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BY CHARLES J. ROLO

PROVERBIALLY reserved, notoriously jealous of their privacy, English writers are paradoxically the world’s most zealous, and perhaps most gifted, autobiographers. A psychic law of compensation may be at work: the ego, overdisciplined in public, has its way in print. In some measure, the abundance of memoirs by literary men has been a by-product of the social system, which provided many of them with a prenatal history, a classical education, and a milieu teeming with lions — a priceless equipment for the autobiographer who is not a man of action.

Those not lavishly endowed by their ancestry were handsomely provided for (autobiographically speaking) by their schooldays. Many have been the memoirs written, in eflect, on the playing fields ot Eton (or Winchester, Harrow, Rugby). With or without the help of well-born forebears and wellknown schools, the English writer — in the period between wars — was rushing his life into print, often before he had lived half of it. I remember a score of youthful confessions, impressions, and good-byes to all that, among them Robert Graves’s, Christopher Isherwood’s, Siegfried Sassoon’s, Ethel Mannin’s, and Beverley Nichols’s (he published his at twenty-five — and has since been another writer with “a promising past”). One of these literary memoirs — actually only part of it is autobiography — has just been republished, ten years after it first appeared: Enemies of Promise (Macmillan, $3.50) by Cyril Connolly. In the interim, Mr. Connolly has acquired a considerable reputation as editor of Horizon and author of The Unquiet Grave and The Condrrnned Playground.

Connolly’s books have shown him to be one of ihe most readable of first-rank critics; a parodist inspired by something approaching comic genius; and a connoisseur of the modern palsy, whose experiments in “self-dismantling” ("When did the ego begin to stink?”) have been conducted with Freudian insight, stylistic brilliance, and a desperate sense of humor. Connolly’s writ ing is st udded with such piquant dicta as: “Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable”; “Imprisoned in every fat man [Mr. Connolly is portly] a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out"; “Hemingway’s tragedy as an artist is that he has not ... run away fast enough from his imitators.”

Enemies of Promise was conceived as “an inquiry into the problem of how to write a book which lasts ten years,” the present edition being proof the problem was solved. It first discusses the splendors and horrors of the “Mandarin” style (the language of Addison, Pater, Ruskin, James; later of Huxley, Virginia Woolf, the Sit wells); then examines the New Vernacular, the “you-man writing of the he-man authors,” obsessed with “the simple fife of the gat.” The colloquial realism of the American tough guys was leading, said Connolly in 1938, to fiction barely distinguishable from reporting. His point has since gained weight: “Our Non-Fiction Novelists” was the title of an essay by Jacques Barzun in the Atlantic not so very long ago. I suspect that part of the apathy toward current fiction, which the publishers complain of, is due to the reader’s feeling that so much of it is not precisely fiction — not, in Mr. Barzun’s phrase, “a novel experience . . . news from somewhere else.” Mr. Connolly concludes that writing designed to outlive a dog or a car will have to return to the Mandarin virtues: “art . . . the striving for perfection, the horror of cliches, the creative delight in the material, in the . . . subtlety of the composed phrase,”

Fart II is a guide to the hygiene of authorship. Journalism corrupts, and well-paid journalism corrupts absolutely. Too much politics consumes time and breeds disillusionment. Marriage? “If, as Dr. Johnson said, a man who is not married is only half a man, so a man who is very much married is only half a writer.” Good health is Unhealthy for the artist, “permissible only in those periods of convalescence when he is not writing.”

In sum, Mr. Connolly is a Flaubertian, an attitude too much scoffed at since the socially conscious thirties, which coincided with the literary decline.

The autobiographical half represents the personal aspect of the title theme: a search for the enemies of Connolly’s promise. This account of boyhood and schooldays at Eton is a good one — provided you are receptive to yet another portrait of the Englishman as a Young Esthete. At seventeen, Connolly, jaded with English poetry, was writing his own in French; he had engaged a small tenor to sing Gregorian chants under his window; and at tea parties in his study, attired in a black dinner jacket and flannel trousers, He dispensed foie gras sandwiches and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes against a decor of w hite roses and green bananas.

Sir Osbert Sitwell was born, you might say, with half an autobiography in his infant palm. In fact, he called the first volume of his memoirs Left Hand,Right Hand! — the left hand representing “birth and tradition.” And what a heritage for the right hand to work on: a dynastic tree stretching back to the Plantagenets; Renishaw Hall, with its three centuries of history; the life with Father, that engaging baronet whose eccentricities, nourished by a large fortune, bordered on a patrician form of lunacy; the family diaries, the family retainers, the family ghosts—a black mannikin who leaped out of disused closets, and a youth who wakened sleepers with cold kisses from the grave and once appeared, superbly costumed, at a masked ball, terrifying his partners with the icy touch of his hand.

Sir Oshert’s schooldays at Eton are now two books behind him. His autobiography has reached its fourth volume, Laughter in the Next Room (Atlantic Little, Brown, $4.00), sections of which have appeared in Ihe Atlantic. It opens on Armistice Day, 1918, with the author, Diaghilev, and Massine strolling among the revelers in Trafalgar Square — Art gazing upon the Philistines. There follows the conquest of literary London, which yields a gallery of breathing contemporary portraits. The book is spangled with epigram and anecdote, with richly comic grotesqueries — the three Ruritanian Ladies; the letters of the family butler; and once again the artist’s father, Sir George, at his lunatic best.

Here is really fine Mandarin prose, with its flowery periods, its intricate rhythms, its opulent and sophisticated texture — fussy and archaic at times (with its “albeits,” its “Terpsichore,” and such), but wonderfully evocative and perfectly suited to the author’s aristocratic aestheticism. An amalgam of ancien regime and avantgarde, Sir Oshert is a champion both of monarchy and modernist art. He speaks with distaste of the present “dustman-democracy age,” and dwells lovingly on the excellence of the Sitwells.

Sir Osbert’s memoirs have grown into one of the major works of the forties, a great chronicle of a family, of two distinct eras and three remarkable artists. These hooks represent, too, a memorial to a creed: the creed (in Henry James’s words) that “it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.” Sir Oshert’s life has been to make of his life a work of art.

A close friend of Sitwell’s, Siegfried Sassoon, has pursued a similar design. Mr. Sassoon’s autobiography, which began with the famous Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, has taken six volumes to reach the author’s thirtyfourth year. 1920. Now he has made an excursion into biography: Meredith (Viking, $3.50). I was mildly irritated by the Mandarin affectations of communing with the gentle reader (a failing of Sir Osbert’s), and of selfdepreciation (not a failing of Sir Osbert’s). But apart from overemphasis on Meredith’s poetry and overestimation of it, Mr. Sassoon has done a discriminating job, which makes the most of his subject ‘s long and vigorous life.

With Meredith we arc in the realm of that rude health which Cyril Connolly distrusts, and in the company of the muscular psyche. The tailor’s son who turned novelist was a great walker (ten miles per diem), a great talker, a prodigious worker (thirtyone books), and an indomitable optimist. His first wife ran off with a painter; success was denied him till he was past his prime; but his “religion of life” remained “always to be cheerful.” And Providence, playing the game according to Victorian rules, rewarded him. A succession of pret ty women lavished on him inspirational if platonic devotion; and when platonism palled, there materialized a young girl who made him happy ever after. The critics began to praise him: America sent him checks; and England, when he was old enough to be forgiven his “deplorable cleverness” and unbridled intellect, respectfully made of him its Grand Old Man of Letters. For two generations, The Ordeal of Richard Fever el, The Adventures of Harry Richmond, The Egoist, Diana of the Crossways, were widely read and ardently admired.

Today, Meredith’s reputation is in the trough. His language daunts us — it has most of the Mandarin vices compounded with less gentlemanly failings. His ideas and preachments are as out of fashion as whiskers and bonnets. What endures are the pages inspired, as Mr. Sassoon puts it, “by the connection of human life with the life of nature, the joy of earth. . . . The outdoor element in him has the oxygen of aliveness in it.”

Precisely these qualities have won lasting fame for another nineteenthcentury writer, neglected in his day, who is the subject of a new biography: Thoreau (Sloane, $3.50) by Joseph Wood Krutch.

In Thoreau’s case, as contrasted with Meredith’s, time has added urgency to his ideas, and his exhortations have been renewed. His essay On Civil Disobedience was acknowledged as an influence by Gandhi. His slogan “Simplify! Simplify!” has its echo in the preachment of Mr. Huxley and the California mystics, who enjoin us to cultivate our Walden. His prophecies are confirmed by a spate of books which tell us we are dancing Petrouchka to the baleful music of the machine. As Mr. Krutch says, “If it is no longer true that the ’mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ that is only because the desperation of so many has become unquiet instead.” Thoreau’s teaching, in fact, gives pause to many who are very far from being Thoreauists.

The precise nature of that teaching has been somewhat obscured by conflicting legends. Thoreau has been claimed as forebear by both (to use Mr. Koesller’s terms) ihe Yogi and the Commissar — by those who believe that improvement can come only by Change from Within, and by the social reformers who believe in Change from Without, the former citing the retreat to Walden, the latter Thoreau’s speeches about slavery. Mr. Krutch, gratefully drawing on Henry Seidel Canby’s biography, in which the facts of Thoreau’s life were well established, makes it his main purpose to bring Thoreau’s personality and ideas into sharper focus. A judicial and penetrating thinker, a lucid and fluent writer, Mr. Krutch makes a masterly biographer. His Thoreau is a distinguished piece of work, an impressive opening to its publisher’s series on American Men of Letters.

Mr. Krutch bears down hard on the legend of Thoreau as a prophet of social reform. Thoreau’s primary objection to industrial society was not its injustice but its joylessness: the price of living in it was a stultifying slavery. His indictment of the acquisitive society was that of a defiant individualist (“The government does not concern me much”), whose message was that each man must carry out his private revolution. Thoreau’s two-year sojourn at Walden was in effect just that: an experiment to discover how many conveniences and tools he could dispense with.

Late in life Thoreau was troubled by the need to reconcile his mounting indignation over slavery with his philosophy that it is not a man’s duty ... to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong.”Krutch concludes that Thoreau became at most a “reluctant ” crusader, who always returned for strength to non-resistance and non-participation. He is careful to stress the lack of system in Thoreatfs thinking. The New Englander’s anarchic scheme of life presupposed a stable society, a government which would allow 1 he dissenter to “stand or sit thoughtfully” while his century went by. When Thoreau said, “1 quietly declare war with the Slate,” he added, “though I will still gel what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.”

In regard to nature, Thoreau oscillated between mystical contemplation and an instinct which impelled him toward what was primitive and savage. Mr. Krutch points out that the continual struggle to reconcile those contradictions and dualities is the thing which gives to Thoreau’s writing its tension and “powerful extravagance.”A reconciliation is achieved not in Thoreau’s philosophy, but in the “unity of sensibility” which vitalizes Walden, which underlies t h6 qua lit ics t hat have made it, to countless devoted readers, the classic record of a certain kind of life.

Krulch’s sagely shaded portrait points up the plain, practical side of Thoreau, which was a cutting foil to his extravagances. It brings out to the full Thoreaus pungent humor, which liked to juxtapose the homely and the ineffable and was keenly alive to the comic aspect of his eccentricities. (On being a vegetarian: “I am only half convinced by my arguments for I still eat fish.”) Even though Thoreau belongs in the camp of the Yogis and not the Commissars, he is not, as we see him here, a man oversold on t he Oversoul. Mr. Krutch has introduced us to a more persuasive and attractive figure than the Thoreau of the several legends. You leave him with a desire to revisit Walden.

The Yogi and the Commissar showed that Arthur Koestler, disillusioned with Communism, conscious of a growing “anti-materialistic nostalgia,”but suspicious of otherworldliness, was searching for a synthesis between his two symbolic figures. Koestler related his dilemma to the scientists’ quest for a new synthesis which would take the place of the exploded mechanistic explanation of the cosmos. Presently it was reported that Mr. Koestler was spending most of his time in seclusion on a farm in Wales, immersed in scientific literature and intensive cerebration. The result of this activity, five years of it, is a long treatise called Insight and Outlook (Macmillan, $5.00), introduced as presenting “a unifying theory of humor, art and discovery, in which these are shown to differ merely in degree not in kind.”The book becomes, in effect, both a diagnosis of the crisis in our civilization and a step toward a theory relating biology, psychology, and sociology.

That bold, somewhat theatrical quality of Koestler’s mind, his fondness for dramatizing dissimilars as opposites and resemblances as analogies, is noticeable in the general theory he advances. The symmetry and cohesiveness are a shade too pat, but are an advantage to the layman, who needs all the help he can get. Though written by a layman, Insight and Outlook is an exceedingly difficult book, bristling with scientific terminology. But the strenuous demands made on the reader’s lime and concentration pay an abundant return. There is much in the book that is brilliantly illuminating, much that is persuasive and important, and a great many speculative ideas which stimulate further thought.

From an analysis of humor, Koestler derives his major original contribution: “bisociative" as opposed to associative psychology. The pattern of the joke is found to be an intersection of two wholly independent trains of thought, each with its emotional charge. The junctional concept is bisociated with both trains, which then become one. The result is that the listener’s stream of consciousness makes an abrupt transfer, and (for physiological reasons) it becomes separated from its emotional charge, which “explodes" in laughter. (An illustration of the pattern: “This dog,” says Mr. Weber, “is worth five hundred dollars.” Mr. Fields replies: “How could a dog save that much?” Here the associative trains of value and thrift intersect on the bisociative junctional word “dog.”)

The dominant emotional charge of a joke is said to be a faint (sometimes imperceptible) impulse of malice. Crying is reduced to “loneliness, the isolation of the self from some higher integrative whole.” Thus crying is the discharge reflex for redundant or frustrated self-transcending emotions; laughter for self-assertive emotions (a theory which such everyday sayings as “the saving grace" of humor seem to support).

Koestler turns next to biological foundations, taking sharp issue with certain pessimistic ideas of Freud’s. Along with several leading modern scientists, Koestler terms the evolutionary trend toward more complex integrations of life substance “the integrative trend” (not necessarily “progress”). Under normal conditions “wholeness” and “partness” — this argument is extended to the individual in society — are not in conflict but are related aspects of the evolutionary process. However, various factors — among them blocking of communications between whole and part, and abnormal excitation in the latter—can lead to the part’s “isolation,” a release from its integrative center. It then displays (like cancer celis or Nazi Germany) a “self-assertive tendency” and seeks to become a new w hole or to dominate the old one.

The two disintegrative factors mentioned above are conspicuous in our civilization. The educational system fosters the self-assertiveness of the growing individual without developing integrative counterforces (attachment to nature, social responsibility, artistic and contemplative inclinations). Later, the competitive and acquisitive drives are wildly overstimulated by the economic system.

Koestler suggests, then, that the crisis in our civilization represents an atrophy of the integrative tendencies of the social whole. He believes that Change from Without is required to create a less competitive environment. But “only the simultaneous unfolding of the self-transcending emotions from within can achieve the individual’s social integration without thwarting his natural appetites.” Koestler discusses the various methods of realizing the self-transcending drives, the most valuable of which, he believes, are artistic creation and inquiry into the nature of the world.

Artistic creation is (like discovery) a “eureka process” — the positive counterpart to the “malicious" eureka process of the joke: the familiar is bisociated with, and so becomes one with, something new and significant. Enjoyment of a work of art is participation in the eureka process, which discharges the self-assertive tendencies and deploys the integrative ones. Examples of art which, in the highest degree, offers the possibility of selftranscendence are the great myths which recur in literature and religion: they contain experiences rooted in the essence of the human condition (in Jung’s “collective unconscious”). The Commissar’s philosophy, which sets up an iron curtain between himself and the unconscious, prevents him from understanding that the part can be both free to behave as a part and yet remain integrated with the whole. But if the Commissar has no insight, the Yogi has no outlook. Koestler has provided the basis for a synt hesis.

This summary, of necessity, is a drastic oversimplification, which cannot do justice to Koestler’s penetration and gives only a hint of the ground he covers. Insight and Outlook is to be followed by a second volume, which will put the hisoeiafive theory “on a more scholarly foundation,” and will attempt to synthesize the recent trends in the different fields of science.

Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov, Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, and Yosif Djugashvili were the Three Who Made a Revolution (Dial, $5.00). As young conspirators, anxious to be anonymous, they called themselves Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.

Bertram D. Wolfe has given us an excellent “biographical history” of the years of conspiracy that prepared the Russian Revolution. Lenin’s personality, quite rightly, forms the main artery of the book. A member of the petty nobility and once a landowner and “exploiter” of peasant labor, he became, a Comrade said of him, a man “absorbed by the revolution twenty-four hours a day, who has no other thought but . . . revolution, and who even when he sleeps, dreams only of the revolution.” He was not so much a man of action, as the shaper of men’s actions: ruthless, utterly intransigent, in love with power, convinced he was right in all things. He combined a theoretical belief in political democracy with a passionate faith in a centralized, military form of party organization, which was not, said Trotsky, “centralism” but “egocent ralism.”

Trotsky, a Ukrainian peasant, grew into a young dandy, a brilliant .journalist, the stormy petrel of the movement, contemptuous of “bureaucracy ” and eager for the halo of a great revolutionary. These two men of conflicting temperament sharply discerned the dangers of each other’s outlook. Trotsky prophetically warned Lenin: “The organization of the Parly will take the place of the Party itself; the Central Committee will take the place of the organization; and finally, the Dictator will take the place of the Central Committee.” Lenin, in turn, warned Trotsky of the consequences of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” in a country where the proletariat was a minority: “Whoever wants to approach Socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at the most absurd and reactionary conclusions.”

The worst fears of both were to be realized and their lifework destroyed by the concessions each made to the other when they joined forces in 1917. Lenin, who had foreseen the dangers of minority dictatorship within the state, accepted Trotsky’s conception of a single-party state. Trotsky, who had foreseen the dangers of dictatorship within the Party, accepted Lenin’s party machine. Inevitably, the Party became the State, and in due course the subordinate whose name, as late as 1915, Lenin could not remember became the Party.

The chapters on Stalin naturally hold special interest for us. Their yield is modest, but that is to be expected; his person is shrouded in secrecy and legend. One passage from a speech of his comes, perhaps, very close to “explaining” him: Stalin’s reference to how shocked he was, when he first glimpsed Lenin at a conference, that the great man should have neglected to plan an impressive entry — “This seemed to me a violation of certain essential rules.” Stalin has clearly lived by t he rules, and with sufficient virtuosity 1o make the desired impression (in each case different J on Eric Johnston and Wendell Willkie, the Politburo and the Russian masses. Mr. Wolfe, after an excursion into official literature on the ex-seminarist and ex-director of the Tifflis Observatory who became the Iron Man, offers this suggestive verdict : Stalin is the supreme example of a man who succeeded in inventing himself.

Some of the most fascinating pages in the book deal with the police agents and provocateurs who infested the revolutionary movement, among them the incredible Yevno Azev, at one time in charge of the fighting section of the Social Revolutionary Party; and the still more incredible Roman Malinovsky, a common criminal, who — charged with the task of fomenting division among the State’s enemies—became a leader of the Bolshevik Underground, a Deputy of the Duma, and a trusted intimate of Lenin.

Mr. Wolfe breaks off his story in 1914 with the promise of a sequel, which is good news, for he is a capable historian who has known his triumvirate personally, who knows his subject as few do, and who does not count the years it takes to make an authoritative book. It is, however, somewhat disappointing to follow the conspirators through 650 pages, which copiously document their writings, their squabbling congresses, their theories about the shape of things, come the Revolution — and then to be denied the Revolution!

On July 26, 1943, Rome was the scene of one of the strangest counterrevolutions in history. The previous day the Fascist Grand Council had passed a vote of censure on the founder of Fascism. That morning, Mussolini visited the King and was told he had been dismissed. The conspirators — several rival factions — had arranged, with unconscious irony, for the retired Caesar to be bundled off into protective custody in an ambulance. Thus the Fascist regime, with its strong military and police formations intact, was liquidated by a signature — the signature of a comic little king who for twenty years had been the Duce’s rubber stamp. The only disturbance which attended this Ruritanian coup d’etat was the noise of singing in the streets. “On July 26,”Benito Mussolini later wrote in Ids History of a Year. “Italy was reduced to one Fascist, Mussolini.

History of a first published in a Milan newspaper a few months alter Mussolini’s rescue by German parachutists; later in book form. This remarkable document, translated by Frances Frenaye, now appears as The Fall of Mussolini (Farrar, Straus, $2.75), its interest greatly enhanced by Max Ascoli’s brilliant introduction. The author writes about himself in the third person, which is curiously appropriate. For Mussolini’s oration on the full of Caesar is that of a playedout ham actor struggling to recapture the poses and gestures that once enthralled the gallery.

Mussolini’s short confinement on an island near Corsica suggests to him that his era will come to mean to Italians what Napoleon’s did to France. Me boasts of having many lives. He tunes in his personal anthem, calling on his compatriots to light like heroes with their Duce to re-create “eternal Rome.” The familiar bombast conjures up the image of a swaggering figure — mouth open, chin thrust forward — with his feet on a balcony and his head in the clouds. And the image dissolves into the photograph of a dangling corpse, with its feet in the air and its head pointed to the ground.

Mussolini’s major theme is the betrayal of Mussolini. He charges, in sum, that his soldiers were cowards (“The Germans fought bravely” is a continual refrain), his generals blunderers, the Fascist leaders both those things and also gangsters and Judases. There are some violations of known fact in the book; there is also a good deal of surprising candor. Mussolini admits that Italy was unprepared for war and lacked the resources to wage it. He discloses (as Goebbels’s diaries did) a curious contempt for his own people, “the mob,” whom he had proposed to convert into empirebuilders and cent urions. He confesses, “I am easily the most hated man in Italy.” (Pnzzone-—“stinker" — was the popular word for him.)

Scattered through the book are reflections on war, government, history, which show the shrewd cynicism of the buccaneer in politics. Mussolini’s colossal egotism blinds him to the fact that his apologia — addressed to the very Italians he so abuses — is his self-indictment. It is one of the curiosa in the museum of Fascist pat hology.

Mussolini’s undoing was the Pact of Steel with Hitler; Hitler’s was Stalingrad. That holocaust is described in the most clinically realistic, the most horrifying novel written about modern war: Stalingrad (Appleton-Century-Crofts, $3.00), a book which bears comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front. In Europe, it has already sold a million copies in various languages. Its author, Theodor Plicvier, is one of the leading writers in post-war Germany. A veteran Communist, he recently moved from the Russian to the American zone, confessing to bitter disillusionment with the Soviet Union. His book, I imagine, was written before the change, since the brief glimpse it gives of the Russians seems idealized.

It is not, however, a novel in which political ideology plays a noticeable role.

Stalingrad is the very powerfully dramatized case history of a death agony — that of General von Paulus’s Sixth Army, encircled between the Volga and the Don. The book’s volcanic effect is obtained by the intensive accumulation of mortuary detail, the piling of horror upon horror, abomination upon abomination. Hunger drove men into machine-gun fire in quest of a hunk of flesh off a dead horse; made them crack open skulls to eat the brains. Surgeons operating thirty and forty hours at a stretch could only handle a fraction of the wounded. The most humane thing was to lay the serious cases where they would freeze to death quickest. When one soldier removed a comrade’s boot, the frost-bitten leg came off with it. Typhus killed thousands. Every day some men shot themselves, others went mad.

This mass agony and mass death served no military purpose. But Hitler had forbidden surrender and discipline was too deeply ingrained for the generals to disobey. One branch of the disorganized army functioned briskly to the very end — the execution squads.

Plievier shows us men of all ranks, returning most frequently to two: August Gnot ke,gravedigger in a penal battalion, and Colonel Vilshofen, a professional staff officer. Gnolke’s moral fiber and will to live are sustained by devotion to a battle-shocked comrade, while in Vilshofen the obscenity of Stalingrad awakens a sharp consciousness of Germany’s guilt and of his share in it. The compassion of the uni hin king soldier and the commander’s understanding of the “German disease" — lhese two qualities, Plievier concludes, must be combined to build a new Germany. How can such men as Gnotke and Yilshofen bring their message to a morally debauched people? Stalingrad carries that message, and with if a searing vision of the nemesis that waits upon arrogance and inhumanity. It is a fine achievement, a terrible and memorable book.