The Peripatetic Reviewer

IT WOULD be well,” wrote Charles Dickens a hundred and ten years ago, “for the American people as a whole, if they loved the Real less, and the Ideal somewhat more. It would be well, if there were greater encouragement to lightness of heart and gaiety, and a wider cultivation of what is beautiful, without being eminently and directly useful. . . . They certainly are not a humorous people, and their temperament always impressed me as being of a dull and gloomy character.”

With the first and more philosophic half of this comment I have no quarrel, but that any observer of human nature, so long experienced as Dickens, could have gone so far wrong in his judgment of our humor and temperament I can only explain by the assumption that he understood neither our belun ior nor our language. Few English writers have been able to cope with the American idiom, and their efforts to reproduce it show how often they have missed the point; this is true even of observers as sympathetic as John Galsworthy. Alistair Cooke, the American correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, is a happy exception: he does speak our language, and in the fifteen years he has lived among us his Friday evening broadcasts, short wave to BBC, have given Britons a fair and witty account of the American character. After the war he went cheerfully to work on a new nonpolitical series, and thirty-two of the best of these have now been reshaped and published as essays in One Man’s America (Knopf, $3.50). He writes about things that are apt to puzzle Europeans, people rather than politics, and the passions, manners, and flavors of our various regions — an effort to explain to “poor relations the foibles of the rich uncle across the seas.”

It is to Mr. Cooke s great credit that he does not go for those subjects so easy to caricature — subjects which amuse (and flatter) the English: Chicago gangsters, Hollywood queens, and Texas brag. He touches the bizarre when he writes of a sweaty Negro night club in Baltimore the night Joe Louis became champion, and this leads him to comment on the quiet modesty with which Joe has conducted his career. He writes of Willie Howard to recapture a great comedian and to remind us all of how hypersensitive we have become about the Jew — and even Jewish jokes — since Hitler. He quotes what Will Rogers said to the Prince of Wales and then a few of the sally things he said to us (“A holding company is the people you give your money to while you’re being searched”; “Statesmen think they make history; but history makes itself and drags the statesmen along”). He writes about the surrender at Appomattox, a San Diego tattooist, and Damon Runyon; about autumn in New England, an express in the New York subway (six miles in seven minutes), and the shop talk in Washington, because they helped him to understand the Cnited States and he thinks they may help British households to do so, too.

Mr. Cooke has not attempted to penetrate in depth our policy and institutions as did those two great Frenchmen, Alexis de Tocqueville and Raoul de Roussy do Sales; rather, it has been his aim to give a sane, vivid, and appreciative account of nature in America — human, that is.

Howard Spring has found the title for his new and capacious novel, The Houses in Between (Harper, $3.05), in the words of the old Music Hall song, “ You on could see the Cryslal Palace if it wasn’t for the houses in between.” The opening of the Crystal Palace in 1351 —at which Victoria and the Prince Consort presided—was supposed to symbolize a golden age of peace and plenty for England. Present at that opening was a little girl, Sarah Bain borough. She saw the Queen and the incredible, airy beauty of the house of glass. She felt the good will and the exhilaration of the occasion, and then in her long life of ninety-nine years she was to experience the human frailty, the violence, the selfishness, and the warring which stood in the way of Britain’s attaining that crystal ideal, The novel follows the skein of her life; it is told in her words and sympathy, and there are few scenes in it which she could not have witnessed and responded to. Because she lived so long, the story of what she witnessed and enjoyed and grieved over is exceptionally long. The first half—the Victorian half—has all the color and quaintness of history, and perhaps that is why I enjoyed it the more. But the whole is related with such an air of naturalness, for Sarah is a comforting and comfortable person, and with such a plenitude of incident and detail, that I can well believe those readers who love England will stay with it to the close.

Sarah’s father was a smug, successful ironmaster who made his first fortune out of the Crimea and who had no time for his child; and the luckiest thing that happened to her was that her giddy mother fell in love with the somewhat rakish Lord Burnage and was divorced. The penalty of divorce in those days was ostracism, and so Sarah was brought up at Tresant, Lord Burnage’s country place in Cornwall, where she and her half sister, Sally Gaylord, had the freedom of lake and beach, and where they were admirably taught by their governess, Maggie Whale, a charming spinster drawn on the lines of Jane Austen. Tresant and the little fishing village of Port even are dominated by two men— Lord Burnage, with his dash and love of danger, a sinking figure on his horse or at the tiller of the lifesaving boat; and secondly his servant, the half pirate and wholly amorous Captain Eddy Rodda, a giant mariner vulnerable to women and the bottle. For a brief season, the household lives in the bright sun of serenity. Then, in a wild night of high seas and shipwreck, Lord Burnage has his back broken in the attempted rescue. His wife dies in childbirth, and the girls, with the occasional help of Maggie, who has now become a novelist, go their individual ways — Bally to the London slums as a social worker, Sarah to her marriage with Daniel Cndridge, lawyer and politician.

It is no service to author or reader to attempt to trace the family ramifications. Mr. Spring’s inventiveness occasionally leads him astray, and for pages we are closeted with minor and sometimes eccentric characters who contribute little but caricature to an already heavily peopled canvas. Again, the necessity of keeping his threads together at times forces him into coincidence, to accidental meetings, and to consequences which are, to say the least, unlucky. The wars take sons and brothers and husbands almost before we have had time to know them, with the result that only the three women — Sarah, Sally, and Maggie Whale are seen throughout in clear and endearing focus. Sarah is the real achievement of the book, and a lovely and perceptive woman she is -witty, generous, and unafraid. She has the quiet tenacity of English women, and Mr. Spring has, I think, been remarkably successful in conveying the hazard, the heartache, and the disappointment of a great people in the touching concerns of a single being.

The first time I saw the Irish Players, I remember how taken I was by their unaffected charm; these people seemed to have walked in off the streets and, with their gift of revelation, to have made me a responsive part in their private world. Walter Macken, the novelist and playwright, has the same touch. At the age of seventeen he was acting in the Galway Gaelic Theatre; at twenty he was writing his own plays in Gaelic; and since 1948 he has managed, acted, and written plays for the Abbey Theatre of Dublin, His true ear for the Irish speech, bis intimate knowledge of the peat farmer and fisherfolk, his love of Irish song and laughter, his skill in laying bare the heart — these qualities, which he developed first in the theatre and now in his books, mark him as one of the most gifted storytellers of today.

His novel The Bogman (Macmillan, $3.50) opens with the return of Cahal Kinsella to his native village of Caherlo. Cahal is sixteen, with very black hair (“as black as the back of a bee”) and features and shoulders to turn a woman’s head. Submissive and unaroused as a young bull, he has at last been released by the Industrial School, which for ten years has curbed his spirits. The boy knows he is illegitimate and that his mother has disappeared, but this abasement is forgotten in his first taste of freedom; there are songs in his heart and he puts his own words to them as he heads for his grandfather’s cottage by the river Ree. He finds Barney, the old man, a hard driver and abusive, but the life cannot dull Cahal’s exuberance as long as Bridie is there to cook for them, as long as he has a melodeon to play and the chance to be with Maire, the new girl in the village whom he surprised while she was bathing in the river and whose beauty is his dream.

Cahal is enslaved before he knows it — to Barney, to the older woman he was deluded into marrying, to the harvests which force him deeper in debt, He fights back with his palienl strength, with Ids songs which are repeated from tavern to tavern, and with his longing for Maire. The youth of the book and the scenes in which Cahal’s strong, blithe spirit is challenged are what give the novel its poignancy. The hooley where Maire first tries to rouse him; the day he “lowered” old Barney in full sight of the village; the flood, when he went to the rescue of Jamesey and his father; the unsparing talk with the Canon; the bloody day on the threshing field — Mr. Macken tells it all in Cahal’s words with a lilt and an honesty refreshing to read.

Artist and horse lover, a son of Ireland and a devotee of Virginia, James Reynolds is a writer in whom the springs of enjoyment are now bubbling at the rate of two new books each year. He writes of Irish castles, and of Irish ghosts, an incomparable collection of which he inherited from his lovely grandmother; he is at work on his autobiography, and he has just published his gay-hearted novel, Maeve the Huntress (Farrar, Straus & Young, $3.75), which celebrates the Ireland of the country house, the ballroom, and race week — a rambling, picturesque story continuing the chronicle of the Lassitter family of Connaught and particularly the adventures of Mark and Macve, the twins, who have reached their eighteenth birthday as the story begins. It is a sequel to Mr. Reynolds’s novel, The Grand Wide Way, and here as earlier everyone present is out to have a good time, and has it.

Maeve herself is a rather old-fashioned Spirited Beauty; she makes her debut, shows her horses at Dublin, visits friends in Italy—the account of Venice is heavenly — captivates an eligible Virginian, and eventually becomes chatelaine of Blaney Castle and M.F.H. of the West Galway Hunt. She has many friends and relatives to smooth her way, all well off, and the possessor of horses and castles with charming names; there are balls, routs, pretty clothes, immense delicious meals, fast races, sensational hunts, quaint servants, ghost stories, and superstition. No personalities but lots of characters; no plot but plenty of incident; cleath and fires are soon forgotten, for what counts here is the joie de vivre. Mr. Keynolds’s zest for Irish society is genuine and compelling.

I have a special liking for those autobiographies in which a writer tells of how he approached and mastered his craft. The essays of John Galsworthy, The Summing Up by Somerset Maugham, Henry James’s Notebooks, and the Journal of Katherine Mansfield are at once sources of incentive and measurement for the beginner. To the shelf, I now add So Long to Learn by John Masefield (Macmillan, $2.50), the account of how he struggled through youth and early manhood to become a storyteller, and within its limits a perfect example of the backward glance, so vivid, so modest, and so illuminating. I think of the difficulties he encountered in his rather lonely boyhood; the forbidding Victorian attitude which drove him into his hiding hole—his “tepee” to read and which mocked any notion of his trying to write. I enjoy the liberation which came to him as at last he began to find the great books, and can see how the yarns of the clipper ships, told him by old Wally of the Conway, were seed for his later work. And I feel the breadth of his vision as Masefield speaks of what Yeats did for the poetic drama; as he gives his magnificent appraisal of the Morte d’Arthur and, in his closing passage, sounds his call for the relurn of the British Epic and Fable in their true nobilily.