Reader's Choice

BY CHARLES J. ROLO

MY FIRST three books form a trilogy covering three crucial phases of our time: the German defeat, the occupation of Germany, the veteran’s return.

A good many of us still don’t know the answers to questions that aroused passionate speculation back in the war years. Many of those missing answers are compactly set forth, often in the enemy’s own words, in Milton Shulman’sDefeat, in the West (Dutton, $4.50). A former Canadian Intelligence officer, he has pieced the story together from captured plans, orders, minutes of staff meetings, transcripts of telephone conversations, letters and diaries, and cross-examination of the senior German commanders. Some of the ground has already been covered, but the familiar gains point from being integrated in the total picture of defeat as seen through German eyes. The accuracy of the picture is vouched for by Major General Sir Ian Jacob, wartime military aide to the British Cabinet.

Why, Major Shulman inquires, did Germany’s leaders “make blunder after blunder until victory became impossible”? His thesis is that, although Hitler was responsible for Germany’s most fatal mistakes, the Wehrmacht cannot again whitewash itself as it did after the First World War with the myth of “the stab in the back.” It was the Wehrmacht’s own fetish of discipline which enabled Hitler to reduce his generals to impotence, and which robbed junior officers and enlisted men of initiative. “Too much Hitler, too much discipline,” were the prime factors in Germany’s defeat. The third was “too much ignorance” at every level of command, the result of faulty intelligence and lack of liaison. (Even generals were not allowed to know the operational plans of adjacent commands.)

The Wehrmacht’s record in this war leaves little scope for consoling myths. Here are but a few of the debit items: —

The High Command opposed the attacks on Poland, France, and Norway, believing that the Wehrmacht was not yet sufficiently strong. Von Rundstedt considered that the plans for invading England were “nonsense” — Intelligence credited Britain with thirty-nine divisions two months after Dunkirk. (It then had three!) The General Staff was at one with Hitler in not taking Rommel’s advances seriously; they denied him proper backing even at El Alamein. Rommel himself is said to have been fatally incompetent in administration. The generals were firmly convinced the AngloAmerican invasion would be aimed at the Calais area. After the first serious reverses, morale throughout the Wehrmacht collapsed with phenomenal rapidity. Major Shulman’s text would have gained perspective from a few paragraphs emphasizing that this chronicle of defeat necessarily obscures the high price of victory. Nonetheless, Defeat in the West is a well-organized, informative, and engrossing post-mortem, written from what is perhaps the most fascinating vantage point.

Alan Marcus’s first novel, Straw to Make Brick (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $3.00), is a sobering sequel to Major Shulman’s story. The familiar components of the German problem are exemplified in the Bavarian township of Erlbach. “The 200 per cent National Socialists went on being 200 per cent National Socialists; the defeatists became more gloomy; the priests continued their laments; speculators came out into the open; and the few anti-Nazis emerged from hiding places and found life still hazardous.” To the conscientious major in charge of the AMG unit, it was “A salvage job — only human salvage.” But his corporal, Mark Gordon, was an “ex-humanitarian” where Germans were concerned (and for sufficient reasons); his mission was “to make things as difficult as possible for them.” Most of the other Americans had more mundane interests: Fräuleins or countesses, schnapps or vintage wines, black-market cameras or antiques, frightening “krauts” into the gutter or playing Caesar — depending upon rank.

Major Christopher’s search for straw to make new bricks was balked by red tape, unsatisfactory rules for denazification, and the hatred and deceit of the Germans; by a spiteful colleague and a dictatorial superior; above all by the sheer immensity of the problem. And Mark Gordon, who denied the existence of a German problem, found himself cruelly enmeshed in it: he, a Jew, fell deeply in love with a German girl.

Alan Marcus has brought the topical problem into living focus and distilled from it a sharper sense of urgency than any nonfiction report. His writing, if not as yet distinguished, is clean, taut, and imaginative. His characters, if not particularly original, are strongly projected without recourse to heroic enlargement. His story moves at a rapid clip, accumulating emotional tension without contrived crises. Each incident amplifies the personal conflicts, discloses new facets of the political dilemma, interweaving and exposing both without glibness, in all their heartbreaking complexity. His vision cuts no corners, and because of this his story takes some unexpected turns. The climax is a deliberate anticlimax — a hiatus between a departure and an arrival — into which the essence of all that came before is vividly compressed. Nothing is solved — for no solution is possible yet much is illuminated.

And what happens when the boys come home is told in Merle Miller’sthat Winter (Sloane, $3.00) — the story of three veterans’ first postwar winter in New York. Its publisher claims it will be remembered in years to come for its portrait of “a generation that refuses to be lost,”and it has been favorably compared with the early work of Hemingway and Dos Passos. I’ve rechecked first impressions with a second reading and cannot join in the hosannas. The book has plenty of story interest, sincerity, and drive. It captures the nervousness of New York’s moral climate and has its moments of emotional intensity. But these considerable qualities are counterbalanced by serious faults. That Winter is shot through with smart-alecky dialogue. Too many of the characters are nationally advertised types: the novelist who betrayed his talent for cash and became a heel in the process; the tough, likable trollop; the cynical, successful editor. And the plot is a prefabricated structure.

Of the three veterans, the rich boy drinks his way out. The Jew runs afoul of prejudice and returns to the bosom and business of his family. The hero sells himself to the “news magazine,” works there long enough to give you the low-down — which is amusing but lacks the diamond edge of authentic satire — then pulls out of town to write a novel. Meanwhile oceans of alcohol have been consumed and a number of sound but quite commonplace ideas batted this way and that. But for a flashback — excellently done — to wartime ex-

perience, there is little reaching for the inner sources of frustration. Everything is superficially solved — the Jew goes home, the writer gets down to writing — and little is illuminated.

I’m judging the book in relation to the claims that it’s an important novel: there’s no question about its being well above the average. Its weaknesses stem from one source: only part of it has been “created.” The rest is imaginative reporting, a “write-up” of ready-made materials (the stock types mentioned, the standard patter) within a prefabricated framework.

Since the second of this month’s New York novels — which has been extravagantly ballyhooed — is prefabricated from start to finish, I’d like to clarify what I mean by that term.

The prefabricated novel, much in evidence of late, is not to be confused with the egregiously popular. It isn’t shackled by the conventions of “escape” literature. It claims to have something “significant” to say — about anti-Semitism, for example — or purports to be a satire or sensational exposé of this or that respected institution. The better specimens are entertaining, briskly if glibly written, sometimes animated by commendable intentions. They have vitality and strong topical appeal. But they are manufactured, not created. They are fancy journalism, not literature. I take time out to press the distinction because the prefabricated novel is competing for attention, not with popular fiction, but with the genuine article, which has a hard enough time finding the audience it merits. Aided and abetted by pretentious réclame, the prefabricated novel captures the three dollars one might have spent on a more rewarding book and a more deserving writer. Here’s a partial anatomy of this de luxe synthetic product.

The author of the prefabricated novel starts out not with an inner vision but with a glossy print of the finished structure. He works, so to speak, not with brick but with ready-made walls, floors, and ceilings: stock types and situations or actual people, smart middle-brow ideas, the brand of clever patter cultivated by exhibitionists who strain to talk like characters in a sophisticated novel. The type is then individualized by identification of his favorite bar and haberdasher, or the real person thinly disguised by caricature and superlative. Anything that looks dull gets an extra coating of sex.

The prefabricated novel is at first glance seductive. But it signifies little or nothing. Where it is “true to life,” the truth is journalistic. What Virginia Woolf called “the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” is never grasped. No meaning is disclosed. No deep emotion generated. No comment beyond the superficial is expressed. The “satire” is glib burlesque which never challenges the basic values at stake and sometimes gives every appearance of admiring them.

Virtually all of what I have just said is faithfully exemplified in The Great Ones (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00) by Ralph Ingersoll.

Some extracts from the publishers’ build-up are worth quoting: “This is the Love Story Of Two Very Important People. . . . Ralph Ingersoll . . . converts the facts and circumstances of people’s lives into a searchlight blazing on their naked human souls. Only once before have we come across such a novel . . . Main Street. The Great Ones is a dead-pan, mordant dissection of another kind of American society, and provokes some value-questioning of its own.”

Ralph Ingersoll has written the middle class to millions saga of Letia Long and Sturges Strong, together with the case history of a magazine empire, Facts, Inc. Sturges’s progress from Yale to Park Avenue is bound up with that of Farts, The Knowing Weekly, to which is later added Fantasy, a Picture Magazine. Letia starts out as an actress, pulls down two million dollars’ worth of alimony, then becomes in short order a celebrated couturière, “the most widely known painter in America,” and a best-selling author to bool. One is not surprised to hear it said that she had “The Touch.” At this point, she is in her late twenties and still full of repressed ambition. She marries Sturges ("the mating of two eagles” — Advt.), becomes a war correspondent for Facts, Inc., and finally enters politics. Mr. Henry Luce, Ingersoll’s former employer, and Mrs. Luce, who are both graciously mentioned by name in this novel, are sparrows by comparison with Ingersoll’s soaring eagles.

Since “value-questioning” is at stake, let us question the values involved in Letia’s first great love affair. It takes place as follows: A writer on the New Yorker, who has just met her, says, “The next question is can you or can’t you be made?” Letia replies, “I don’t think so.” But she takes a fancy to his tweed jacket, and, “He was just a guy — but suddenly she was just a girl.” She murmurs, “You can make me, I think you’re swell.” And so to bed. All this is preposterously juvenile and no naked souls are discernible.

The Great Ones is not a novel but a dossier — ream upon ream of factual reporting with just enough imaginative transposition to place it on the fiction list and elude the laws of libel. Letia and Sturges are described with accumulation of detail, but not infused with a single particle of the life which Dreiser poured into Frank Cowperwood, also the embodiment of “vaulting ambition,” also a fictional titan elaborately documented from actuality. Ironically, the comparison with Main Street is justified only In Mr. Ingersoll’s most surprising failure. He gives you the impression, as Lewis sometimes does, that he is mesmerized by the values whose futility he is out to expose. His final remark that Letia, after a brief interlude of I love, “will never revert to being a woman again” comes as an agreeable surprise. You had guessed she was a monster around page 50, but you had an awful feeling Mr. Ingersoll had not.

The Gilded Hearse by Charles O. Gorham (Creative Age, $2.75) contains yet another exposé, this time of a best-seller factory, whose motto is: “Books are merchandise, like soap or toothpaste or fountain pens.” It’s a turbulent account of twenty-four hours in the life of a publisher’s Bright Young Press Agent, Richard Eliot, who is ambitious, unscrupulous, confused, and — like his colleagues — mortally insecure. Again we have prefabricated ingredients, but the conflict between Eliot and his wife is well handled, and the final tailspin ably executed.

My next three novels, whatever their failings, are genuine fiction, works of pure creation. Two are by young Southern writers. All three draw heavily on Freudian lore.

When Johnny Somers arrived to teach high school students history in Pineboro, Alabama, he was himself “a child in his heart and mind and flesh.” His lonely struggle to achieve man’s estate is anatomized by Robert Gibbons in The Patchwork Time (Knopf, $3.00).

Gibbons’s sensitivity to the speech and texture of life in a small Southern town has won impressive praise from Erskine Caldwell and Eudora Welty, and his people — raffish, cruel, brutal, and cunning; sometimes likable and sometimes tragic — are authentic, if strongly colored. Blackie Boone, amoral, resourceful, understanding, is an attractive and mature creation. And crow Johnson, the rural Machiavelli, lecherous, arrogant, unbelievably vengeful, becomes utterly credible as Mr. Gibbons elucidates his private obsession. But the author’s experiments in Joycean technicpie, though they yield persuasive insights, are sometimes distracting and obscure. The Patchwork Time is a patchwork quilt in which, here and there, the dye has run and marred the pattern. There is no doubt, however, that Gibbons has an important and original talent. He writes with a compassion and a concern for human dignity which mark a radical departure from the tortured violence of Caldwell and Faulkner.

Other Voices, Other Rooms (Random House, $2.75), by another Southerner, Truman Capote, is also a story of emotional growth, this time from pre-adolescence to the first bewildered, terrifying awareness of adult passions.

At thirteen Joel Knox is summoned from his aunt’s home in New Orleans to live with a father whom he has never seen, at Skully’s Landing, an isolated, decaying house in the rural South. Here we are plunged into poetic Grand Guignol with a Southern accent and a cast of freaks: Joel’s cousin Randolph, an exotic homosexual who spends most of his lime sipping sherry, pasting bluejay fenthers onto cardboard birds, and staring out of windows, dolled up in a Louis XVI ball dress and a silver wig; Joel’s paralyzed father, who signals for attention by bouncing a red tennis ball around the house; a century-old Negro, Jesus Fever, who is always cold: his daughter Zoo, who is certain that the husband who half cut her throat will be back from the chain gang to finish the job; ldabel, a ferocious tomboy; Miss Wisteria, an oversexed midget; and others. The happenings in this world of grotesques, a nightmare universe where dream and reality are commingled, are replete with metaphorical intimations and Freudian imagery. Other Voices, Other Rooms has the perverse flavor of a children’s story unfolded in a gothic chamber of horrors.

Mr. Capote is twenty-three. Like the short stories which have won him a sizable reputation with the advance guard, his first novel is experimental to the core. It achieves remarkable effects of poetry and terror: the unknown is a continual presence, obliquely disclosed in shapes and colors, and, in the shocked instant of recognition, again enveloped in mystery. Other Voices, Other Rooms is intense, brilliant, and — as a novel — a half failure: too formless and too choked with gaudy blossoms. I hope that Capote’s exciting talent will respond to other voices, will explore other rooms. He already has an astonishing command of ways and means, a magic all his own.

Raoul Faure is another writer who has pondered Freud; and Freud has made him ponder the legend of Lady Godiva. Mr. Faure is convinced it is a brazen whitewash. In Lady Godiva and Master Tom (Harper, $3.00), he recounts with Freudian hindsight what really happened before, during, and after that piquant one-woman parade.

This, I hasten to emphasize, is no clinical case history but captivating fantasy, clearly and enchantingly written, richly laced with irony, surprise, and a sly sort of gaiety. Pervaded, too, with wisdom, dispensed with engaging simplicity by Ezra, the Earl’s sagacious counselor.

In Mr. Faure’s hands the story of Lady Godiva becomes a timeless parable. Lady Godiva is the glamour girl turned bitch after marrying the successful stockbroker; she is the frigid mink-coaled matron with unprintable daydreams, who plays at philanthropy and has been known to dive nude into swimming pools after too many dry Martinis. And Tom, when you learn the secret of that famous peep, turns out to be a specimen the serious young novelists have been solemnly dissecting, but with less success than Ezra, the canny ancient, who hasn’t heard of narcissism or the Oedipus complex but doesn’t miss a trick.

Mr. Faure is a French businessman transplanted to America, who has made himself one of the most polished English stylists of the day. His third novel amply justifies the praise lavished on Mister Sf. John and The Spear in the Sand. To my mind, Lady Godiva and Master Tom is a book that has something to say, says it with charm, and is fun to read.

W. H. Donald, the Australian newspaperman who for some forty years helped to shape China’s destiny, has long been one of the genuine mystery men of our time, Just before his recent death, he confided the story of his career to another old China hand, Earl Albert Selle, who now tells it in Donald of China (Harper, $3.50). A lively book, it is somewhat marred by mediocre writing, loose organization, and frantic hero-worship.

Donald’s biography is in effect an intimate history of modem China. To the non-expert the book unfolds a picture of strife, backwardness, and corruption that is startling by comparison with even the most outspoken reports. As a young man, Donald took ship for China from Melbourne at the bidding of a mysterious telegram offering him a job on the China Mail. In 1905 he became the most famous correspondent in the Far East with the scoop that disclosed the whereabouts of the Russian Fleet and enabled the Japanese to destroy it at Tsushima. He later joined the Revolutionary Party that overthrew the Manchu dynasty, sighted the suns at the siege of Nanking, and thereafter acted as adviser to innumerable Chinese “governments.”In the thirties he became the Solon and inseparable com panion of the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

After acquiring the bulkiest dossier in Tokyo’s file of Very Important Enemies, he was captured in Manila and spent three years in internment without being recognized. Perhaps the most astounding fact about Donald, who lived only for the Chinese, is that he never learned their language, never ate their food (he traveled with a private cook), and mispronounced even the simplest names. The biography of such a figure cannot fail to be engrossing.