The Peripatetic Reviewer

OUR small cottage on the shore north of Boston is overshadowed by oak and beeeh, three acres of woods seemingly as remote as a camp in Maine. The windows of my workroom carry the eye south and west into green glades where the boles of the trees are splotched and whitened by the shafts of sunlight. Here in quiet I do my reading and, when troubled, my reflecting about the Atlantic’s policy.

Here, less than five years ago, I wrote an editorial entitled “The Open Heart,”in which I gave a few instances of that magnificent unanimity which drew us together after Pearl Harbor. I ended it with these words: “We are speaking of the open heart. I don’t say this is the way to live, this anguish, this uprooting, this cry of return. I say that while we had to we lived with the open heart — and with a sympathy for others that makes us a groat people. See that in our hurry to renew our privacy we do not close that heart too soon.”

Now it seems we are all heading for trouble again. For the past fortnight my eyes have winced at the too familiar photographs of the first wounded, the infantry caught up in retreat as they were at Château-Thierry and Bataan, the transports pulling out as the wives watched. For the third time and so soon. I look til my fifteen-year-old with that inexpressible dread of every parent, and I ask myself, “Did it have to be this way?”

The test in Korea came just as Washington was recovering from the violence and infamy of the McCarthy attack. As James Reston said, “It has made the nation see how it must live in order to survive.” I believe Stalin’s Intelligence has small concept of the potential of this people when aroused. I believe the time has come when we must live with ourselves again instead of in divided camps.

But there are aspects of the McCarthy terror which we had better remember, things we should be ashamed to do again, things we must do better.

1. Hereafter let us avoid Assassination by Guesswork. When McCarthy, behind his Senatorial immunity, called Owen Latlimore “the top Russian espionage agent in the United States,” he was doing just that : he was assassinating a man’s character by guesswork. That is, I think, the most infamous abuse of Senatorial immunity I can remember.

The charge was baseless, as the Senator soon discovered, but the infamy spread to those who believe what they read in the headlines. “Look at him,” said the man next to me in the smoking car as he pointed to Lattimore’s picture, “he looks just like a Communist! ”

Owen Lattimore has worked hard to procure the knowledge he possesses of China and of those remote borderlands between China and Russia, He grew up as a boy in China and so learned to speak the tongue. In his twenties he followed the ancient caravan routes across Mongolia and into Turkestan, and his first two books, The Desert Road to Turkestan and High Tartary, were written with an understanding of the Chinese people and with a knowledge of their past and present which established a new high in Sino-Amcrican scholarship.

Throughout his career, he has believed in the Open Door policy for China. In the early 1940s it was his hope, as it was that of many Americans, that the country could be unified under Chiang Kai-shek. Last January in the Atlantic he wrote: “The Kuomintang, under the increasingly jealous and narrow leadership of Chiang, put up the worst possible defense of a cause that was originally good and should have won.” He could not fail to detect the increasing corruption in Nationalist China; in this he was not alone— ask any American who flew the Hump. The dangers resulting from this corruption he was one of the first to report, and report accurately. He also reported the growing power of the Communists in the Northwest. We accuse the Politburo of telling Stalin only what Stalin wants to hear. It seems to me infuriating that Americans should try to make Mr. Lattimore the scapegoat because he told the unwelcome truth.

2. The Non-Retracting Press. When McCarthy made his accusation, the press in Boston splashed Lattimore’s name in big type on the front page. But only the Christian Science Monitor thought it important to mention Lattimore by name when, in July, the Subcommittee exonerated him in a report; the others didn’t even bother to print the news that he had been given a clean bill of health in the Minority Report of Senator Lodge. I think this is a poor showing in a country which prides itself on fair play. Lattimore has been a target of evil slander, and the country deserves to hear of his vindication. The Washington Post, which followed the hearings day by day with scrupulous checking of detail, set an admirable example, and in the aftermath the New York Times gave a very fair resume of the Committee reports. Arthur Krock in his column for July 11 paid Lattimore a fine tribute for the authority and correctness of his views on Korea; and in the later analysis by the Times of the Commit tee report, the exoneration of Lattimore, Jessup, and Service was quoted at length. But of how many other metropolitan dailies was this true.?

3. The Reliability of ex-Communists. I should like to see us judge American character by the old standards, not by the twisted testimony of renegade Communists. The discipline of the Comniunist Party is not conducive to truthtelling. Louis lindenz joined the C.P. at the age of forty-four, and worked for it for ten years, He had a new book which was in proof at the time he was asked to lustify against Lattimore, and galley proofs of the book had actually been distributed to some reviewers. One critic went through the text painstakingly to see if there was any reference to Lattimore. ’There was not a word, which I take to be the clearest indication in a book of many accusations that Budenz had not thought of accusing Baltimore of anything when he wrote his text. But alter Budenz had been called to the witness stand, the two performances had to gee, and so his publisher allowed him to insert on page 265 the statement that “Owen J. Baltimore" server! as adviser to Vice-President Henry Wallace and to our government on Chinese affairs. The statement is inaccurate even as to Owen’s name, but what is worse, it is immoral. This belated, sly addition is what one would expect of an informer, but not what one would expect of the publisher of Budenz’s book, who must share with hint the blame for the immoral editing.

I agree with Senator Lodge when he says that we must arrive at a fairer, nonpartisan method of testing loyally, and I also agree with him when he points to the Amerasia case as one which smells to high heaven, and which must be given an airing. I agree with Senator Margaret Chase Smith when she rebuked McCarthy for having unloosed “ The Four Horsemen of Calumny —Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”I agree that we must have stronger leadership. Blit we must also have a stronger following: we must learn to live with ourselves again. We have it in us to he a great people. If our destiny is big, so are our responsibilities.

The Married looks by Robert Nathan (Knopf, $2.50) is t the nearest thing he has written to his exquisite Portrait of Jennie and in its way quite as haunting a short novel. This is the story of Edward, a California scientist, head of his own laboratory, who looked up one morning from his microscopic study of the mutations of the fruit fly to realize that somewhere along the last twenty years he had lost the look of his wife’s young face. He was just as faithful to Ruth as ever and she to him. She cooked what he liked, bought his clothes, and helped him to keep his wilder notions in order— so she had been doing for twenty years; and yet somehow Edward had forgotten the young girl with whom he had fallen in love, and his life turned gray as a result. Since love abhors a vacuum,it isn’t long before Edward is looking elsewhere, and what he finds in Clementine is at once a mystery and a familiar which threaten on l he serenity of his scholarly, well-controlled existence.

Clementine when Edward first saw her was a honey-colored girl in an old-fashioned but becoming dress of light sprigged muslin. She lived in a little roofed-over wagon with white and red sides, which followed the vagaries of her father, who was prospecting for oil. She keeps turning up she and her wagon&emdashat the oddest times, and it isn’t long before Edward is cutting his regular appointments with Shepperd, the astronomer, in order to have a lazy swim with Clemntine. Edward is not built for the double life: his only way out of the dilemma is to bring Ruth and Clementine together and that is the story made piquant and poetic in Mr. Nathan’s prose.

Mr. Nathan is a master of the double meaning, and his scientist, whether lonely or infatuated, has a way of thinking which is a delight. “It takes two to keep things; you can’t keep them all alone by yourself,” he thinks to himself when Ruth is remote. And again, “We look at the world through the lens of our own spirits. If the spirits are high, we see good in everything; if low, the world appears to us as a ball of mud. And my spirits had been low for a week.”Such are the touches of skill and speculation in this love story.

White If itch Doctor (Westminster Press, $3.00) is the slory of an American woman missionary in the Congo. The author, Louise A. Stinetorf, poses the hook as a novel, but it could pass just as easily as an autobiography which from first to last rings true. The woman in the story, Ellen Burton, is in her fortieth year when the chronicle begins, a robust farm woman of missionary stock who was not free to follow her bent until after her parents’ death. The spirit was strong in her; and despite the Board’s protest that she was long past the right age for a foreign appointment, she did the necessary stint at the hospital, and when she could write “ R.N.” after her name set sail for Africa loaded down with eastoff equipment and the gifts which each new missionary lakes along to Africa. The book really begins with her arrival at Leopoldville where she meets Dr. Early, the mission head, a blunt veteran openly skeptical as to her ability to stand the pace and resentful of evidence that she has a small independent income. His own salary after decades in the field was $300 a year.

Sister Ellen, whose face and figure bear no resemblance whatever To the glamorous young creature on the book jacket, takes hold of her new life with fear and resolution. She has her good moments, as when, in her first talk to the people at Tani, she seizes desperately on that old saying, “It is better to light a candle — a torch, I mean — than to curse the darkness,” and her bad ones, as when, on her first night in the compound, a python loops itself over the corner of her muslin bed net. She gradually conquers her fear of the snakes and the leopards and the scorpions. She stands up to Dr. Early and to the Belgian administrators for the things she believes must be done. She takes to heart the advice given her by Dr. Mary: “So, you think you’re only a nurse! Well, let me tell you, Ellen, in Africa, this far from any white man’s town, you’re whatever the occasion demands — or you’re nothing at all!” In her more than twenty years of service Sister Ellen becomes the trusted mama of the natives whose passage from place to place is telegraphed ahead by the beat of the jungle drums. She does what she can to ease the births and the deaths; she learns how to deal with the chiefs and the Council of Old Men; and when at last the time comes for her to turn home to the Midwest she feels that she is being uprooted. An articulate chronicle, rugged, valiant, and true.

Marion Crawford, nickname “Crawfie,” was for seventeen years responsible for the education— and happiness — of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Her devotion to them was reciprocated, and out of it has come The Little Princesses Harcourt, Brace, $3.50). Crawfie writes with discretion and without pretense, and the details are pleasantly revealing. We see the youngsters with their fondness for “Li’l Abner” and “Dr. Dolittle.” Wo see Lilibet’s rebellion against French verbs when she routed the French teacher by turning the inkwell upside down over her own head. We see their holiday trip into the Underground when their detective was the only one of the party the passengers spotted. We see that Margaret is the more humorous of the girls, and are given the quotation of hers which Barrie put in his play and for which she received the royalty of a penny every time the line was spoken. We find that Bobo, the maid, makes the best fudge in the royal household, the one delicacy the girls are “a little uneager to hand around.” We suffer through the strenuosity of the Coronation, at the end of which Queen Elizabeth commented, “We aren’t supposed to be human,” and we follow with quick interest that very human love story between Prince Philip and the queen-to-be.