The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

EVERYONE with a turn for writing keeps notebooks. I have kept — and lost — them ever since I was an undergraduate. One that I retrieved recently holds the reading notes and thumbnail observations which I wrote down in England twenty-three years ago. In leafing through it I was struck to find these three quotations which I had labeled “The Senses.” The first was from Kipling’s Puck of Pools’s Hill:

The pigeons pecked at the mortar in the chimneystacks; the bees that had lived under the tiles since it was built filled the hot August air with their booming; and the smell of the box tree by the dairy-window mixed with the smell of earth after rain, bread after baking, and a trickle of wood smoke. . . .

The second was from Hilaire Belloc:

And on this account, Sussex, does a man love an old house, which was his father’s, and on this account does a man come to love with all his heart that part of earth which nourishes his boyhood.

The third is taken from the letter which Captain Scott wrote Sir James Barrie as he lay dying in the Antarctic, a letter which Barrie incorporated in his St. Andrews address on courage: —

We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot. Hoping this letter may be found and sent to you, I write you a word of farewell. I want you to think well of me and my end. Good-bye. I am not at all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a simple pleasure which I had planned for the future in our long marches. . . . We are in a desperate state — feet frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and our cheery conversation. . . . [Later — it is here that the words become difficult.] We are very near the end. . . . We did intend to finish ourselves when tilings proved like this, but we have decided to die naturally without.”

Evidently to me in my early twenties those three passages exemplified the British character. Kipling, one of the masters of sensuous detail, stood for the sense of nature, Belloc for the sense of attachment to home, and Captain Scott for that sense of adventure which has made the Englishman the bravest traveler in the world.

All honor to that prophet of the Foreign Office, Harold Nicolson. The son of a diplomat and himself a member of the Diplomatic Service who has served his country in Madrid, Constantinople, Persia, Berlin, and at the Versailles Conference, Mr. Nicolsou had the temerity to publish in 1932 a novel, Public Faces, which called the turn of events more accurately than any other work of fiction in the Long Armistice. At a time when we in this country were worrying about the Depression and near-beer, Mr. Nicolsou, looking ahead eight to ten years, foretold the rise of the Churchill Government and its fall from power because of adventurism in the Near East and then, with Churchill replaced by a safe, leftwing Conservative Party in 1938, the fireworks in this novel begin.

In that year, according to Public, Faces, Mr. James Livingstone, an irrepressible Ilritish geologist, discovered a unique deposit of ore in the island of Abu Saad in the Persian Gulf. From this deposit, with the encouragement of the Government, he composed an aluminum alloy — “harder, lighter and less corrosive than any of the steel alloys —and Britain quietly took over the concession. From the Livingstone alloy came what Mr. Nicolsou has described as “the rocket aeroplane" which flew from Croydon to New York in live hours, and from it came the secret discovery of “the atomic bomb” (remember this was all written fourteen years ago). The expert, who shyly, coughingly testified in the presence of the Cabinet, explained that “a single bomb no longer than this inkstand could by the discharge of its electrons destroy New York. The Cabinet was aghast, and for a whole year it sat light on the lid of the Livingstone alloy (call it uranium, if you please). Then the Great Powers, suspicious and half terrified, began to close in, began to dispute the validity of that concession in Persia. And then the novel takes hold.

For its advance perception of our present crisis, for its wit and its lovely solution of the world menace, I urge the reading of that prophetic novel, Public Faces. Here in prescient English prose is the story of where we stand today, only in this case it is Great Britain which, because it has aroused the demons of domination, is the most universally hated and despised of nations. Here is the human equation of what might happen when matter was transmuted into energy. Here I do think is one of the most audacious novels of our time. Let it be reprinted.

Leaving to one side Harold Nicolson, H. G. Wells, and Lord Trenchard, I cannot believe that there were many Britons who envisioned the rocket plane, much less the atomic bomb, as far back as 1932. For those who even had a glimmering, it must have taken an extra amount of fortitude to live, as we know today. But l wonder if we do know.

I have just returned from a 4000-mile circuit ride through the Middle West. At Pittsburgh, Kansas City, and Detroit I talked to “realists’" who believe that life might be worth living the second day after an atomic bomb attack. To anyone who has seen the rubble of Europe, it is rather appalling to try to argue with this American obtuseness.

For six years the British have lived on the verge of being overwhelmed. To them invasions and bombs were not fiction, and the shocks they have suffered and survived will leave an ineradicable mark on their children, as it will on their poems, their plays, and their novels for years to come. The sense of loss will color their books. For they have lost heavily in happiness, they have lost their attachment to the old but not bomb-proof walls, they have lost that beauty and that sense of nature which were once thought to be protected by the seas.

For such as these, Evelyn Waugh is the Laureate. His prose has the taste of a persimmon — sweet, but with a pucker at the end. That pucker is not the taste of despair: rather, he writes of loss and deterioration casting the mind back to the golden days of Oxford and the twenties, weaving his narrative so credibly, so artfully, through the reckless sophistication of the Long Armistice that when you come to the end of his new novel, Brideshead Revisited, you are in fact at the beginning of the new England, the England baptized in fire.

Brideshead Revisited is the story of that set which was known as the Exquisites when I was in Cambridge. They were languid, full of mannerisms and strange tastes, rich, witty — and they prided themselves on their wine. They lived behind black curtains and occasionally they were doused in the fountain.

Having them in mind, but beginning his story in Oxford in Eights Week, Mr. Waugh introduces us to Lord Sebastian Flyte, the fair, decorative second son of an old Catholic family. Sebastian is one of the most attractive and noticeable of the new men at Christ Church — noticeable because he is always seen carrying or motoring with a large Teddy bear. His enjoyment of life, which is certainly sensitive, is marred by two things: his deep interior need to escape from reality, and his loathing of his family.

We come to know Sebastian through his best friend, the artistic Charles Ryder. With Charles we visit and visit again Brideshead, the rearranged castle with its pre-war beauty. We meet that Catholic zealot, Sebastian’s mother; we meet Julia, the sister who is burning up the town, and the Marquis, ihe apotheosis of adult grandeur, living like Byron with his mistress in Venice. We feel the estrangement and in a curious way the dearness of these people to each other, before the crash.

And then, as his drinking takes hold, wo see the hypochondria begin to destroy Sebastian; and watching the swift change from the charming boy to the sullen drinker, we begin to perceive the instability, not only of his family, but of that English society to which he was such an ornament.

No American could conceivably have written a story like this. It is English to the core, English in its lament, English in its sensuous, evocative beauty, as in the recapture of the innocent days at Brideshead, English in the bitter, fairy laughter of Anthony Blanche, English in the hard tenacity with which Charles the artist, “homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless,” as he describes himself, finally faces up.

The old cliché that the American novelist excels in material while the British novelist excels in style and touch is skillfully reaffirmed by Christopher Isherwood’s short novel, Prater Violet. Mr. Isherwood’s virtuosity disguises the fact that his narrative is pretty thin. It is, in fact, the story of a single character an Austrian film director of great magnetism, Friedrich Bergmann, who is brought to England in 1933 for Imperial Bulldog, Ltd., to produce a romantic film about Vienna. Bergmann is teamed up with young Mr. Isherwood, the idea being that the English novelist will help the Viennese over the rough spots in the translation.

Bergmann is a darling. The world is his oyster, and he feeds on men and women as if they were so much horse-radish. His adventures in the film studio, as in the London streets and pubs, are a constant joy to him, as they are to the reader. His film of the little violet-seller and Prince Rudolf of Borodania is making progress in a streamlined Graustark idiom, and Bergmann, Isherwood, and their typist, Dorothy, are happily contained in a little world of their own — a world independent of London and Europe — when in comes the sobering news that Hitler has taken over Austria and that Bergmann’s wife and daughter may be imperiled. They won’t let him desert the halffinished film, and so in spurts of melancholy and feverish energy Bergmann revises the tinsel and drives the show through.

The details of the studio and of the studio characters are handled with that talent and insight which one remembers of the notes F. Scott Fitzgerald left for his unfinished novels. The portrait of Bergmann is one to remember, and the warning implicit in this smoothly written but not very substantial book is how oblivious we all were to the real meaning of the rape of Vienna. Shall we be so again?