots of an overcrowded city. It is curious to compare this book with John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, with which it has much in common. Here are the same profanity, the same superficial cynicism, the same brutal reaction to discipline. But in Mr. Brooks’s book one is very much aware of the moral indignation which prompts him to revile the very stupidity and hatred he is describing.

Here today

Before the war I thought R. C. Hutchinson the best-developed of the younger English novelists (“younger” being under forty), and it is a relief to find that his experience in the British Army, while it has delayed, has not diminished his powers. His new novel, Interim, which was written in 19431944, is separated by time and hard experience from the earlier books, like Testament and Shining Scabbard, which so clearly established his authority. But for all his absorption in the war, Mr. Hutchinson has not lost his touch as an artist of character, and to my mind Interim is by all odds the best novel England has sent us since the blitz.

The spell of this story is the spell of immediacy, the delight of those snatched-at hours when a man on leave is taken suddenly into the confidence of a family in an unfamiliar place. Interim is the story of such a family and such an intimacy — a family inhabiting a stone farm on the high, rocky Uplands of the West Riding and the intimacy which it created for a particular sergeant of artillery who, with his crew, blundered into the farmyard at three in the morning. Having intruded, Roger comes back — the first time, to apologize, and then on leave, drawn by the attraction of these remarkable people.

The Quindles are people as valiant as they are variable, and Roger is drawn back to them not because of their hospitality (which is war-frugal and self-help) but because of the temper of their thinking and the simple, sterling quality of their living. In the Army, Roger is something of an intellectual hermit. Hopelessly estranged from his wife, shut off from the books on which he has fed, he finds on this lean farm with its Upland beauty a solace which he is to hold on to for as long as he lives, and this solace comes directly from the four members of the household — from Bernard Quindle, the head of the family, a doctor of humility, an ever questioning Christian who has dedicated his life to trying to transfer to China the civilization fast fading in Europe; from Charlotte, the invalid and possessive mother whom Sargent had painted and in Masefield’s phrase “the woman marching by the beaten man”; from Vaughan, the psychologist son, a pilot of a heavy bomber in the RAF when he might so easily have been doctoring in a hospital, and Virginia, the forthright, resourceful daughter, victim of an impossible marriage, whose presence pervades the whole story, though in truth she is seldom at the farm.

These energetic people, so impervious to poverty and the strain of war, so full of each other, so full of argument (much of the book is in dialogue), of intellect, and of deep caring, are a family to remember as Roger remembers them when at last he is brought to hospital: —

I could see the shape of Orchilly with peculiar clearness: firelight on the worn furniture and the dogs sprawling; a morning wind at my bedroom window, the very tricks and tones of Bernard’s voice, the day’s tiredness dissolved into the tune of the evening. So fresh were those scenes, passing in procession across the white wall and the pain in my side and the ragged music, that they possessed me with their happiness.