The Peripatetic Reviewer

THERE are days like this, days when the Swiss Family Weeks lose their memory and resourcefulness and become just so many Peterkins. The conspiracy of inanimate objects must never be taken lightly—nor the propensity of the eager mind to overlook familiar details in the zest to get the expedition under way. We were bound, the six of us, for the beach under Castle Head, live lobsters were in the bucket with their cover of seaweed, sweet corn would be steamed after them, there was plenty of butter and bread, and beer and peaches to wash the meal down. When dusk fell and high tide brought the fish into the rocks, we would trust our outboard motor to locate and troll for the stripers. The September tide and the full moon should be propitions.

But we had evidently failed to propitiate one of the gods. It was not until we had the motor in place, had stowed the food and extra sweaters, and were looking to the rods that Tom, our friend and skipper, discovered the absence of his fish box. In the camera of the mind he saw where he had left it at home, and since home was an hour’s trip he swallowed dismay and agreed to ferry us to the beach and then ret rieve while we foraged for driftwood and did t he cooking.

The mouth of the river was ruffled by the easterly, with big whitecaps on the bar. A slow roll followed us in, and as the bow grated on the sand, water lipped into the low stern. The girls scurried to get out of the trough but not until their clothes and the spare sweaters were soaked. “Take the oars and head her out!” said Tom as he pumped. Which discovered to this member of the crew that the oars had been left behind on the dock. Now it was my turn to be dismayed.

Picnics, to which I have become an addict late in life, are the better for being cooked on the spot and eaten without sand. This one took time, for the seaweed was far to seek and the beach, swept clean by last night’s tide, had hidden its driftwood under the eelgrass at the foot of the dunes. We built our fire in the lee of a big rock with an old spar for the backlog and rocks to support the grill. The driftwood snapped with a heat as quick as charcoal.

There are almost as many ways of cooking lobster as there are appetites in the country. Personally I like them small and I like them soft with the cream of their own still in the claws. On this occasion we had three inches of salt water in the bottom of our bucket, then a layer of seaweed, then a bundle of three lobsters tied in a cloth, then another layer of seaweed, until all nine lobsters were laid in their nests. Then the bucket went over the hot fire, and was allowed to steam for fifteen minutes. With our backs against the rocks, crusty bread in one hand and a can of melted but ter within reach, we feasted as you do when you use fingers, chin, nose, and teeth for the inhalation of good food. Tom had returned in time for his share and now our eyes kept wandering out to sea to catch the terns who might show us where the fish were feeding.

The wind had dropped; the nocturnal surf-casters were wading in and now it was our turn. The women burned the scraps in the embers, the fireplace was sanded, and sweaters went on as the eel skins were fitted for our first run. So as to have more room in the boat, we left cooking gear and picnic basket in a compact trustful group ashore.

Whether with so many aboard we could have caught and gaffed a big striper is a question. An open question. As close to the shore as we dared we turned for a preliminary troll beyond the breakers. To slow the pace we tried cutting down to one spark plug, which always makes the outboard sulky. It balked in protest; the skipper pulled and pulledand with that the starting cable broke. The parting jerk woke up the engine and above its sputter I heard the skipper’s command, “Lines in: we go home. I don’t dare stop her.” And so, well fed but unfished, we bobbed across the Bay.

There is a Swiss Family postscript. One if by sea and two if by land: one half-hour to boat the distance between dock and beach but twice that time if you motor the curve inland and then hoof it out to recover your belongings. They were all there neat and safe as we had left them. Anglers are honest except when they tell stories.

Think of James Thurber and his Walter Mitty, of Thomas Heggen and his Mr. Roberts, of Betty MacDonald and her struggle with the Egg, and you recognize without defining the quint essence of American humor. Think of Ludwig Bemelmans and you will see that new elements are present: Bemelmans cooks his goose, even his American goose, with a European sauce. Like the headwaiters and maîtres d’hôtel who emerge so resourcefully in his stories, Bemelmans himself is suave, with a magical command of food and wine, with a polylingual capacity for charming — and disingenuous

—phrases, and with a dead-pan observation of human idiosyncrasies. In short, he is a satirist with appetite who first wrote about the Europe he loved and lost, and who now cracks his whip at American conventions and quiddities.

Dirty Eddie is a novel about Hollywood and in it Mr. Bemelmans pays his respects to Belinda, the beautiful redhead of Chicago, and Vanya Vashvily, the producer whom she puts to bed but not the way you think; to Maurice Cassard, the French scenario writer who wears a knitted bib, to Arty Wildgans, the gemütlich agent, and to Moses Fable, for whom the lovely Hollywood blossoms are forever opening. He describes the service at Romanoff’s and the abalone steaks and French fries of the fish pier; and, as a climax, the sensat ion felt throughout the studio, and in the private lives I have mentioned, when Dirty Eddie, a neat black pig of utmost intelligence, took over the lead in Will You Marry Me?

Mr. Bemelmans is famous as an observer — and collector —of odd facts, and in California he reaps a rich harvest. His comedy was never better than, for instance, when Cassard describes what the studio would like to do to their tyro, Moses Fable; his satire has a cutting edge as in this account of Dirty Eddie’s contract:—

It must be said here that once Moses Fable conceded defeat, he did so with good grace. Dirty Eddie . . . was guaranteed star billing; a sevenyear contract with yearly increases and no layoff; a percentage of the gross; a waiver of the “force majeure” clause (in case of fire, strike, flood, or other acts of God, he was to be paid anyway); retention of radio and television rights; first-class transportation for any traveling: the right to choose his own stories, hire his own writers, directors, and producers; and the right to approve the cutting of the picture. There was a rider attached to the contract allowing him to do an outside picture a year.

And in serious relief there is the rapier logic of Cassard as he discusses democracy and the war’s end, and in Belinda’s pathetic recital of her first marriage, a touching short story tucked into the larger frame. This is not the book to end all books about Hollywood. The narrative lacks the scope, the technical curiosity, and the poignancy which gave such promise to the novel which Scott Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death. But Bemelmans, master of the bizarre, has caught to perfection that half of our strangest community.

A doctor’s son who knows the integrity of the Middle West, a journalist who paid his way by parttime teaching, book reviewing, and as a magician, Thomas W. Duncan felt the vibrations of this novel when he chanced on the abandoned ruins of an old circus farm in 1936. In the years that followed he and his wife jogged through the West in a house trailer while he composed the l300 manuscript pages of Gus the Great. This is the spacious, many-peopled story of a small-town toughy who fought his way up despite the stigma of his birth, who was well trained as a printer’s devil by one of his mother’s lovers, and who traded journalism for the show business — first in an amusement park and then a circus under his own name — with the money he earned by marrying a bovine heiress.

Gus Burgoyne had gumption, courage, and a loud vitality which made him popular with crowds and successful with some women. As a young city edi tor in the 1890’s, he enjoyed the easy come, easy go, of political favors. As a country showman in the prosperity of Roosevelt and Taft, he rolled in the easy shekels. And then the east wind began to blow. There is much vitality, much humanness, in this casual, slow-paced book. One character leads to another and the asides draw you off from the main theme for many pages at a time. But the driving force, the self-confidence, and the magnetism which are so strong in Gus’s character keep leading your curiosity on despite the disproportionate length and the undistinctive style. I think that Mr. Duncan st rikes certain notes too often, as when, for instance, he reiterates Flora’s likeness to a cow; I think he has captured the human nature in I he print shop and under the big top with better than average plausibility, and I am sure he will be a better novelist when he learns to telescope his genealogy and to suggest instead of spelling out the minor reactions.

In few states of the Union are there such sharp contrasts as in Georgia: the beauty of the peach orchards contrasting with the erosion of the onecrop gullies, the disease and illiteracy of the poor country districts contrasting with the energy and charm of Atlanta, the mobocracy of a Talmadge contrasting with the volunteer commit tee of stalwart citizens who set about cleaning up the state before the war. Berry Fleming is a native Georgian who after his education in the Northeast and fifteen years of literary work in Europe and in New York has come home to take an active part in local reform and to write books which, while being rooted in the South, will branch out to Americans everywhere. In Colonel Effingham’s Raid he told the endearing story of a retired officer’s assault upon the sloth, indifference, and chicanery of a Southern community. Now in his bigger and more skillful novel, The Ligh twood Tree, he has dug deeper to find the taproot of Southern heritage.

Mr. Fleming is a colorful historian and his method in this book is to relate the present against the past, to show in a series of overlapping vignettes how the tenacity of Oglethorpe as he threw back the Spanish invasion, how the faith of young Bruce as he spent himself against the British, how the cussed independence of Senator Jackson as he risked assassination to stop the sale of Western lands—how these traits have descended, however dormantly, to the citizens of Fredericksville, Georgia, today. The protagonist of the story is mild-mannered George Cliatt, a teacher in the public schools who al the age of forty finds himself falling in love, and what is worse, projected into the center of a political squabble in defense of one of Ids former pupils, a free-spoken garage man soon to be drafted. George has been a serene bachelor too long to jump at either of these prospects; his love-making is now shy and now ardent, and as for his bucking the Home Folks Party — why, he would much rather that were done by someone else, preferably a toughminded lawyer. But fight he must, even if it costs him his job, and his bewildered and indignant stand becomes a demonstration of how often in our own home communities we are willing to let George do it if only we can be left alone.

Choosing his strands from three centuries, Mr. Fleming has woven his story together with fine historical color and deft transitions, and has informed it wit h t he affection of a native. Lazy readers used to the straight ahead incline of romance may find this book a little baffling to follow. But it is unquestionably Mr. Fleming’s best novel and one of which Georgia should be proud.

I Remember Distinctly by Agnes Rogers and Frederick Lewis Allen is my favorite vintage book of this year. Mr. Allen, author of Only Yesterday and the able editor of Harper’s, has the memory of an elephant, a social conscience that smiles as it recalls, and a talent for terse and telling résumé which is the envy of any historian. With the help of his wife, a historian in pictures, he has presented a running commentary which begins with the Welcome Home parades of 1919 and embraces the slinky beaded dresses and the Theda Bara cloche; the Lindbergh Crossing and the Lindbergh Tragedy; the smash hits and the best-sellers of the golden twenties; the strikes and witch hunts and the gang murders; the prohibition night spots and Bryan’s case against Darwin; the Hoover depression and the early improvising of the New Deal; the boom of air travel, skiing, radio, and the talkies; the popularity of the great commentators; Willkie’s rise and Father Coughlin’s slump; the vociferation between Fight for Freedom and America First — a graphic and emotional summing up of that life which came to an end on the Sunday of Pearl Harbor. This is a book of nostalgia, of laughter, and of startling remembrance for those now in their forties. The giggles of the twenty-year-olds will be sacrilegious.

In August I spoke with affection of my sixteenyear old spaniel, Mickey, and since then have been trying to convey to him the responses of those who love old dogs. Forgive the immodesty if I quote these t hree: —

Roaming in my usual leisurely fashion through this month’s Atlantic, I reached last night your entirely charming story of “Mickey.” It is one of the most delightful dog stories I’ve ever encountered and I hasten to make obeisances in due form. Incidentally, that episode of the squirrel heaving apples at Mickey pleases me for a very special reason. We had a squirrel in our oak tree, whom we named Babe Ruth, because he used to sit on a high limb and let drive with acorns at Whiskey, our gray Persian cat. He was a good shot, too. But whenever we recounted the tale, our friends raised their eyebrows and otherwise indicated doubts as to the veracity of the narrators. It was a noble feud and lasted two years, but Whiskey finally achieved “V-S Day,” and we had to bury the acorn pitcher. Thanks for bringing up reinforcements on the habits of squirrels! — JAMES POWERS, Bouton, Mass,

It is pleasant to thank you for your account of Mickey in youth and deep old age. I suppose that a dog’s higher satisfactions come from being understood by its human companions. It seems a sorry gap in our line of communication that they cannot take in the printed word. If it were otherwise, how avidly would Mickey (and our own young dachshund) peruse your biography and bark sharp approval!—ROBERT C. SMITH, Moorestown, N.J.

Mary and I wish to join in another fan letter: this time over the piece about your dog. You will have ravished all pet lovers simply by your devoted memory. But you have done much more, you have written a bit of living literature which those without pets can enjoy along with those who have them. Your essay should find its place in the anthologies, and be read by generations. So be sure to use it in your next Atlantic Pocket Book. — RAYMOND SWING, Washington, D.C.