The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

AM I alone in thinking that for the first half of 1946 this country has been living a gigantic paradox? Everywhere I have traveled, the countryside has seemed more green and inviting, the shrubs more colorful, the trees more umbrageous than I can remember during the war. Wherever I look I see Americans embracing peace with both arms — the ball parks overflow, the bets on the horses set a new high; there are not enough park benches for the lovers, nor enough houses for the newlyweds; not enough cars, or pleasure boats, or summer cottages for the holidays. Come Friday afternoon, the roads leading from every city are a happy stream of family cars, outward bound for the week-end.

We are living peace with a gusto. Yet this happiness seems to ignore the divisive forces which are straining the nation apart. Seen from the perspective of Washington, one is impressed by the smallmindedness of Labor, by the new militancy of the Church and the State Department, and by the ever threatening talk of Russia and of war. Living peace and talking war— that is our paradox.

In the East Wing of the White House a group of us sat listening to Mr. Hoover’s account of what the well-fed nations have done and must do to narrow the gap between the living and the starving. In measure of calories he drew a dividing line between order and revolution, between vitality and slow death. Below 1200 calories a day, watch out. Buchenwald’s diet was 875. The present British diet is 2700. In this country we get along on an average of 3400, though the heavy eaters shoot way up beyond this. Now, by voluntary means and by taking wheat at the source, we are trying to close that four-million-ton gap which imperils Europe and Asia.

At the close of the talk we filed into the projection room to watch in aghast silence the eighteen-minute film Seeds of Destiny, a documentary to break your heart (and ruin your appetite), the work of Major Miller of the Signal Corps. “Of course,” someone explained, “this is too shocking for the general public. It will have to be cut down, but we are hoping to get some of it into the theaters this summer.” Why only some? Why is it too shocking for our public to witness what the public of France and Italy and Germany and China are going through? The grubbing through American Army garbage tins, the wolf packs of orphans stealing amid the ruins, and the little tots with rickets, who have to be fed like brittle birds—why are we too tender-minded to see how other people are living in peacetime?

Pictures as shocking as that could not fail to convince a conscientious striker of the relation between our failure to deliver and Europe’s failure to revive. I ask myself why labor leaders in their attitude toward the public seem to be following the contemptuous example of W. H. Vanderbilt: “The public be damned.” In the utterances of John L. Lewis and A. F. Whitney, as in the mutterings of the maritime leaders, I hear plenty of demands but no recognition of what American stoppage means to our responsibility for world peace. That, in my judgment, is small-minded. If Europe has not enough food in reserve for thirty days, how can our ships tie up?

Either we are a responsible people, or we are selfish and evasive. I blame no one for wanting fairer working conditions. But in these crucial months, more crucial and divisive than any since the Civil War, I blame our spokesmen for not keeping us more steadily aware of the larger choices ahead.

As I see it, the choices are three. War. War, or as some would call it, a preventive war. But for this Fourth of July, let there be no rhetoric about atomic warfare. Let those who incline toward war put the cost squarely on the line. Let them explain what atomic energy and biological poisons will do to flesh and blood. Let them explain how vulnerable to rockets are our great industrial plants and our cities.

The second choice is the choice of spheres — the Russian sphere and the Anglo-American sphere, with sparks flying as the edges meet. This is war deferred, and in their Fourth of July oratory I hope that the proponents of this policy will figure out in public what it would cost the Ford Motor Company and General Electric and Du Pont — to name but three of our greatest—to decentralize and to erect subterranean plants. Let them also explain what such warlike precautions will cost us in civil liberties, and in our standard of living as we begin to live like crazed moles.

The third choice is to believe that peace is still possible. To tell the people, with more candor than Secretary Byrnes and the President have yet employed, the obstacles in the way and the responsibilities which as a people we must assume if the first of those obstacles is to be removed this summer. To tell and keep telling.

At Ernie Pyle’s age and with his record in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, it would have been perfectly plausible for him to turn home in 1945. Plausible but not natural. For by that time the country had come to expect certain things of this writer, and sick at heart, punch drunk as he must have been, he could not duck that responsibility. So after a minimum leave with “That Girl,” he crossed the Pacific in February, 1945, to write in the Marianas, at Saipan, aboard the carrier known in the fleet as “The Iron Woman,” and finally at Okinawa these dispatches which constitute his Last Chapter.

Here is the same keenly observant and warmly alive writing which made Brave Men a high point in reportorial history. The text is briefer and it is made more poignant because we can see that the author is wearing out (“A lifetime of sin and crime finally does catch up with you,” he wrote when after a mile and a half he could no longer keep up with the Marines on Okinawa) and because we know the ending. I asked Edgar Jones, one of his fellow correspondents, how it was Pyle did his work. “Ernie,” he said, “would go ashore with the troops for a week, he went in on the sixth wave at Okinawa, — then he’d come back to ship to write up his notes for ten or twelve columns. After Okinawa he didn’t want to take part in another operation and he promised his wife he would not. But he was on a headquarters ship. I guess he couldn’t resist the pressure. It was always part of the morale if Ernie Pyle went along: if he was there, it was okay. I guess that is why he went in to Ie Shima.”

The Adventures of Wesley Jackson are the adventures of William Saroyan’s alter ego in uniform. Prior to his basic training, Wesley lived with his father in San Francisco, and his father, who had never completely recovered from the gas, shrapnel, and shock of the First World War, was very much on the town. Wesley himself is fresh and impressionable, afraid of nothing and with a gift of speech which talks him out of trouble and into some quite unusual friendships. He never sees action, but he does see a good deal of the unmolested world — Alaska, New York, the Army Training Films, the OWI — and while he is land-based in London, he comes to know the English and to fall head over heels in love with young Jill from Gloucester. This is the opera bouffe of war, laughing, sentimental, threatened by the tragedy off stage, and throughout wistful for peace.

In Singing Waters Ann Bridge reverts to that narrative pattern which served her so successfully in her earlier novels, Peking Picnic and The Ginger Griffin. The story opens with an unattached but attractive young woman — in this case her name is Gloire — bound for the Inaccessible. On the way she is taken in hand by a group of experienced travelers. Kindly but very firmly, the British reprove her for her ignorance; they provide her with camping equipment and then, the men on foot, the women on horses, the little party sets forth, headed for a remote and dangerous mountain. They climb higher and higher. Propinquity begins to do its work, and the travel which might grow tedious in the hands of a less versatile writer is given an extra edge by the threat of danger. After some delays and dalliance, the goal is reached and the heroine is then returned to civilization, chastened and rededicated.

The narrative in Singing Waters moves slowly; it pauses to observe the birds, the landscape, the flowers of Albania; and it halts for long exchanges of dialogue which, as they verge on preachments, may dry up an American’s interest. As a partisan of Old Europe, Miss Bridge has allowed herself to become both tart and didactic, and when her characters condemn the United States, our justice, our big business, our education, our scholarship, our classless society, or when they sing praises of Europe’s peasantry and handwork, the author behind them is speaking with a condescension and a snobbery which are more than her people can bear. I am sorry that thesis has discolored what might otherwise have been a picturesque if tenuous story.

The English comedy in Margery Sharp’s early books. The Nsutmeg Tree and Ginny Brown, — comedy of the George Robey school, strutting, hilarious, awkward, and farcical, — attracted a wide reading in this country. In Britannia Mews she has turned serious — perhaps too serious for her capacity.

Britannia Mews, in which her story is centered, was in the 1880’s the well-kept coachmen’s row for wellto-do families like the Culvers and Hambros, living their orderly if repressive lives in Albion Place and Kensington. The author is quick to hint at the contrast between their Victorian pretentiousness and the benign slavery at their back doors.

As fashion moves to the suburbs and fortunes decline, the Mews becomes a slum. It also becomes the refuge of Adelaide Culver, the strongest and most rebellious daughter of the Victorians, who defies the conventions by running off with her art teacher and who, during her degradation in the Mews, builds up such a stiff defense that she is nicknamed “Poker Back” by the inmates. Thanks to her husband and her lover, Adelaide becomes the artistic dowager of the district, and when, after the First World War, the Mews is revived as a fashionable Bohemia, she reigns as its queen, white-haired, beautiful, and detached, the living symbol of that Victorian middle-class England she despised.

Adelaide is the heroine and time the antagonist of this long and unequal narrative. Miss Sharp has attempted within the compass of a single book what Galsworthy accomplished in a trilogy, and I do not think her talent is equal to the undertaking. In her effort to compass the eighty years her chronicle requires, she cannot give her transitions the attention they deserve. Thus Adelaide’s change from a repressed schoolgirl to the resourceful Poker Back, or her lover’s conversion from a sprawling drunkard to a neat artisan, or her brother’s alteration from a clinging vine to a companionable elder, leaves me incredulous.

Miss Sharp is also handicapped with having to work with too large a cast. She makes her people of passing interest but she leaves them again and again flat rather than developed characters. The social contrast seems forced to me, and usually too obvious to be important. And Adelaide’s seizure at the close, when her life passes in review as she staggers home, is a technical device which many English novelists borrowed from Lytton Strachey and one which I no longer find moving.

It is an indication of the paucity of good fiction that these two English novels should have been chosen by our book clubs.