The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

THESE are the days when to be shut in is a pleasure. I have never been a great one for tumbling in the snow, nor ever shall be, now that the accumulation of reading has first claim upon my week-ends. The rhapsodies of skiers I must take on faith; I have never broken it leg on Cannon Mountain, nor felt the heroism of being trundled across country to have my collarbone repaired at the Hanover Hospital. But I have watched the blue of the conifer’s shadows as it deepens on the untouched snow, and the stripped perfection of beech and elm as they point to the cobalt sky. My appetite for the open winter has been made keen by the splitting of wood or by walking with my old spaniel (until ice forms in his pads and he has to be carried). And my appetite for the open fire and the open book which are the benison of February make me realize how much I love the city and how little time any of us has had for true reflection since Hitler’s voice began to scream in 1938.

Winter never shut us in for long in my part of New Jersey; even after a heavy fall of snow the slush came quickly. During one blizzard, when Father was away on a business trip, I fabricated a pair of snowshoes out of a couple of old tennis rackets and used them that very afternoon on Clinton Place. It was a tribute to their maker that the gut lasted as long as it did; they were made by Slazenger’s, and the name has ever since had a tingling association for me, as the rackets proved not to be as old as I had suspected.

Not until I came to New England did I really know what it felt like to be blanketed and shut in by the snow. In my twelfth year I spent the winter with my Navy cousins on Kittery. There for three days we were shut in by the greatest blizzard I have ever known. It blotted out school and ferry; it made visits and naval routine all but impossible; it made each of those old rose-brick houses a warm, happy island protected front life. We had hours, days, to do as we pleased; we read and were read aloud to; we made fudge (the chocolate for which had been unfortunately impregnated with Lifebuoy soap), and we did our stamps stretched out on the floor— which is the only way to do them when you are twelve.

Every boy who is collecting today, every philatelist old enough to be critical, must have fell a covetous curiosity about F.D.R.’s stamp collection. As a philatelist F.D.R. was lucky from the outset. His collection was started by his mother, Sara Delano, and when it was passed along to him early in his boyhood, it was certainly better than average. The Delano family had extensive business in the China trade, and therefore young F.D.R.’s collection of Hong Kong stamps and covers which he corralled from the family papers was very near a “specialty" at a time when most of us would have been trading to round out our simplest U.S. edition.

Stamps must have been a great solace to him during those shut-in days of his illness. Certainly he worked hard at them then as he did in the White House later. There for thirteen years he had an unrivaled, some say an unfair, opportunity to fill out his volumes with presentation sheets which came his way in number. Loyal lieutenants were sending back to him dies from abroad, and here at home he naturally had first choice of the National Parks and the other Farley imperforates, one sheet of each being reserved for the President with the Postmaster General’s inscription: “This is the first sheet just as it came off the press today.”

We know that Mr. Roosevelt was working with his stamps at Warm Springs on the last morning of his life, and we now know that the whole collection, unique as it is, has been well and fairly appraised by an expert, George B. Sloane. Mr. Sloane made his examination at Hyde Park shortly after the President’s death, and the account of his appraisal, which I recommend to every collector, appears in the November 24 issue of Stamps. “ I am certain,”he writes, “that I was the first person, aside from the President himself, who had ever seen his entire collection, and I doubt that even Mr. Roosevelt realized the size of the collection he eventually assembled. . . . It is a valuable collection of stamps, but not a million dollar collection, as I have seen reported on several occasions. I appraised it at $80,000. It contains no spectacular or famed rarities in single stamps, and there is no 24c airmail invert, nor even a proof of the invert, contrary to past rumors. The President had a hand in almost all of the stamps issued during his administration, and it is generally understood that he drafted numerous rough pencil sketches for the designs. . . . If these sketches are in existence, they more likely are in the files of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where the final designs are customarily completed for our stamp issues.”

Mr. Sloane tells us that the collection shows evidence of prodigious labor in its mounting, that the President did all his own writing up, and that longhand notes, often in pen and ink, usually in pencil, extend through all the volumes. He tells us that for years Mr. Roosevelt had given over some part of his time each day to his collection, and he often worked on his stamps while in bed. He tells us that in the deep wire basket that held the results of his last morning’s work, there was a booklet containing a collection of Japanese issues used in the occupation of the Philippines, and among other things an envelope containing mixtures of duplicates, on the outside of which F.D.R. had written, “To give away.”

Lost causes are the brocade of romance. Napoleon, the ogre of Europe who was feared during his life only a little less than Hitler, has now moved into the golden light. The lost cause of the Confederacy needed no such perspective: Southern chivalry was heroic ten years after Appomattox. But it takes rather longer to bestir sympathy for Benedict Arnold or for the Tories in New England, as Kenneth Roberts has done, and it will take longer still, I hope, to attach any romance to the monstrosity of the Nazi regime. Loss when it is coupled with devastation, immeasurable cruelty, and disease (as in the War of the Roses) is not remembered in romantic terms.

In her new novel, The King’s General, Daphne du Maurier has found a time and cause beautifully suited to her talents. The time is three hundred years ago, the forties of the seventeenth century, when Britain and Ireland were bitterly divided in their hatred or loyally toward that “proud, stiff little man,” Charles I.

Miss du Maurier revives those hotheaded days when the Duchy of Cornwall rose and rose again in its loyalty to Charles I. Fiercely and craftily led by Sir Richard Grenvile, the King’s General in the West, the Cornishmen cut off the Roundheads and drove them into the sea. It was at dear cost, for the great country houses, like Menabilly, which were Sir Richard’s headquarters, were sacked and burned. And the triumph was short-lived. Sir Richard, the best professional soldier in the field, was the evil genius of his cause, as he is the Svengali of this story.

He was contemptuous of mediocrity, and his cruel quips, his swift, malicious answers to authority, won him no friends at court. He exacted unquestioning obedience from his troops, just as he demanded that his men be paid, even though the Cornish squires had to be pinched to do so. A ruthless soldier, it rankled that his Prince could never trust him with complete command.

But there was another side to Richard, so sudden, so tender, so unaccountable, that the women who loved him, and chief among them Honor Harris of Lanrest, saw him as he might have been, and therein lies this tale.

The story is written in retrospect, as Honor, a crippled and broken woman, might have written it, in the last autumn of her life when the King lived over the water and the country lived groaning under Puritan severity. The reminiscence is set down in the long hours of the night, when Honor is too cramped to sleep, and it is part of Miss du Maurier’s spell that we continually see the eager, kindling spirit of eighteen shining through the wasted woman (“My camp follower, my trailer of the drum,” as Sir Richard once called her), and that we attach such intensity to a story which is doomed from the start. Here are the passing moods of romance — the courtliness of the Duke of Buckingham, whose birthday party first brings the pair together, the love-making in the apple tree, the venom of Gartred Grenvile, Richard’s sister, who could so easily have prevented Honor’s accident, the bucolic beauty of Cornwall before the troops laid it waste, the black moods of Skellum Grenvile, and the loyalty with which the Cornishmen went to their death. The posturing, the hidden passages, the cold steel of jealous lovers are the old familiar effects of melodrama; yet here in The King’s General the blend of fact and fiction is to me more brooding and plausible than in Frenchman’s Creek; it is written pensively and accompanied by that feeling of loss which must today have been sharpened in any sensitive Englishwoman who surveys the present and remembers the past.

In the winter of 1941 Mr. Somerset Maugham was the guest on one of my broadcasts, and at the close of our discussion I asked, “What effect do you think the last war had upon English fiction? And what may we expect from this?” “That’s a very difficult question,” he replied. “I’ve never pretended to be a prophet, and if I’ve ever preached it’s been unbeknownst to myself. Early in the last war I was dining with some French officers in their mess and the conversation turned to this very topic. I hazarded the opinion that defeat was a better subject for fiction than victory, and so I suggested that the best novel about the war would be written by a German. If you remember All Quiet on the Western Front you will admit that I was right. I can only say the same thing now.”

If he is right and defeat is a better subject for fiction than victory, then we should look to the French, who lived with defeat for four years; to the Greeks, who were riven by it; to the Italians, who still taste the gall. But I question if this time we can expect much from inside Germany: the Nazi contamination resulted in a mental paralysis, and the greatness of man in defeat would be hard to find in the Germany of today.

In All Quiet on the Western FrontErich Maria Remarque concerned himself with men in defeat. Now in his new novel, Arch of Triumph, he has selected for his protagonist one of that considerable number of Germans who were outcast and marked for tragedy before the war began. Ravic, his hero, was once the chief surgeon of a great German hospital. He was tortured by the Nazis; as an exile he served as a surgeon with the Spanish Loyalists, and after that defeat he comes to Paris, without papers or passport, living in the Hôtel International, “a little island of uncertain existence,”supporting himself as an operator for Dr. Veber, who runs a private hospital, and as a ghost doctor for Durant, a wealthy French physician too old to do his own surgery. His hard knocks have detached him from any base: he stands alone, observant and ironical, accepting the present for whatever it may bring.

Ravic’s is a hard philosophy: “When there is no longer anything sacred to one, everything again becomes sacred in a more human way. One reveres the spark of life that pulses even in an earthworm. . . .” Ravic enjoys the sanctuary which Paris gives him; he finds forgetfulness in surgery, alcohol, and women; he lives for revenge against the Gestapo; and most of all he lives because of his responsibility for the human body, a surgeon’s responsibility which has never been beaten out of him.

On the surface this is a hard story, a story of gynecology and of brothels, of abortion and death. The author must provide us with some sentimental or comic relief from these sordid details, and he does so in two ways: by showing us Ravic’s occasional nostalgia for the Germany that has perished, and by high-lighting the doctor on his nocturnal adventures in Paris. There is a kind of inverted romanticism in this-for instance, when Ravic and his mistress Joan set out for an evening of drinking. They have two vodkas before dinner, and a carafe of vin rosé-with their hors d’oeuvres; they then go on to the Colisée, where they clean up two cognacs, and then on to the Scheherazade, where they buy a bottle of Courvoisier. Three o’clock brings them back to his hotel, where they drink cognac out of tumblers, while Ravic reminds Joan from time to time that he will have to be operating at nine. This is not exceptional; it is Ravic’s steady diet, although he is apt to switch to Calvados as bedtime approaches. Well, there might be a few surgeons who could stand such punishment. There might be one.

Against a tawdry background, Mr. Remarque has animated for us the nervous beauty of Paris in those fateful months before the Occupation. Here is the French character caught in a flash, and skillfully caught, in its harsh reality— the taxi driver as he glances back at the lovers, Madame Boucher, who specializes in abortion, Boris, chess player, philosopher, and doorman at the Scheherazade, the spunky hotelkeeper who harbors the refugees, and M. Laval, the pompous official who with unconscious irony condemns to deportation the surgeon who had saved his life the month before. But neither these quiddities nor the prophetic fatalism of Ravic can save the story from running down. Remarque, who is an addict of melancholy, has here let his themes run away with him. The dialogues drone on too long for their best effect. The mood of loneliness is repeated with variations that become wearisome. The surgery is painfully excessive, and in his alcoholic fortitude, Ravic becomes superman. Powerful writing and many fine touches of characterization are clotted for want of selection.