The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

WE SLEEP lightly this spring because of what is on our conscience. “Macbeth does murder sleep” (for Macbeth read suspicion and belligerency), and the great lines continue: —

“the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath.
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course.”

But now, when our lights go out, it is not possible to find anything like our customary amount of balm. We drift off, but after five hours, or sometimes six, the problems which yesterday admitted no solution summon us back to consciousness; and in that borderland, before reluctantly we stretch the muscles and are awake, we realize from the snatches of dissolving fog that even in the unconscious the mind has continued its ceaseless grappling with anxiety. If this is true of us who are well fed and beset with a minimum of internal hatred, how much truer it must be of Europe and Asia, weakened by starvation and the threat of civil war.

In war, men sleep from sheer exhaustion, sleep anywhere — in abris or foxholes, on deck, sitting upright. Men fall asleep when not supposed to, as I twice did in the summer of 1918 while driving my ambulance back to the front after agonizing runs of 65 kilometers. Each time, as my eyes closed, the Ford swerved off the road to the left, narrowly missed a tree, and brought up in the roadside ditch, from which, as the sun rose, I was extricated by crews of the French seventy-fives. Country doctors have to fight this tendency to nod. I know of one who, as he returns from a midnight call, habitually removes his right shoe. The pressure of his foot against the accelerator is enough to bring him back to earth.

But in the readjustment after war the strain is on the mind, not the body, and the imagination won’t let go. I know, for I have lived with insomnia for twenty-five years.

Anyone who works in the evening runs the risk of sleeplessness. This I first discovered as a veteran trying to make up for lost time at college, reading and writing long after midnight. Night work for many of us is like a stimulant: the mind shakes off the inhibitions of day and races ahead, eager, confident, seemingly omniscient.. And like a drug, this habit is hard to stop. After two decades of indulgence I have learned a simple rule: if I turn the mind off before midnight (and doctor myself as you shall hear), I’ll be asleep in half an hour. But if I pass midnight and force on towards one or two, I know that when I stop, it will take from sixty to eighty minutes in bed before the mind comes to rest. Perhaps not then.

As a student, and later when I was courting, I used to “fight the pillow,” tossing first to the right side and then to the left, winding myself up in the sheet like a mummy and then springing out of bed to put on more blankets or take off those that made me so hot. By then I was so awake that every night sound was magnified. I’d hear the clock in the steeple strike the hours, my alarm clock would tell its seconds louder and louder, floor boards would creak, and always that petulant inner voice was saying, “You’ve got less than five hours left — less than four — Boy, how you’re going to feel tomorrow ! ” Bridge players who have sat up through longer and longer rubbers trying for that finesse which never works, poker players who keep drawing to those two pairs long after the guests — and the winnings — have departed, know what it feels like to be in this squirrel’s cage.

Sleep was still an adversary when as an editor I was more and more obliged to read my manuscripts in the quiet of evening. At first I tried to walk the machine down. Fully dressed (but my watch at home) I would pound the pavements, which are certainly deserted at 2.30 A.M. I had heard Robert Frost, a light sleeper, tell how he had tramped out many a poem in the dim hours when town or village lay asleep. But I would come back from those prowls with my senses as alert as a cat on the roof.

About this time I had a lucky encounter with Serge Koussevitzky, the magnetic conductor of our Boston Symphony: we sat side by side in a Pullman, he on his way to a concert, I to lecture in New York. I have often marveled at the energy and spirit with which he leads, and I was curious to know what kind of meal sustained him. “Before the concert only a little porridge,” he said: “a little porridge, honey and butter. But afterwards a real supper. Otherwise I could not sleep.” I remembered how, at the end of a concert, the veins in his temples seemed to throb with the intense rhythm of the music, and I thought to myself, “Of course. It’s as simple as that: the blood must be drawn from the head back to the stomach, and eating does it!”

That was several years ago and I’ve seldom missed a midnight supper since — applesauce, triskets, milk, prunes, cheese, but always milk. On my lecture tours — block booking with almost every night on a sleeper — I used to go over and over the talk for the next day like a victrola needle that is stuck in a single groove. A little supper stopped that. Now if you hear the sound as of crackers and milk going on behind the green curtains, you’ll know who it is, and come right in!

Yes, says the worrier, but what do I do about my troubles, those things I can’t forget? My answer is, “Cover them with a picture.” We all live with worries. As an old cobbler once said, “ I’ve had a lot of trouble in my time and the worst of it never happened.” And it is so easy to imagine the worst when you are trying to go to sleep. Ten minutes before you turn out the light, try to leave a picture in your mind which it will be pleasant to revolve. If you’re a reader, try a book like Thackeray’s Letters, a selfportrait that lifts you right back into the London of Victoria. The sports page is a potion for many men: have the Red Sox at last got the pitching to stop the Yankees? It lulls me to play over a favorite golf course, or to approach step by step the trout pool of my dream.

Donald Culross Peattie told me that when he can’t sleep he revisits his collection of waterfalls, the most beautiful falls he has found in the Great Smokies, the Columbia River valley, the Sierras. The best treasurer I know, a man so conscientious that he struggles many a night with the figures of the day, has this simple method of composing his mind: he begins to think his way along the road, remembering the curves, the straightaways, the landmarks from Sandwich to Dedham. He says he never has stayed awake long enough to get to Dedham Village.

The last resort is, of course, the sleeping tablet. I have tried a good many, and the effects of the sockos I do not like; after six hours I come to feeling like a sponge that has indigestion. My favorite is a tiny mild sedative which I used in my convalescence from shingles and which induces a ten-minute relaxation. Habit-forming? Perhaps. But why not? You use a sulfa spray to cure your sinus and that is a good habit. Chemistry has much to contribute to modern living, and there is no reason under heaven that it shouldn’t assist us in sleeping.

And if you miss a night ‘s sleep, don’t worry about it. I remember what Dr. William T. Councilman said to me when, as an undergraduate, I was grieving about my loss of sleep. “Well,” he said, “losing a night’s sleep won’t hurt you physically. You can do what you have to do. And it really doesn’t matter much to the rest of the world.”

Kay Boyle is a Minnesotan who got her bearings as a novelist in the Paris of the Post-impressionists. Like Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, she is a stylist to whom the manner of writing was at first more important than the matter. Her years abroad, in Paris, in Austria, and in England, informed her work with a worldly grace, with a cosmopolitanism which was neither tired nor effete. When she came back to this country in 1941, she brought with her a passionate loyalty to France, and when in 1945 the Army Air Forces flew her back to Europe to see the results of liberation, she went, I am sure, with one end in view: to transmit to millions of Americans who have never known Paris, and never will, the inextinguishable spirit of the Resistance.

In A Frenchman Must Die Miss Boyle tells a story that is little known and less appreciated on this side of the Atlantic: the story, true in all its essentials, of the French Milice (the Militia formed January 30, 1943), some 80,000 men, part German, part French, thugs, apaches, black-market gangsters, and collaborationists, to whom American jeeps, uniforms, and weapons became useful props in the poisonous work which they had been left to do after the withdrawal of the German forces. The Milice were commanded by German officers with a perfect knowledge of French and the region in which they operated; they were in touch with the German Gestapo in Spain and Switzerland, and at their head was Joseph Darnand until his capture by American troops in 1945. The ruthlessness of this Fifth Column met the implacable vengeance of the Maquis, and the clash was at its fiercest in the Haute-Savoie, where Miss Boyle found the embers which, as she breathes on them, give fire to her words.

This is a story of pursuit which begins in the tiny mountain village of Ameau, where the Maquis, under the leadership of a Franco-American, Guy Mitchie, come on the fresh scent of a big-time Vichyite. The Resistance knew Charles Pliny as unmistakably as they knew the look of Laval’s necktie or Pétain’s cane, and they hated him almost as bitterly. The pursuit leads down the mountainside to Lyons, by plane to Paris, to the bistros, the radio station, the Ritz, and thence on a mad dash by car to the Swiss frontier. The pace quickens to the run of melodrama, and the intrigue has its romantic stooge in the beautiful but sexless Danielle Monnet. But again and again the story is brought back to earth by the masculine fidelity of the Maquis, by men as sardonic as Bobo the bartender, as pitiable as Louveau the little tailor, as audacious as Mitchie, men as memorably French as Pierre Brossolette.

In writing this novel. Miss Boyle has reversed her technique. Now it is the story which, matters first, and the facts — the intense, tragic facts of bankrupt Francewhich matter second; as for style and femininity, it is as if she said they are incidental in this man-torn world.

Man-eaters of Kumaon is the true story of a white hunter, Jim Corbett, an Englishman born and bred in India, speaking the dialects and at home in the jungle, who roved through the Kumaon hills in the Himalayas, tracking down the man-eating tigers and leopards which are such a scourge to the tiny villages of the United Provinces.

It is impossible for most of us peaceful commuters to imagine the necessity for such a man, or to estimate the alertness, the power of observation, the physical and nervous fitness which were required of him. In our protected state we tend to sympathize with the tiger; we are more afraid of automobiles than we are of man-eaters. But in the Kumaon hills even today a single man-eater will destroy more people than lost their lives in a year on the highways of Massachusetts. For instance, one tigress which was finally brought down by Major Corbett had been driven from Nepal after killing 200 human beings, and on her rampage through Kumaon had added another 234 to this number. To meet this terror, the government would call in Jim Corbett, and the hunt was on.

Major Corbett tells us that “tigers are responsible for all kills that take place in daylight, and leopards are responsible for all kills that take place in the dark.” The SOS would fetch him to the spot of latest bloodshed, and it was then his method to proceed alone and on foot. Human company he found encumbering, “for if one’s companion is unarmed, it is difficult to protect him; and if he is armed, it is even more difficult to protect one’s self.” From years of experience Major Corbett knew that the tiger is invariably aware of the presence of the hunter, and thus the hunt is a stalking match between the two killers. Tigers naturally assume that human beings have the same sense of smell and consequently do their stalking upwind. And when the wind was against him. Major Corbett had the instinctive feeling that his enemy was at his rear; therefore he would proceed through the waist-high jungle in a series of tacks so that he was never completely at the mercy of his adversary.

Thirty-two years spent in the more or less regular pursuit of man-eaters gave him a knowledge of the jungle floor and an awareness of the danger signals of birds, deer, and buffalo, on which he had to rely as he closed in for the kill. And “close” it was, for in many of the stories recounted in this intrepid book the Major is within twenty yards of the crouching cat before he shoots. In addition he is protected by that sixth sense of impending danger. “I will not labor the subject beyond stating that this sense is a very real one and that I do not know, and therefore cannot explain, what brings it into operation. On this occasion I had neither heard nor seen the tigress, nor had I received any indication from bird or beast of her presence, and yet I knew, without any shadow of doubt, that she was lying up for me among the rocks.” And she was.

His hunts would last for days, sometimes for an entire month of ceaseless tracking, sleeping in trees, squatting motionless on rock ledges, or forcing his way into rocky ravines and through brush the more terrible for what it might conceal. He never carried more than five bullets — usually three was his quota. In his feud against the Chowgarh Tigers, my favorite tale of the book, when he has reached the bottom of a sandy ravine and has cautiously stepped clear of a perpendicular fifteen-foot slate: “I looked behind me over my right shoulder and — looked straight into the tigress’s face. . . . Her head, which was raised a few inches off her paws, was eight feet (measured later) from me, and on her face was a smile, similar to that one sees on the face of a dog welcoming his master home after a long absence.”

I admire this book for its knowledge, its modesty, and its fearlessness. And strange as it may seem, it is a disarming plea for the preservation of the tiger. “A tiger,” writes the Major, “is a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage, and . . . when he is exterminated — as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support — India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna.”

To her stories of the South, Eudora Welty brings a talent which is as original as it is captivating. She is not a one-note writer. There is range to her work, as we know from her early and memorable stories in the Atlantic. In “A Worn Path” she stirred our pity for an ancient Negress; she was touching on eccentricity in “Why I Live at the P. O.,” and in “Powerhouse” she was drawing us into the spell of hot music. She is not easy to follow, for there is a sense of mystery about her writing, and she is enough of a poet to lead you obliquely into the fragrant Delta garden of her imagination.

Delta Wedding, which has been serialized at three-quarter length in the Atlantic, is a dreamy, odd, beautifully written picture of Southern kinsfolk gathering in 1923 for the marriage of a favorite daughter, Dabney. The Fairchilds are a numerous, preoccupied, and charming family bound together by pride and a kind of cousin-vitality — not too happy about the bridegroom, who is the overseer, not too easy about Uncle George’s affairs (Uncle George is their white-headed boy), but consumed with each other and individually so curious in their affection that the reader, if he is no more critical than little Laura, is soon caught up and enmeshed in the family doings of Shellmound. The beauty of this story is that it is written from the inside out. The vitality in it bubbles up as clear and cool as spring water. Women more than men will enjoy threading the intimate relationships, and to Southerners it will come like a dear letter from home.

For me, Carson McCullers, equally Southern and a stylist of great fluidity, is a different case. It seems to me a pity that a young author with such evident gifts should be so pledged to aberration. In her new short novel, The Member of the Wedding, she has set herself the problem of holding the reader’s interest in a slight story about a twelve-year-old girl, Frankie, lonely and gawky, who spends more time than is good for her in a sultry Georgia kitchen. Frankie’s brother is soon to be married at Winter Hill, and she yearns for the event as a chance to “belong” to the wedding party. The novel is written from the outside in, and to my way of thinking it never penetrates very far. There are plenty of causes for depression in this dismal world of ours, but the trivial gloom which Miss McCullers has spun with such effort about Frankie is hardly worth bothering or reading about.