The Peripatetic Reviewer

WE HAVE enjoyed the magazine in the past year,” wrote in a reader renewing his subscription, “but do your stories always have to be so dismal?” ‟Do they indeed?” I asked myself. “Let’s think that one over. What does the record show?”

The record of what we have published in the past twelvemonth, reinforced by my recollection of the more notable borderline manuscripts which we rejected, makes it undeniably clear that death and violence were the two essential components in the better short stories submitted to the Atlantic. This you would expect of the war stories. But the theme looms up just as dolorously in the stories of civilian life: death by strangling, by lynching, and by drowning — not to mention the less obvious ways. At one editorial meeting I discovered that of the seven short stories we had accepted for our summer schedule, five turned on death and in three of them the main character was drowned. So at that moment we installed a new taboo: for the time being, no more death.

Somerset Maugham is right when he says that defeat is a better theme for fiction than victory. But defeat need not take the form of a lugubrious death; a living death can be made infinitely touching, as in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frame. Defeat is at the heart of Chekhov’s lovely classic, The Darting; yet the innocence, the adaptability, and the loyalty of “the darling” are so skillfully disclosed at each turn of her career that we hardly know whether to laugh or sigh. Defeat can be implacable but so valiant, as in Kipling’s superb trilogy, A Centurion of the Thirtieth, On the Great Wall, and The Winged Hats, that although I have read them six times my flesh began to prickle as once again this summer I heard him sound thegreatness of that lost cause on the Roman Wall in Hritain. Kipling is a master of the sensuous detail, and he really makes you sweat with that legion on its march to the wall; but greater even than this sense of participation is his power to ennoble the lost cause. And that, I think, is something we miss in current fiction.

This infatuation with death is discernible in every magazine which features fiction, and is clearly to be seen in The Prize Stories of P1951, an annual selected and edited by Herschel Brickell (Doubleday, $3.75). This is the thirty-third such volume to be published in honor of O. Henry, and the twenty-four narratives in it are the pick of the crop. Mr. Brickell, assisted by three judges, has singled out a trio of stories for the special O. Henry Awards, and it is the fun of the thing for the reader to pit his favorites against those of the judges. The first of the prize stories, “The Hunters” by Harris Downey, is a war story, powerful but overelaborate in its description. It would, I think, have been belter received in 1946; by now its virtues have been matched or excelled.

Eudora Welty, who wins second money, is, I think, with William Faulkner one of the two best in the country. Her present narrative, “The Burning,” a piteous account of two old maids caught and burned out in Sherman’s March, is full of memorable touches but impeded by stylistic indirection which I am sorry to say makes it very hard to follow. Must a good story be such hard work to read?

For the third prize winner, “The House of Flowers” by Truman Capote, I have nothing but praise. Here is a young writer — he was born in New Orleans in 1924 — with an exciting talent: sure in his characterization and very compelling as he draws you into his situation. His story of a Haitian courtesan and John Hersey’s comedy, “Peggety’s Parcel of Shortcomings,”which originally appeared in the Atlantic, are most enjoyable. I have partisan reasons for being proud of ‟Old Century’s River” by Oliver La Farge and of what seems to me the best of the newcomers, “Black Water Blues” by Monty Culver. But when I come to Jean Stafford’s “A Country Love Story,” so authentic in its anxiety, so hopeless in its intimation of defeat, I wonder, as our subscriber does, if life must be as dismal as this.

John Marquand’s new novel, Melville Goodwin, USA (Little, Brown, $3.75), is a triangle bounded by these three points. The high point, the apex, is that day in October, 1949, when Major General Goodwin, who had just been ordered to Berlin, happens upon what looks like a nasty incident with a Russian patrol. A drunken American private had wandered across the line and been arrested by the Russians. In retaliation the Americans had corralled a Russian sergeant, and there might have been shooting if the General had not walked up to the threatening Russian officer, brushed his Tommy gun aside, and slapped him good-naturedly on the tail. When the Pentagon orders the General home to be interviewed, they call in the radio commentator, Sidney Skelton, who had served with Goodwin briefly as a P.R.O.

The second point of the triangle is that week in February, 1945, when the General, whose Silver Arrow division had been conspicuous in the breakout at Saint-Lê, is roped in to explain the Battle of the Bulge to a visiting circus of American writers and publishers in Paris. Fresh from the front and rather full of himself, the General is a pushover for Dottie Peale, the most predatory and attractive lady present, and Sid Skelton, who has the circus in charge, has to be the discreet go-between in the affair. Those are two points and the third, of course, is General Goodwin’s unknown destination after the notoriety has blown away. What if anything will Dottie do to Mel Goodwin’s service record, and how human is a General supposed to be?

Skelton, who has done very well for himself in radio since the war, invites General and Mrs. Goodwin and the magazine writers to his new place in Connecticut from which the price tags have hardly been removed: the General takes over Savin Hill as his headquarters, and his story is pumped out of him partly in reminiscence, partly in what his wife Muriel confides to Sid, and partly by Sid’s shrewd questioning. Sid’s dry skepticism, a carry-over from his days on the newspaper, helps to keep things under control — especially when Dottie, determined on a reunion, begins telephoning from New York.

The process of opening up Mel Goodwin to see what makes a soldier is one Mr. Marquand enjoys at length. Perhaps at too great length, for I suspect that the tilling in of the background will pall on some readers. The portrait is ironic at the outset when we hear the General spouting the old wheeze about ‟git thar fastest with the mostest men” and how the answer to everything is to estimate a situation and then take action, but the caricature fades and we begin to warm toward Mel as we see him through Muriel’s eyes, The General’s wife is very much of a strategist: ‟Muriel’s never happy unless she’s running something and usually it’s me,” says the General. ‟I ought to be on wheels and then she wouldn’t have to push so hard.” Her candor, matched with that fierce loyalty of a service wife, makes her in many ways the most important and interesting person in the book. In contrast to Mrs. Goodwin, Dottie is simply one of those avaricious, dissatisfied (“Oh God, I wish I’d ever been able to find a man!”) female bandits Mr. Marquand loves to burn.

To try to judge the General is to tell too much of the story. At a time when our civil leaders are thrusting, some say, an immoral amount of responsibility upon our top brass and at a time when the standards at West Point are up for questioning, readers will naturally look into Mel Goodwin, and the system which produced him, for an answer as well as for entertainment.

Those Devils in Baggy Pants (Appleton-CenturyGrofts, $3.00) is the racy, rough-and-tumble, idiomatic story of one battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry as it was written and told by Ross S. Carter, one of the three survivors of his original platoon, to his brother, Professor Boyd G. Carter of the University of Nebraska. Having survived everything the ‟Krautheads” could throw at him in Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany, Ross, who had re-enlisted, went down under an infection in 1947. This is the record, as true as he could remember, of the reckless, tough-fibered, loyal men who died before he did.

The paratroopers were shock troops: they were keyed up for their jumps, which generally landed them behind the enemy’s lines; they were trained to be resourceful and did their most spectacular fighting in small independent groups; they were merciless, expecting no mercy; they were picked lor aggressiveness — not, like the Prussian Guard, for size — and when en repos, they fought each other — or any other available Americans—rather than be bored.

In a document like this the background is sketchy and disconnected. Ross Carter is concerned with the enlisted men, not the officers, and as the platoon is trained and toughened in North Africa and Sicily the individuals in it begin to show their idiosyncrasies and prowess: Big Rodgers, the Golden Gloves champion, who never drank or cursed and who prayed before going into battle; Old Duquesne (he was forty-three), the gray-haired lumberjack, who could really stomp when he got mad; little Finkelstein, the cockiest bantam in the regiment; the Virginian, nicknamed the Arab, who read Homer and broke into epic poetry when the gloom was thickest; the Master Termite, who had dug more foxholes than any man at Bragg; and Berkely, the author’s best friend. At Salerno and in the cruel peak fighting in Italy they outlived a 200 per cent replacement in the company; and then, when they were ordered into the Battle of the Bulge, the sturdy band knew their numbers were up. Only four of the originals came out alive and two of them were wounded.

It is characteristic that six months of civilian life were all that Berkely and the author could abide; then back they went to re-enlist with the paratroopers. It was the only place to wait before the joined the long procession.