The Peripatetic Reviewer

WE ARE a people of contagious enthusiasms. We never do things by halves. Television is our newest craze, and it is anyone’s guess how much it will change the use of our leisure.

When I was in London in 1948 my friends in the BBC told me that Britain had already passed through the hypnotism of television. The new medium was no longer a novelty, sales in London had slowed down, and spectators were settling back with the realization that there were other ways of spending an evening.

But here the craze is still in an early stage of acceleration, and with us television is sure to reach a far larger percentage of the population. More than 3.5 million sets are now in use, and upwards of 190,000 households are being converted each month. Sets are sold on no cash down; they are being sold like an English geyser: you or your neighbors drop in a quarter each time you want to use it, and when you have slotted the price of the set it is yours. It isn’t only the well-to-do who are being hypnotized. Look at any new development in the suburbs and count the number of television sets.

American reaction to a novelty as powerful as this is hard to predict. Radio never followed the expected course. First came the excitement of the homemade sets with earphones — “I got Dallas last night!” For a short time radio was regarded as predominantly an educational device, and many universities applied for licenses. Then, as the craze took hold, music monopolized the air; jazz, torch singers, classical music, and finally the symphonies crowded the program, and it was predicted that phonograph records were through. But radio had the opposite effect: it actually broadened the demand for records. Next came the popularity of the spoken word, when Amos and Andy, Alexander Woollcott, Jack Pearl, Town Meeting, Kaltenborn, Information Please, and the fresh years of Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Charlie McCarthy took command of millions of households. People stayed home to listen to their favorite programs; they wouldn’t answer the telephone when Woollcott or Fadiman began to speak. Television is a long way short of that point. But it has already affected every household under its spell.

I should say that there are five areas in which television has affected our use of leisure. Check these off and tell me where you differ.

1. Begin with the children, who are the most hypnotized members of any family. The children’s programs, the puppet shows in particular, are of a higher quality than the average of television. As a result television has intensified the problem of homework. For two decades we have been bringing up children who could do their homework while the radio was on. But books make no sense at all when kids are looking at the screen. So parents have to invent a new discipline for enforcing homework - and after that, for getting the kids to bed. Check?

2. Sports. We were beginning to be a nation of spectators before television was accessible. Now we no longer have to brave the elements as we watch. Television of college football will drive most athletic associations still further into the red; it has already forced a reorganization of the pros. “Why should I sit out in that damn cold stadium when I can see the game so much better at home?”

Personally I don’t believe that sport is half as good as it could be in television. The line plays in football you see vividly, but the surprise and sweep of a long forward pass are completely muffed. So too with the kicking, which needs a wide-angle lens to be appreciated.

In hockey I can never see the puck. In baseball the pitch is too fast. The best sport in television is a good fight or the spectacle of a couple of behemoths grimacing their way through a wrestling show, but is that worth an hour every evening?

3. The stage. Television still seems infatuated with third-rate vaudeville from which the amusing, ribald lines have been censored. Occasionally we do get a well-rehearsed, well-acted production of a Broadway hit. But even this is not shown to best advantage. It seems to me wasteful for an advertising agency to devote $12,000 and six rehearsals to the reproduction of a good play, a novel, or a short story, and then kill it after one showing. It is a waste of good talent and it is thick-headed to think that the millions who would like to see it can all be at home at one time. I think good promotion and word-of-mouth advertising would build up an audience for a production which could be repeated several times.

4. The films. The time has not yet arrived, but may come, when we can sit at home and take our pick of some of the most famous old films that Holywood has produced. With the good old A pictures I hope they will also include the best Disneys, the best short Benchleys, and the best documentaries of the war. Couldn’t we rent something like this from the telephone company? Or will television, by providing a new form, take over the movie theaters?

5. Reading. Television will not affect the conscientious readers, what I call the real, first-class readers to whom good books are a necessary and steady diet. But it has already affected the secondclass readers, the people who have been spending maybe $20 a year on their books and magazines and more than a couple of whom have told me, “Ever since television came into our house, I just know that it has held us for more than an hour a night when we might have been reading,” Television still leaves much to be desired. But when color is perfected and program directors are given greater scope the competition will increase.

Daphne du Maurier is a weaver of enchantment, a gifted romantic writer who exerts in our generation the charm and bewitchment which her grandfather exerted in Trilby and which her father exerted in the English theater. Her talent is individual, not derivative: she has displayed it in historical novels - Frenchman’s Creek and The King’s Ceneral, stories which were richly colored and to me a shade implausible - and in Rebecca, a contemporary novel altogether fascinating in its power of illusion.

In The Parasites (Doubleday, $3.00), Miss du Maurier returns Jo tho modern and to the London stage which is in her blood. The “Parasites” for whom the book is named are the three children of the fabulous Delaneys: Maria, Niall, and Celia, a fiercely protective trio in their half-sister, halfbrother relationship. Maria, grown to be a famous star, was the result of Pappy’s first marriage (?) to a little Viennese actress: Niall, the languid composer of dance tunes, was the result of an affair Mama had with a pianist before she met Delaney; and Celia, their half sister and the least talented of the three, is the daughter who took care of Pappy after Mama’s tragedy and who knows to a tick the inner workings of this illustrious theatrical household.

The story begins in the spring of 1949 when Charles, Maria’s husband, in an outburst of longcontained anger, tells off the Parasites for what they are. Thereafter we follow the story on two planes — now in the consoling, half-accusatory conversation of the trio as they review their life in the living room of Menabilly; now in the flashbacks which occur to each as they are reminded of the crisis in their relationship; thus past and present are fused to a point of reality.

This is evocative writing: a study of talent and temperament, a picture of backstage rehearsals and tumultuous first nights, of a home life in hotels and on tour. It was a glittering triumph for the elder Delaneys, who were born to greatness and never had a moment of misgiving, but only a half life for the children, who lacked their parents’ confidence and capacity. The scenes of the stage are delightful in detail; the vignettes of that snowy night on which Maria made her debut, of Paris in August, of Pappy in a restaurant getting maudlin, are wonderfully to the life. Niall’s composing seems to me to leave something to be desired; Tin Pan Alley, I think, requires a tougher schooling. No, it is for the character drawing of the four women and for Pappy’s magnificence that this book will be remembered.

The Horse’s Month by Joyce Cary (Harper, $3.00) is a laughing, scampish novel about a London artist too old to pay his way in Bohemia. As a younger man Gulley Jimson had fame, two wives, a few years of good money, and always a willful independence; now, at the age of sixty-seven, although his warm, fleshy nudes still fetch big prices at Christie’s, Jimson himself has descended to the level of a disreputable and beloved vagabond living from hand to mouth, or more literally from hand to gaol, because of his irrepressible habit of shoplifting, of pilfering any valuable small objects that come within his reach. He has just finished a six-month sentence as this story begins, and is on his way back to the leaky little boathouse on the bank of the Thames where he left his last canvas and brushes before the bobby picked him up.

Jimson hasn’t finished or sold a painting in fifteen years, but his spirit is undaunted. Everything he sees reminds him of a new subject, and particularly of a large-scale design for an Expulsion from Eden, a composition which changes its color and form in accordance with his mood. Gulley’s reckless vitality is never curbed by his poverty. He is often wet and miserable, but his quest for a secondhand canvas and some tubes of paint, his love of William Blake, whose poetry is always running through his head, and his need for warmth and drink and affection are every bit as exciting to him now as they were when his pictures were selling and he could have had any woman for a second glance. In his extremity he is cared for by a barmaid, a young art student, the cobbler and the postman, and by a very solemn young biographer, Mr. Alabaster. But what really keeps him afloat is his inner buoyancy, and it is this, his tenacious, temperamental self, which makes the story.

Joyce Cary has succeeded in that most difficult assignment of making the reader see as an artist might — rain as it slants across the Thames, London dawn as Gulley emerges from the flophouse, the lovely remembrance of young Sara (“the real old original fireship”) as she steps from her bath. Here are the pictures, and here is the insatiable desire to paint on old sacks, on secondhand canvas, on blank walls; and here in unexpected corners of the story are the spicy jibes at art books and art schools, the mockery of art dealers and of innocent art patrons, the whole illuminated scene flowing out of the laughing rapscallion mind of Gulley Jimson.

It was the example of Van Wyck Brooks which first encouraged Louise Hall Tharp to follow up the career of The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Little, Brown, $4.00). Mrs. Tharp is a New Englander: ancestors of hers had been pilloried at Salem, and Salem as a place and a past flicked her imagination. While her children were in college she gained confidence in the writing of her books for children; then in her maturity she began her study of those three girls who were the talk of Boston and the North Shore one hundred years ago.

They were the daughters of Dr. Peabody of Salem, a middling doctor and a better than middling dentist who dabbled in mesmerism and whose bank balance was never sufficient for his demanding children. Elizabeth was the oldest —a strong-willed, demonstrative optimist “with that glowing faith in the future which made her at the same time so lovable and so exasperating.” She was a hard worker with a mind men liked to work with. Dr. Channing tested out his sermons on her when she was his secretary. Bronson Alcott used her as a sounding board and his most magnetic instructor (though he never paid her) in that school of his which finally horrified Boston. And Horace Mann after the death of his wife turned to her for consolation though not for her love.

Mary, the second daughter, was a one-man woman, more self-effacing than Elizabeth, but no less determined in her love of Horace Mann, whom she eventually married and followed to Antioch. Sophia, the most charming, the most feminine, the most gifted of the three, had the grit to develop her very real talent for painting and the charm and sensitivity to prove an admirable wife for Hawthorne.

In style and technique the book is a blend, and a very good one, of letters and diaries and Mrs. Tharp’s reanimation of the past. In its scenes, in its conversation, in its detailed knowledge of the background, it is an invigorating, honestly recaptured chronicle. These people mattered largely in their day, and we enjoy that day and feel their vitality in this leisurely and attractive book.