ABINGDON lies seven miles south of Oxford, and the last time that I had taken this road was in July of 1943. On that sunny afternoon, I remember that the air had been heavy with the sound of bombers being tuned up by the mechanics for the evening take-off. The farms I passed had been converted into an endless relay of airfields. The metal strips ran through the standing wheat; and the control tower commanded, among other things, the geese and chickens of the near-by farmyard. As our bus passed the entrance to the fields, we were waved at by the ground crews, and the two robinbreasted farm girls at the window in front of me got the familiar American wolf call.
On that summer’s day in the war, I had come from Air Marshal Harris’s headquarters, where I had been one of a party of three editors to whom the Bull, as he was nicknamed, had shown the results of the recent raids. Here were the huge photographs, before and after, brought back by the reconnaissance planes; we heard the persuasive British argument for area bombing, and we also heard for the first time the tribute to Lord Trenchard. “It was he who saw further than any of us,” said the Bull. “He got us our appropriations, small though they were, and it was he, more than any other man, who was responsible for having our Hurricanes and Spitfires in production in that desperate year after Munich.” Those were the thoughts I had in mind as I took the bus from Oxford to see John Masefield.
That was seven years ago, and now my hired car was taking me past the same farms on my way to Abingdon. I noticed a landing field that had gone back to seed. The Nissen huts had been taken over by a squatter colony — married veterans, many of them, who couldn’t find houses in overcrowded Oxford; the washing was out and the children were playing where the ground crews used to sweat it out. Further along I saw a hangar which had been converted into a showroom for McCormick tractors. But the biggest field of all, closest to Abingdon, was still in the possession of the Fleet Air Arm; the planes with their wings folded like grasshoppers were parked in the hangars as they would be on a carrier, and others were being tuned up. It was a big installation and the jet planes here would have made Bull Harris’s mouth water, I thought, could he have had them in 1943.
Again I walked down the flint driveway with the rooks circling and scoffing at me overhead. Again, now as then, it was the poet himself who came to greet me at the door. As Mrs. Masefield poured us tea, our talk turned to the Spanish galleon— one of the Armenda — which had been sunk off the island of Mull and which divers from the Admiralty were now trying to salvage from the mud, the fierce currents, and the depths. “They have got her free of the mud,” said Masefield, “and if they can manage that tricky current, I think they will have her up. Here is a piece of her they sent me.”
We examined the chunk, the size of a man’s palm, and with my finger I traced the fan of the grain. “Oak?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I think more likely Spanish walnut. They might have had us, you know,” he continued reflectively. “With that strong wind at their back the Armada was actually at the gates of Plymouth before we could do anything about it. The wind was so strong and so dead against us that our ships could not get out of harbor. They really had us at their mercy, and had they come in then as some of the younger captains wanted, there’d have been more Spanish blood in the South of England today.
But the Spanish Admiral had none of Nelson’s audacity, He had no heart for this command, he didn’t really want it. Also, he was under orders to pick up the Duke of Parma and load aboard his army, which was waiting on the French coast. Those Spanish ships wore huge floating forts, and they were fought by soldiers. While he was doing this the wind began to shift in our favor and so our ships got out. People forget what a daring innovator Hawkins was. When it was known that the Spanish were building the Armada, Hawkins went to the Queen with plans for smaller, swifter ships. Oh, he checked with Raleigh and the other great captains, he knew what he was doing, and here was the big innovation: this big British fleet was to be manned and fought entirely by sailors. He believed that they could work the guns faster and make an allowance for the roll, and would be much more deadly in their broadsides. And so it worked out.
ˮAs the Spanish came lumbering on, beating up against the wind, it was the British ships that had the speed and the wind at their back. The Spanish ships, towering and pitching, fired right over us, and so Hawkins drove them away or sunk them just as the Hurricanes and Spitfires were to drive away those bombers of Göring’s. The Spaniards had not come provisioned for adversity; and as they were driven off course by our ships and the mounting storm, they ran out of food, they suffered from thirst, and they went down on the rocky coast.”
“How many did they lose?” I asked.
“About a hundred and fifty ships, I seem to remember— a hundred and fifty out of the two hundred that started. About fifty of them to our gunfire, and a hundred to shipwreck and disaster.
“When they brought the news to Philip he was shocked with grief, for one of his dearest friends —and he hadn’t many — had gone down with his ship. Then, as he recovered, he said slowly, ‘It is a proof of God’s favor that I have the power to build a second Armada.’ But of course he didn’t. And of those few who straggled back, many never recovered. It was humiliation quite as much as their long exposure. One of the Admirals who returned went straight to bed, would neither eat nor drink, but turned his face to the wall, and there he died.”
Such was the story that little chunk of walnut called out of the poet. His cheeks flushed as he told it. Listening, I forgot that only shortly before he had been in a nursing home. He gave me to see it as if he had been there on the deck.
The taming of Ohio
With The Town (Knopf, $3.50) Conrad Richter brings to a triumphant conclusion the story of an American pioneer family and of what happened to it in its transition from a lonely, fearful outpost in the deep Ohio woods of the 1780s to the relative security of the civilization in a sunlit town in the first half of the nineteenth century. “My purpose,”he wrote me early in his research, “was to start with an early American woods character who knows only a rude hunter’s cabin, and to take her, together with the great region in which she lives, from wilderness to cultivated fields to town, where in the end she dies, a leading citizen, and one who has seen all the historic changes.” This story he has brought to us in a trilogy; The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and now The Town can be enjoyed singly, still more if read in sequence. Together they compose a novel which in style, character, and authenticity ranks beside The Time of Man by Elizabeth Madox Roberts.
Sayward Luckett is the leading woman of the story. We see her first in the gloom of the hunter’s cabin, the oldest daughter and most dependable child of Worth, the pioneer, and his ailing wife. Because her mother is so ill Sayward has to do for the young ones, and after Worth’s desertion it was she alone who held the family together. So she was old before her time, but not unattractive, and in a mood of rebellion she reaches out for the man she wants, Portius Wheeler, an intelligent, not very well adjusted young lawyer from the Bay State, who was trying to bach it alone in a near-by clearing. They are a good team — Portius longheaded and knowledgeable, Sayward instinctive, resourceful, and so wise in her handling of people. It is the tale of their life as the trees come down and the land opens up, and of the doings of their children, which fills The Town.
The story is told in an idiom in keeping with the past. The words have a primitive strength and an imagery that come from the direct contact with nature. Much of the story comes to us through Sayward’s eyes, and in the last half — in The Town — what she doesn’t see is relayed to us by her youngest son, Chancey, puny, held back by his rheumatic heart, imaginative and hypersensitive in his guarded interior life. Together they are the well-contrasted interpreters of the great changes that were taking place: Sayward, the hardy rooted mother, the early settler who held on to her acres, who used her blood and determination to build the town, and Chancey, slow to find his strength, sage and intuitive in his judgment of his elders, the petted peacemaker in his family and, when grown, the editor who struggled to keep the peace and to moderate the violence of live abolitionists. It is these two who give us the sense of real participation in the past. When we see Sayward calm down Portius who has come home drunk and bitter over losing the judgeship; or ride with Chancey, a helpless stray, on the great muscle of the bridge as it sweeps before the flood, or share his delight in the “long blue sea wave of the pigeons” he saw in Fowler’s Grove — in scenes such as these our imagination makes us young again and we feel that we are seeing the American countryside and people as Audubon saw them.
Just knocking around town
The Circle of the Day (Simon and Schuster, $3.00) is Helen Howe’s third novel and by my score her cleverest and best thus far. In design it has the tidiness of a one-act play; ihe setting is Manhattan, and the story opens at the sunny breakfast table in the Millets’ apartment on East 57th Street. This is Faith’s and Eric’s tenth wedding anniversary, and after the presents have been unwrapped and Fay, their eight-year-old daughter, reluctantly packed off to school, Eric, the thirtysix-year-old president of one of the most important concert managements in the city, leaves for his office, and Faith settles back in bed to skim the Times and to plan what she shall do within the circle of her day, making ready for their theater party in the evening. But the hours are more eventful than usual.
A gossip tips her off to a new danger that has come to town in the person of Cherry, the English actress who was Eric’s mistress before their marriage. The gossip admits to having seen Eric in Gramercy Park playing with a golden-haired fouryear-old, “and, my dear, the resemblance between them was out of this world.” While still rocking from this punch. Faith, now at the manicurist’s, is advised by the worldly Mona Stevens what her counterattack should be. Still staggering she attends a meeting of a women’s club where the lecturer is a worm, and from there it is just a short step to Cartier’s, where she is having her anniversary present, a gold cigarette case, initialed and where, on what now must be proving to be a thirsty day, she bumps into her old flame Freddy, the lover she might have married instead of Eric, who promptly takes her out to the most appropriate bar, where they exchange autobiographies over a quart of champagne. From this point on the reader must go it alone.
Miss Howe is a skilled monologuist and her gift of satire and mimicry show to good effect in the descriptions of the women she does not like. But in this story she has made a genuine, and at times successful, effort to get inside those characters whom she wants you to like. Faith’s emotional upset comes too early in the day and too early in the book for us to feel it with anything more than a superficial response. We simply accept it as the first of a series of complications involving two nice people who will, we hope, go to bed happily when the story is over. I think they do.
I am making ready for my annual trip to the North woods and shall take with me The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00), the fourth volume of essays to be published after Virginia Woolf’s death. Here is her exquisite blend of biography, interpretation, and criticism; here is the appraisal which refreshes your understanding of Oliver Goldsmith, of White s Selborne, of the novels of Hardy, Turgenev, and Conrad; here is the portrait of her father, Leslie Slephen - so charged with affection, yet so clear and objective in its line. Here is the calling back to life of the little governess Selina Trimmer, and of Parson Woodforde who kept his diary for fortythree years. “As we read — if reading is the word for it — we seem to be listening to someone who is murmuring over the events of the day to himself in the quiet space which precedes sleep.”Here are longer essays — one on reading, one on reviewing— which are tonic for the tired mind.