Reader's Choice

THE American Abroad — the subject of a long line of novels stretching from The Marble Faun to The Ambassadors and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is now the subject of two more: World So Wide (Random House, $3.00), the last book completed by Sinclair Lewis before his death, and The Nice American (Creative Age, $3.00), a first novel by Gerald Sykes.

Messrs. Lewis and Sykes are dealing with an area of American experience in which there have been significant changes since Henry James’s day, and particularly since the Second World War. “Mr. James’s simple miss,”writes Lewis, “has become the young lady at the Ritz Bar, and his young suitor, apologetic for having been reared in the rustic innocence of Harvard instead of the Byzantine courtliness of . . . Oxford, has been replaced by the American flying Major, who ... is used to being courted as the new Milord.”This apt observation of Lewis’s, which might serve as a preface to Gerald Sykes’s novel, is scarcely reflected in his own. Though World So Wide is set in 1950, I had the impression of being back in the era of George Babbitt and Sam I Jodsworth.

Lewis’s hero, Havdon Chart, a successful architect of Newlife, Colorndo, is a product of babbittry, but with deviationist tendencies. At thirtyfive he feels deeply dissatisfied with the philistinism of his home town, and, when his wife is killed in a motor accident, he decides to go abroad to find out how “to be a self-respecting human being, and even learn to read.” He settles down in a pensione in Florence; zealously devotes himself to imbibing culture; and quickly falls in love with a young lady Professor from Winnemao. U.S.A., a ha uglily, oliveskinned beauty, with “the looks of a Latin Principessa" and a stern dedication to dry-as-dust research.

No sooner has Haydon’s humble courtship softened ihis improbable creature than complications arise in the form of a wildly improbable charlatan, Lorenzo Lundsgard, Ph.D. This Lorenzo is a Hollywood actor turned college professor overnight; now, with imposing backing, he is gathering material for a movie and a lecture campaign that will “sell” Culture to the American masses, and along with Culture a strong dose of authoritarian ideas. A hectic climax is precipitated by the arrival of Rocanna Eldritch, a girl reporter for the Newlife Evening Telescope, who, though she realizes that “there is something great” for Americans in Europe, ralher enjoys behaving like Mark Twain’s bumptious rustic abroad. Roxanna brings home to Haydon that his heart and talents belong to Newlife. But Europe has given him the enrichment he was seeking, and he is able to go home fortified against Newlife’s materialism. The Innocent has been “civilized” without losing his American virtue.

It is disagreeable to speak tartly of the last work of a novelist such as Sinclair Lewis, but I cannot do otherwise without hypocrisy. World So Wide seems to me an egregiously ingenuous story. It has a certain amount of bounce and is moderately amusing in part, but as a whole it is unconvincing and embarrassingly earnest about what have long been portentous commonplaces — a comedy belonging to another era and datelined 1950.

Today, the story of the decent boob seeking a smattering of cultural grace amid the pitfalls of European snobbery seems a stale joke in the folklore of tourism. The traditional drama of American “innocence” and European “experience,” in its most pertinent contemporary context, is the story of men such as Gerald Sykes’s far-from-innoeent Colonel Childress, one of the new Milords; it is a drama of inexperience in the face of stunning new responsibilities. What the “Innocent” has to learn, Mr. Sykes perceives, is “to be imperial" without being imperialist. And whereas a gentle cultural workout may suffice a Haydon Chart as a specific against babbittry, Harlan Childress understands that the new situation of the American calls for a tough, farreaching struggle for maturity.

This struggle is reflected in the intellectual questionings and the emotional problems of Sykes’s “nice American” in the Algiers of 1945. Mr. Sykes is a keen thinker and a mature man, and his book has many good things in it — suggestive reflections; crisp observation; a wonderful account of a trip through the Kasbah; an original, subtly shaded characterization of a reactionary Senator. But The Nice American falls short of being impressive as a work of fiction. The action and most of the characters show signs of being too deliberately fashioned and manipulated to illustrate a body of ideas.

The war has caused Harlan Childress to think searchingly about his country’s values and his personal aims, and he has been deeply influenced by three men: an aging Moslem, a British Intelligence Officer, and a Frenchman who has survived Buchenwald. Childress’s immediate dilemma, on the eve of his return to civilian life, is whether to marry the fine-grained, aristocratic Frenchwoman who has been his mistress, or to attempt a fresh start with his exwife, Mollie, a high-powered, glamorous career girl, now in the American Red Cross, whose success-mania previously wrecked their marriage. A further uncertainty is whether he should go back to engineering or throw up security and indulge his passion for photography.

Though “right” enough symbolically, the windup has the flavor of a boy-gets-hard-to-get-girl climax in the slicks. In fictionalizing his ideas, Mr. Sykes, far from giving them greater density, has sometimes thinned them down into clichés. I must add, however, that I found The Nice American more interesting than a good many more successfully executed novels. Mr, Sykes really has something worth while to say.

The Americans in Finistère (Farrar, Straus and Young, $3.00), a novel by Fritz Peters, are also abroad, but in this case their being Americans abroad is not the issue: the story has to do with the effects of divorce on a sensitive adolescent. Every schoolboy has heard, nowadays, that the wages of divorce is neurosis, where sensitive adolescents are involved; and every reviewer has learned that this is an ideal subject for a depressing little essay in amateur depth-psychology disguised as a depressing little novel. But Mr. Peters, I feel, has wrested a pretty creditable work of fiction from the emotional turmoil of the wounded adolescent. It is not, to my mind, as original or as powerful a book as the author’s first novel, The World Next Door, the story of a patient in a veterans’ hospital. But it is further evidence that Mr. Peters is a solidly talented writer. (The secondary characters here, in particular, are very skillfully portrayed.)

The mainspring of Finisière is the loneliness, the hunger for companionship and burning need to love, of a fifteen-year-old boy, the son of divorced parents. Matthew Cameron’s mother settles in France after the breakup of her marriage and sends Matthew to a French school. Shortly afterward, she marries a saturnine Frenchman, whom Matthew does not get along with. Catherine herself, a rich, attractive woman of the world, tries to do the right things for her son, but she has not the emotional capacity to understand his feelings.

Matthew is deeply wounded when his one great friend in Paris, an older American, becomes engaged and has little time to spend with him. Back at school, he semiconsciously tries to drown himself. He is rescued and treated with affection by the games instructor, Michel Garnier, a man of thirty who has struggled unsuccessfully with homosexuality; and Matthew falls desperately in love with him. This homosexual love affair — to Matthew, innocent, idealistic, and ecstatically satisfying; on the part of Garnier, guilty, apprehensive, but wildly passionate — is the core of Mr. Peters’s novel. Matthew, wholly absorbed in the strange experience of happiness, is childishly heedless of Garnier’s warnings that in the eyes of the world their love is ugly and perverted; and the story moves forward, with the sense of a trap closing, toward inevitable tragedy. Mr. Peters has handled a difficult theme with dignity, persuasive insight, and compassion.

The vagaries of love of the orthodox kind are brought under the microscope in a short novel by Alberto Moravia, Conjugal Love (Farrar, Straus and Young, $2.50), translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson. Moravia’s two previous works have won him a sizable following and a good deal of critical praise. His special forte, to my mind, is his adult, handling of sexuality in all its aspects, a talent which is relatively rare among Anglo-Saxon writers, however copiously or candidly they may write about sex. There is a vibrant awareness in Moravia’s fiction of the erotic element in life — something of the sex-consciousness of D. H. Lawrence minus Lawrence’s sex-mysticism. Moravia’s powerful sensuality is altogether spontaneous and forthright, free of any taint, of staginess; and his shrewd insight into the psychology of sex never sounds like clinical analysis.

The narrator of Conjugal Love is a wealthy, slightly fatuous dilettante, Silvio Baldeschi, whose life has been restless and ineffectual until his fairly recent marriage, which has proved profoundly satisfying. Baldeschi has long cherished a belief in his creative powers, and now he has the strength of purpose to apply himself to writing a masterpiece. He soon perceives, however, that what he is writing is commonplace, and concludes that a period of continence might give his inspiration more chance to express itself. Moravia, leads him in due course to a recognition of his painful lack of talent and the detection of his wife in a shocking infidelity. But the discovery of the devil in his wife’s flesh and the collapse of his own pretensions bring an understanding of truths which give a deeper substance to their “conjugal love.”

There is no hint of Pollyanna in the way Moravia handles all this. Out of an episode which might easily have made no more than a sardonic anecdote à la Maugham, Moravia has fashioned a masterly study of the relations between a husband and a wife.

To pass from the mental climate of Moravia to that of William Saroyan is to regress from the Institute for Advanced Study to the kindergarten. Mr. Saroyan once produced some fine fiction inspired by the notion that life is beautiful provided you are a bum, a drunk, a prostitute, a child, a dotard, an unpublished poet, or an Armenian. Saroyan has not exactly turned traitor to this credo, but he seems to have made the distressing discovery that there is slightly more to life than was dreamed of in his philosophy. In his last book of stories, he tried his hand, rather gloomily , at what he called “the tough stuff" the kind of tale in which life is not all a bowl of stuffed vine leaves and arak: and he does so again in his new novel, Rock Wagram (Doubleday, $3.00). While it represents a laudable attempt to deal with the tragic, Rock Wagram strengthens my conviction that there is no other novelist in the same echelon of Talent as Saroyan who can pack so much silliness between the covers of a book.

The story has to do with an Armenian bartender of Fresno, California, who becomes a movie star; marries a girl, half his age, who appears to consider that heaven is the Stork Club; divorces her, after they have had two children, because she is a liar; and then resolutely goes to pieces, longing for a wife, kids, a vineyard, and Armenian companionship. I confess to being exasperated, perhaps beyond reason, by Saroyan’s chronic cuteness and his now melancholy, earnest-sounding mindlessness. Readers who do not suffer from this allergy may well find a certain poignancy in his new novel.

The life of a professional economist sounds like a thoroughly unpromising subject for a biographer. But the late John Maynard Keynes, besides being the most commanding and controversial figure in contemporary economics, was an altogether remarkable personality; his career, from his schooldays on, is the story of a man endowed with stunning intellectual powers who did everything he turned his hand to with spectacular brilliance, and who also had a genius for friendship and enjoyment of living. Lord Keynes, who died in 1946, is now the subject of a long biography by an Oxford don, Roy Harrod, whose lectures on Keynesian economics I attended as an undergraduate. Mr. Harrod is one of the leading British economists generally in sympathy with Keynes’s viewpoint: Keynes regularly sought and respected his criticism.

The Life of John Maynard Keynes (Harcourt, Brace, $7.50), while it contains too much economics to be easy reading, is both an admirable personal history and a trenchant study of Keynes’s doctrine, far-reaching influence, and concrete achievement. The economic fundamentalists who hold that there is one god, laissezfaire, and that Adam Smith is the true prophet, have absurdly misrepresented Keynes as a “socialistic” theorist, hell-bent on destroying the capitalist system. In point of fact, though he advocated government planning to level out the cycle of boom and depression, Keynes strongly favored the private enterprise system and was strongly critical of much in the economic policies of the Socialist Government.

It is impossible to sum up in a review Keynes’s immense contribution to the economic thought and practice of our time. Mr. Harrod places him in the same class as the two greatest architects of economics, Adam Smith and Ricardo.

Keynes became a professional economist almost by accident. At Eton he studied the classics and read medieval Latin poetry as a hobby. At Cambridge he specialized in mathematics and philosophy - later he published a notable Treatise on Probability. He would, in fact, have become a philosopher had not the dean of Cambridge economists, Alfred Marshall, impressed by the few undergraduate essays Keynes wrote in economics, persuaded him to accept a lectureship in this field.

During the First World War, Keynes, still in his early thirties, was responsible for conducting the whole of Britain’s external finances. His famous indictment of the economic provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, closed the door to an official career. Between wars, he taught at Cambridge; was an editor and prolific journalist; wrote his two big books on economic theory; served as Chairman of the Board of an insurance company and as an investment counselor in the City; and, starting from scratch, he made a fortune of some two million dollars by audacious speculation on the stock exchange. I wonder how many of the newspaper critics who have attacked Keynes as a typical “theorist.” intoxicated with abstract ideas, know that for some twentyyears he displayed the same kind of wizardry in the market place as a Bernard Baruch.

Keynes’s close friends were mostly artists — members of the “Bloomsbury Group” such as Lytton Strachey — and he himself married a prima ballerina of the Diaghilev company. He liked to entertain, and at one of his parties executed a creditable cancan with his wife. He was a generous patron of the theater, a discerning collector of modern painting, a bibliophile who read his First Editions, and a fine prose stylist. During the Second World War, Keynes played a leading role in the conferences which established the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank; and he was the chief spokesman of the British team which negotiated the post-war American loan, Harrod considers Keynes to have been one of England’s greatest speakers. On one occasion the stubborn Mr. Bevin, refusing to be persuaded by Keynes, paid a witty tribute to Keynes’s persuasiveness: “When 1 hear Lord Keynes talking,” said Bevin, “I seem to hear those coins jingling in my pocket; but I am not so sure they are really there.”

Keynes’s friend, Bertrand Russell, winner of t he 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, calls his latest book Unpopular Essays (Simon & Schuster, $2.50), because some reviewers complained that his last book was loo “difficult” for a popularization, and in the present volume “there are several sentences . . . which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling.”Those essays (two of which have appeared in the Atlantic) display, in concentrated form, Bussell’s characteristic qualities — the wit. crispness, and lucidity of Ids prose; the vigor of his intellect, the grace with which he wears his erudition; and. above all, his undeviating rationalism. The binding concern is “to combat in one way or another, the growth of dogmatism, which has hitherto characterized our tragic century.”Anyone who shares this concern will, l am prettysure, get a good deal of pleasure out of Russell’s book; for my part I found it a delight.

Lord Russell is one of the great virtuosi in the salutary art of debunking; but he holds that mere skepticism is itself a form of dogmatism, certain of not knowing, and he suggests that wisdom lies in learning to endure uncertainty. Russell’s assaults on dogmatism lead him to consider, among other tilings, the way man’s selfimportance has shaped certain theological beliefs; the “ulterior motives” xjf the great philosophers; the fallacy of the popular maxim, “Human nature cannot be changed.” 1 cannot recall an essay which so neatly punctures so many of the superstitions of Homo soi-disant sapiens as “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish.” Here, to suggest the scope of Russell’s volume, are some of the other topics he discusses: “Philosophy and Politics”; “The Functions of a Teacher”; “Eminent Men I Have Known”; “The Future of Mankind.”