The Steeper Cliff

The Steeper Cliff is the absorbing story of a search conducted in occupied Germany by Lieutenant Andrew Cooper for a “good” German. Against the opposition of his CO, Major Groll, a souvenir-hunting, rank-happy reserve, whose venomously drawn character will be regarded as understated by anyone who has been with an army of occupation, Cooper persists in his efforts to find and appoint as editor of a Bavarian newspaper one Adam Lorenz, a member of the German Resistance.

The search takes place against a bawdy background of occupation binges and military government intrigues in the dusty ruins of the Thousand-Year Reich. There are many excellent minor people: the ex-Hitler Maiden, the civilian expert on Germany, the combat officer, and a group of semi-Nazis. As Cooper attempts to judge the resistance of Lorenz to Nazism, he comes to identify himself with Lorenz and to ask how courageous he himself would have been. Driven by his own lack of experience with war, and by his memory of cowardice as a child, he tests his courage by his quarrel with Major Groll; at the end he must decide whether to take that final step over the cliff from which there is no returning.

The flaws in this rewarding first novel are not so much occasional overslick turns in the plot, or even the sometimes awkward love affair between Cooper and the wife of Lorenz. The real weakness of the book is essentially the weakness of our conduct of the occupation of Germany. Not once does Cooper consider the possibility of reforming any of the applicants for editorship, as, driven by his feelings of cowardice, he judges them, browbeats them, fires them, drives them to suicide. Mr. Davidson has accepted somewhat too complacently the Fascist thesis (he erroneously suggests it is Puritan at one point) that for the sinner there is no redemption but loss of employment or imprisonment.

And in the end, the quest for absolute courage is a failure. What Cooper does find is the more important virtue of charity, first towards himself, and therefore towards others. For all its groping on its main theme, The Sleeper Cliff remains a sensitive, at times brilliant, novel on a great moral subject.

JOHN ASHMEAD, JR.