The Peripatetic Reviewer

THERE are as many ways of reading as of writing. You may, for instance, have the misfortune in your youth to be a slow reader or a Left Reader. I surely was one of the slowest in my class both in school and college. In the hot, depleted atmosphere of Widener Library, I often timed myself and almost never hit a faster pace than thirty-five pages an hour. This of course was “required reading": the label did not add to one’s appetite for the books, and the books themselves were solid. Now, twenty-five years later, with the speed I have acquired as an editor, I could go through those same books, retaining the chief details and the more conclusive passages, at the rate of eighty pages an hour. Anyone can learn to read faster; it is simply a matter of discipline, memory, and practice.

An editor does not keep a stop watch on himself when he is reading manuscripts, for the quality of the manuscripts determines his speed. When I am reading the manuscript of a novel which I know we shall want to publish — but which I also know is in need of revision — I read with a pad at my right hand on which I jot down critical and appreciative notes, perhaps one for every second page. This is constructive reading, and it goes almost as slowly as the reading for memory which used to exhaust my time in college.

When I was the first reader for the Atlantic, I used to average sixty manuscripts a day — sixty envelopes of manuscripts, that is, for the poems came in clusters. Of course if, in the morning, I ran into three or four acceptable papers, each one of which had to be read to the last comma, my average dropped. On the other hand, my tally — for I kept actual count — sometimes ran as high as eighty-five or ninety. This is aggressive reading, best done when your mind is decisive and resistant to anything but the best.

But you don’t read Jane Austen or Henry James or Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf or Thornton Wilder aggressively. At least I don’t. You read them savoringly; you read them with your imagination tuned to style.

To read imaginatively is the most difficult of all reading requirements. We all know what it is to read breathlessly — to gulp a book down in the quiet of the night, reading with what Coleridge called “that willing suspension of disbelief,” until somehow it is 3 A.M. when we turn the last page.

Emotion sustains this pace and emotion is fundamental in any absorbing book, as it is in those that last. But the really great novel calls for more than emotion. It calls for the imagination of the reader — the imagination to enjoy the surface movement and the sensuous effect and at the same time to penetrate beneath the surface to find the inner design and those truths wrung from experience which have driven the novelist to write.

Since the Depression, the most popular living novelist in America has been not Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck, but a retired clergyman, Lloyd C. Douglas. He is a man of faith who writes in primary colors; he has produced fiction imbued with affirmation through a long period when personal doubt and violence besieged the mind; he has retold the best-loved stories of our Christian heritage in swift-moving twentieth-century idiom; and to his sometimes questionable skill in enlivening the episodes of the past, he has added an evangelism which preaches at us in words unsubtle and sincere. This does not necessarily make Mr. Douglas a great novelist , but it has possessed him of the largest body of readers in America.

In The Big Fisherman (Houghton Mifflin, $3.75) — who is, of course, Simon Peter, the most appealing of the twelve Apostles —Mr. Douglas bus mounted a story, somewhat earlier in time, against the background and research which provided the setting of his most successful book, The Robe.

The story makes a circuitous approach, for it is more than a hundred pages before we catch our first glimpse of the strong-armed fisherman bossing his trawlers. In the meantime, we have followed the conspiracies and feud between Arab and Jew; we have watched the indolence and corruption of Antipas in his sumptuous villa in Galilee; we have had our nostrils twitched by the sensuous presence of Salome and have heard, as if from the fringe of the crowd, a prophetic sermon by John the Baptist.

Much of this comes to us in a blend of simplified history, Maxfield Parrish scenery, and twentiethcentury slang. At a Roman banquet, where Antipas is shamefully neglecting his Arabian wife, the conversation runs like this: —

Mark Varus [the host], flushed and lusty, approached to say — in Greek, “So — at last — we have the lovely Princess of Arabia, with us!”
Arnon smiled, only half understanding.
“Her Greek isn’t very nimble yet, Mark,”said Philip. “Know any Aramaic?”

And then after a pause, the wife makes another try: —

“And I won’t be a success — unless I’m a little bit drunk?" inquired Arnon.
“Well—" drawled Philip, with a chuckle, “that’s one way of saying it. . . .”

Romans, Jews, and Arabs all drop into this oldshoe colloquialism. In a moment of pride in one of the Arabian elders, “Happy days for good old Mishma,” remarks the Queen, and a few pages later when the boys at the camp get to quarreling with the young Prince, “You’ll pay for that, squeaked Deran.

That is undistinguished writing, but it obviously does not deter the many readers who thirst for the morality revealed in these scenes. There is a difference in method involved. Thornton Wilder in The Ides of March, his novel of great imaginative power, seeks to show us by conversation, letters, secret papers, and poems the distinguishing and bitter differences which were shaking Rome in the last year of Caesar’s life, and he succeeds in giving us the corruption of the great Empire; whereas, in The Big Fisherman, Mr. Douglas is recasting the New Testament in modern dress, writing as if it might all have happened to a Portuguese named Simon in Gloucester Harbor or to a member of the Stern Gang in Galilee only yesterday.

As might be expected Mr. Douglas achieves more success in his characterization of Simon Peter than he does in his delineation of Jesus. Here, as in his rationalization of the miracles, the striving for reality has a minimizing effect. And it should be added that there is not a spark of humor in the book from beginning to end, as there certainly is in the novels by Bruce Marshall, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, to mention three who have similarly dedicated themselves to religious subjects. Mr. Douglas would probably reply that sincerity, and not humor, is what fills his congregation.

Point of No Return, the new novel by John P. Marquand (Little, Brown, $3.50), I have read twice in manuscript, and in large part a third time in print. I know my way about in it and can only speak as a partisan, for I admire the writing, and have been regaled by its satire of New York bankers. In Charles Gray, the hero, Mr. Marquand has given us a most sympathetic delineation of what a middleaged man feels like a year after his return from war.

Before he went into the Navy he had been in line for the vice-presidency of a conservative Fifth Avenue bank. Charles had come a long way since his early days in Clyde, Massachusetts, and his moderately successful record at Dartmouth; he had gained the confidence of his elders in the bank and, what was equally important, the trust of some of the large depositors; he had gained in subtlety without losing his quizzical streak of candor; he had climbed the rungs of suburbia to the better country club and the better house under the ceaseless, affectionate prodding of his wife Nancy. He didn’t have to step out of line when the war came, Nancy didn’t want him to, and there were those in the bank who were sure he was surrendering his lead to his closest competitor, Roger Blakesley. But the war years gave Charles, as they gave others, a fresh hold on himself and a fresh, disquieting slant on the old values he had lived by.

When he comes back Charles is more detached — a mood which drives Nancy wild — more restless in the bank, more quizzical. His dealings with wealthy Mrs. Whitaker, the talk he has with the night club operator whose account must be turned down — somehow for Charles these incidents are outlined in an irony he would not have felt before the war. His competition with Roger and his understudying to the President, Tony Burton, assume a half-questioning reality; he is in there, but he isn’t sure he wants to be, he isn’t sure he wants the vice-presidency now that it is open, and it is this self-doubt, so infuriating to his wife, which gives the story both its depth and its unexpectedness.

A statement one sometimes hears to the effect that The Late George Apley is Mr. Marquand’s best book seems to me a very unfair disparagement. This criticism overlooks the fact that it is always easier to write satirically of one’s grandparents than of one’s contemporaries; it overlooks the growth which I think is undeniable in Mr. Marquand’s more recent novels: H. M. Pulham, Esquire is a better novel than Wickford Point, and for my money, B. F.’s Daughter comes nearer to our time and interest than Pulham did; it overlooks the problem which besets every writer of satire, a problem of how to develop a central figure who will himself be part of the ironical situation and yet at the same time be admirable and so recognizable as to be almost a man we know. This I think Mr. Marquand has done in his characterization of Charles Gray.

I have been expecting big things of R. C. Hutchinson, the English novelist — not to be confused with the author of If Winter Comes — ever since I read his Shining Scabbard, a macabre, unforgettable story of a French military family at the time of the Dreyfus case. There wasn’t a word of French in his dialogue and description, and yet these people in what they said and did were French and alive to the core.

Elephant and Castle (Rinehart, $3.75) is a big book— big in its capacity, big in its accommodation of many people — an honest, often laughable, sometimes deeply touching cross section of London from the middle class to the Toynbee Hall district to the poorest slum — big in its actual length, which amounts to somewhat more than 280,000 words. Don’t run at it and don’t be abashed by the large cast of characters which you will turn back to for convenience in the early chapters. This book exerts a slowly possessive power if you will give it a quiet chance.

It is a story of London, 1920-1939; it takes its title from a famous tavern in one of the poorer districts, and in its essentials is the story of a marriage that shouldn’t have been but was. Armorel’s family, as one of her uncles says, “do make rather unexpected alliances now and again.”Her father had made a mess of his marriage before he lost his life in the battle of the Somme, and now Armorel, whose lovely figure is curiously at odds with her London School of Economics zeal and her tendererthan-thou compassion, sets out first to reform and then to marry a tough mug who has just served time for beating up a bobby. She was a witness to the fight which put him behind bars; she pulled every string possible to get him out on parole but he wouldn’t come, and then with that stubbornness so beautifully developed in her Botticellian make-up she tracks him down through the Hollysian House Boys’ Club, knocking over the Warden, who of course falls in love with her on the way. Armorel has great courage, moral earnestness; she is ambitious and she is sure that she can bring out the man which she sees in her Gian. What she minimizes is his uncouth but nonetheless real resourcefulness and his need for her love quite as much as the precept — and thereby hangs the tale.

It is the tale of people so diverse but so real that they must be believed in; of a wedding so appalling and yet of such utter comedy that I laughed aloud; of a honeymoon in a bleak, windswept boardinghouse where Gian has the most endearing conversation with an old spinster, and where Armorel misses the very wisdom she might have perceived; it is a book of high comedy; it is the picture of a young couple’s struggle in that oldest of truths, “to bear and forbear,” a struggle which, as it opens up their characters and inequalities, reveals to us at the same time the sprawling character and still greater inequalities, the comedy and the pathos, of a great city. It seems to me the most encompassing and sympathetic novel of London which I have read since The Forsyte Saga.