Reader's Choice

IT’S becoming apparent that there’ll always be a Tory England — in fiction; a sort of Britain-inexile. Cripps may enforce austerity, Bevin may free India, but between the covers of some new novel — probably written by a woman, possibly by an ardent socialist — butter is spread thickly on the crumpets; subalterns sail off to Bombay to defend the Empire; life is lived graciously in country houses, stately homes, or Mayfair mansions; and if politics are mentioned, you hear that Ramsay Mac or “honest" Stanley Baldwin is at the helm. It is, positively, a resistance movement, and one to which a sizable number of U.S. readers seem willing to contribute up to $3.00 at regular intervals. A few years back, thirty thousand of them, according to reliable intelligence, purchased The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Milford. Miss Mitford now fol. lows through with Love in a Cold Climate (Random House, $2.75), also a tale of Britain between wars. The only war, I might add, that anyone in the book talks about is the Boer War.

I would have said off hand before reading Miss Mitford’s novel that the splendors and foibles of the British aristocracy have been too copiously documented to have much entertainment value left. Miss Milford, however, is a writer of singular charm — polished, witty, skilled in comic portraiture, and original in her handling of familiar types. Her novel is peopled with extremely odd characters, among them a ferocious peer some of whose lunatic eccentricities rank with those of that matchless eccentric, Sir Osbert Sitwell’s father.

The story grows out of the fact that Boy Dougdale, middle-aged and married, has a penchant for pinching little girls, and unsuspectingly causes one of them to fall in love with him. This child, Polly, is the daughter of Lord Montdore, a former Viceroy of India and so prodigiously wealthy that Raphael and Caravaggio hang in the most modest of his guest rooms. When Polly, a ravishing beauty, comes of age, she is duly launched on the marriage market with sufficient éclat to attract royalty itself. The problem — and Miss Mitford makes the most of it — is that Polly’s heart belongs to Dougdale.

Nothing could be further removed in temper from the nostalgic novels about Tory England than the post-war Italian novels about prewar Italy which are beginning to reach us. Under Fascism, Italian literature lost all contact with reality (Silone was the major exception). The two dominant strains were the heroic, rhetorical principle of D’Annunzio and an absurdly sentimentalized cult of family life. The characteristic heroes were Duce types or unctuous petit bourgeois.

The contemporary novel, reacting against this tradition, is seeking to rediscover the realities of Italian life and document them faithfully; to define the position in which the Italians find themselves after so much suffering. The novels mention Fascism sparingly; and when puncturing its heroics, they are wary of counterrhetoric, the heroics of democracy. Their heroes are the poor: little men but not the little man — “fall guys" who always get a raw deal. Evil stems from three principal sources: the state, the system of property, man’s inhumanity to man. All of this applies to Vasco Pratolini’s novel, A Tote of Poor Lovers (Viking, $3.50).

The Italian, it has aptly been said, is a man who lives in the street; and it is as members of a si reel — a squalid back street in the slums of Florence — that Pratolini writes about his twenty-odd main characters (all told (here are sixty). The poor lovers are only part of a larger story, a chronicle of everything that happens in the Via del Corno and to its people during three of the early years of Fascism. At least a score of individual dramas are intertwined in the book, and interspersed through it are glimpses of the household life of the street at this or that moment of the day: the sounds, the smells, the routine happenings, the latest gossip. Here is a world which represents in miniature the predominant reality of urban Italy, a reality which few foreigners get to know. Pratolini has given us a living picture of it in a fine, compassionate novel stamped with tragedy and not devoid of hope.

For several years A. J. Liebling has made it his business to bring to light periodically in the New Yorker some of the day-to-day misdemeanors, errors, and absurdities of the press. A round two dozen of these pieces are assembled between the covers of Mink and Red Herring (Doubleday, $2.95), and they guarantee several hours of fierce pleasure to anyone who feels that the wayward press and its pundits need to be chastised for their sins.

The job that Mr. Liebling is doing is tougher than it may look. It calls for meticulous scrutiny of a ceaseless flow of newspapers; unerring selectivity; much additional research; resourceful agents in strategic places. Sometimes the critic needs essential information from the victims themselves, and I imagine that they take an atrabilious view of Liebling’s activities. Then, too, deft artistry is needed to fashion an effective story out of the malpractice of stale newspapers.

Mr. Liebling’s performance is, to my taste, more often than not superlative. He is one of the most gifted practitioners of the casual, quietly humorous style patented by the New Yorker, and his innocuous-looking sentences are infinitely destructive. The pieces in this book written two years ago have lost little of their freshness, which suggests the author’s caliber as a reporter.

Liebling’s casebook does not draw too heavily on the obvious examples of journalistic depravity — Hearst headlines and the like. The sort of thing the author relishes is to catch out the best papers when they overindulge their prejudices. The New York Herald Tribune, for instance, which rooted for the Taft-Hartley bill, reported after its passage that one section contained a potential press gag, “it was disclosed today” — today being three weeks after the President had elaborated on the press gag in his veto message. Thanks to one of his operatives, Liebling was tipped off when Time Inc. decided to adopt a party line: its writers received a memorandum ruling that anything they wished to publish elsewhere must be censored for “coincidence with Time Inc.’s editorial policy.” Time’s management, when queried, said that the magazine had “never had a policy.”

One of the most lethal among the several pieces on the spy fever has to do with the “ Re-De-Secretization ” practiced by the Scripps-Howard Papers in coöperation with the UnAmerican Activities Committee. A so-called revelation whooped up by the Scripps-Howard chain in 1948 — the story of Louise Bransten, which was “secretly read into the official record” of the Committee — turns out to have been told in public before the Committee a year earlier and front-paged in the New York Times.

There is a mass of top-notch exposure in this collection, but Mr. Liebling hasn’t much faith that the wayward press can be made to mend its ways. In at least one instance, though, he brought off something of a David and Goliath coup: a piece of his succeeded in really shaking the top brass of the Associated Press.

The historians, Toynbee for one, have made it reasonably clear that SOVIET Russia ceases to be so mysterious when you study Tsarist Russia and its Byzantine heritage. There is striking proof of this in a two-volume work by Feodor Dostoievsky,The Diary of a Writer (Scribner’s, $12.50), now completely translated into English for the first time by Boris Brasol. The Diary is the sharpest of reminders that there is nothing new about Russia’s present obsessions and ambitions. It also leaves no corner of the Russian psyche unvisited, no national trait unexplored.

Dostoievsky was, after his prison term in Siberia, anti-socialist, antimaterialist, a worshipful subject of the Tsar and a fanatical champion of the Russian Orthodox Church. (The Soviet critics who have attempted to reinterpret him for contemporary consumption have been officially squelched.) Emotionally, too, Dostoievsky, with his burning compassion, was the antithesis of today’s ruthless commissar. For all that, the leitmotifs of the Diary reflect, often with uncanny accuracy, the nationalist ideas now so conspicuous in the gospel according to the Kremlin. Dostoievsky’s was a two-world outlook as intransigent as Vishinsky’s: Europe hates Russia and is making ready “to scald out all the Slavs.” Europe, however, has been “corroded" by socialism (now capitalism) and “is tottering”; the future “belongs to Russia.”

Like Pravda, Dostoievsky continually proclaims the moral superiority of the Russians as sole possessors of the true faith — then Russian Orthodoxy. He excoriates Russia’s sophisticated “Westerners" (now “cosmopolitans”) who have “detached themselves from the people [and] from Russian truth,” and have become tainted with European (now “bourgeois”) ideas. Above all, Dostoievsky dwells on Russia’s “mission”: to impose on the world — by war, if necessary (Dostoievsky is more candid than the Kremlin) — “the idea of universal union and brotherhood.”

Dostoievsky’s dissertations on the Russian character afford a penetrating insight into the national inferiority complex, the emotional pathology, which underlines the eternal Russian urge to dominate, He delves into the Russian’s painful sense of isolation, the result of belonging neither to Europe nor to Asia; his “craving for suffering” ("the Russian people, as it were, delight in their afflictions”); his desperate need for confession and self-abasement.

The Diary of a Writer appeared for a year, 1873, as a column in a journal of which Dostoievsky was editor. Later it was issued as a separate monthly publication. While its main purpose was to expound Dostoievsky’s views on the great social and religious issues of the day, it also served as an outlet for anything and everything that came into his mind. Into it went ripostes to the authors critics; brilliant crime reports; anecdotes; essays on such topics as drunkenness, lying, trial by jury; notes on literature and literary contemporaries; a potpourri of journalistic trivia, including marital advice to young ladies. The Diary could not help being a notebook for the novelist, and we see two actual events recorded and reshaped into short stories.

These turbulent volumes are streaked with incoherent thinking and sloppy writing. A good many pages are dull stuff, but the work as a whole offers reward enough — the reflected portrait of the great novelist; the picture of an exciting world in revolutionary ferment; the illuminating material about Russia and the Russians; and such remarkable passages as the speech on Pushkin and the critique of Anna Karenina.

The new biography of Emerson by Ralph L. Rusk, Professor of English at Columbia University, is the first in sixty years based on complete sifting of the immense mass of documents which Emerson left to his heirs. Mr. Rusk, who in 1939 edited six volumes of Emerson’s letters, has been studying his subject for twenty years; he has even taken the trouble to retrace Emerson’s extensive travels at home and abroad. His Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Scribner’s, $6.00), a monument to painstaking scholarship, is certain to remain the completest source book on Emerson for a long time to come.

Mr. Rusk has chosen the role of “disinterested observer”; his objective is to let Emerson and his contemporaries “speak for themselves and act as they did in real life without much regard for our preconceived notions.” This resolute objectivity, while it lowers the temperature of a biography, has the merit of rescuing Emerson from the sentimentalists and hagiographers who have shrouded him in a sickly mist of infatuation. Professor Rusk’s is a fresh, sensible, and firmly realistic portrait, which presents to us an Emerson who is admirable and impressive but in whom one scarcely recognizes the radiant Philosopher-King of Van Wyck Brooks’s devotional Life. The nagging poverty of Emerson’s youth, the considerable tensions of his private life — these are two of the points which assume a new importance.

Mr. Rusk’s biography must come pretty close to assembling everything ascertainable about Emerson. We learn the yield of his pear tree, the exact fee received for every lecture — a host of details which candidates for a Ph.D. will cherish but which may make the chronicle seem cluttered to the non-scholarly reader. By and large, though, the biographer has handsomely discharged the task he set himself. The only criticism possible— perhaps an improper one — is that he did not set himself a somewhat different task. His massive biography does not attempt a critical appraisal of Emerson as writer and thinker.

A great writer is a living writer: he is for use in the sense that, though he cannot wind clocks, he can, as a poet has said, toll us the time. The point I wish to make is that what Emerson has to tell us has become distinctly blurred by canonization and counterattack. I cannot help regretting that Mr. Rusk, with his singular mastery of Emerson, did not draw together and revaluate his subject’s ideas as Joseph Wood Krutch did so successfully in his recent study of Thoreau.

The best-seller list has for some time reflected an unparalleled demand for therapeutic and theological nonfiction. Authors as diverse as Rabbi Liebman, Monsignor Sheen, and two secular experts in what might be called lifemanship — Mr. Carnegie and Dr. Peale — have commanded, virtually simultaneously, a prodigious audience. The latest opus designed to help the troubled modern is written by H. A. Overstreet, former head of the Department of Philosophy at the College of the City of New York. His book, I suspect, lacks the potent appeal of those by the authors just mentioned, since it offers neither simple rules for selfimprovement nor the solace of faith. As a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, however, The Mature Mind (Norton, $2.95) is assured of a wide hearing.

There’s nothing new in the author’s thesis, but it is one that bears repeating. Dr. Overstreet says, in sum, that our society is suffering from an acute case of infantilism or arrested development: the remedy for the individual is to cultivate maturity, which takes a good deal of cultivating. The Mature Mind, in effect, popularizes an up-to-date humanism buttressed by the insights of psychiatry.

All infants, Diderot observed and later Freud, are essentially criminal. “The object of our culture, then,” writes Dr. Overstreet, “should be to make people grow up,”and it seems to be doing precisely the opposite. Scrutinizing the main forces that shape our minds — the ruthlessly competitive economic ethos; the “fight-and-grab” in politics; an educational system in which “fact is added to fact until the sum of facts is equal to graduation”; the press, radio, movies, and advertising; the dominant ideas inherited from the nineteenth century — Dr. Overstreet seeks to show how each has helped to create “the neurotic personality of our time.” Religion gets a chapter to itself, one of the most pointed.

Dr. Overstreet devotes a third of the book to discussing the meaning and criteria of maturity, and the insights on which his “maturity concept” is based. The mature person, he writes, is one who is moving “toward wholeness of life . . . increasing his knowledge, responsibility, affection, and awareness of the wide interrelationships that make all men one in destiny” — a person whose “linkages with life” are constantly growing; who is free from hate, fear, and enlargement of the ego. Maturity is not synonymous with “adjustment.” In an immature society, the mature man is likely to be “unadjusted” (not neurotic). How does one cultivate maturity? Some positive suggestions are modestly outlined in Dr. Overstreet’s concluding pages.