The Peripatetic Reviewer

JUNE is the month when more Americans emote than at any other time of year. I do not refer to June brides and grooms, though of course they help to swell the total: I mean the more elderly gentlemen in blue suits who, having achieved prestige and a fortune, are invited to address the Commencements of our schools and colleges. Since these men of distinction have almost never disciplined themselves to speak in public, they rise to the occasion by reading a script prepared for them by their public relations counsel, and under the strain they emote.

When I graduated from school wc were emoted to by Mr. Clarence Mackay, in striped pants and cutaway. He began by likening us to “little ships sailing forth upon the sea of life,” and having launched out on this original simile he couldn’t stop. “Some of you under full sail will ride the Seven Seas like the clipper ships of old: some of you will luff and he left in the doldrums far astern; some, not heeding the warning of lighthouse and bell buoy, will pile up on the Reef of Norman’s Woo: some of you will jibe and yaw" — on and on until our parents were yawning and we Seniors wore sick of the whole business.

Another figure of speech overworked at Commencements is that of “Climbing the Mountain. , . . Getting to the top slowly ... at last the Great View, the Broad Horizon, the Promised Land. . . . This is not the End but the Beginning.” Graduating classes, being dressed and subdued for this kind of thing, are much too polite to give such performances the raspberry. They know that any humor will he unpremeditated and any truth a lucky gleam. They conceal their boredom by not looking at the speaker and by fidgeting quitetly.

Any humor will be unpremeditated. I recall a school commencement where the leading Seniors had been encouraged, a few of them, to speak parts which they had written. One of them, a cousin in whom I was interested, chose for his subject, “The Sewerage System of New York City,” and w hen bis turn came he rose, cleared his throat, and suffered a dreadful pause, It wasevident that he had forgotten, his beginning, and m desperation he reached for the nearest line ‘’And so, he said solemnly, “all the dishwater, all the hath water, and all the rain water of New York City Hows down to the East River, never to return again.” That was all of his speech be could remember; he repeated it three times, and brought down the house. But parents seldom have a I real like that.

Too often the day is roasting hot, the collapsible chairs unyielding, and the oratory tedious. Rarely does the unexpected happen. It occurred at Southborough when the old Rector of Groton, Mr. Peabody, the first of several visiting dignitaries, let fly for thirty minutes at Divorce, He gave it both barrels, and since a good many in that fashionable audience had changed partners at least once, this was a ease where the parents were squirming quite as noticeably as the Seniors.

Back in 1939 when I was invited to do my first radio program, I turned to Alexander Woolleott for adv ice. “ Aleck,” I said, “N.B.C. wants me to do a half-hour program on Tuesday evening. What do you think?” “I can’t imagine why any network would be fool enough to ask you,” he said, “but since they have, surely you won’t be fool enough to refuse?” “All right,”I said, “but is there any handbook to tell me what to do?" “No,” he said, “there isn’t. Every man learns for himself. There are just two pieces of advice I can give you. Dictate your talks, so that you can hear the sound of them. Never write them. Secondly, avoid consonants as if they were a rattlesnake. The s’s and ch’s will blur the moment your throat is dry. I so short words with plenty of vowels. Radio is speaking; and in speaking, the vowels have a bile and a music no one can miss.”

These truths are just as applicable to a Commencement speaker, He should rehearse his remarks aloud to a critical listener before he tries them in public, He should remember that the classic prescription for any speaker is to begin lightly. I have seen a famous banker win his audience in twenty seconds by confessing at the outset that he too bad a dreadful time passing his math. The great Commencement addresses, the talks that are really remembered, are candid, a blend of humor and experience, and evoke a feeling that the speaker is dedicated to something bigger than personal success. When I say this I think of Lewis Perry, the former headmaster of Exeter; of J. Edgar Park, the former president of Wheaton; of Vivian Pomeroy, the Unitarian minister of Milton; of George F. Kennan, formerly of the State Department; and of Thornton Wilder, whose talk at the Commencement of 1951 was one of the most luminous in Harvard’s history. Commencement addresses should be good, brief, and to the point this year, especially in the men’s colleges, where 90 per cent of the Seniors will be going straight into uniform.

The Man Whistler by Hesketh Pearson (Harper, $5.75) is a witty and perceptive book alive with the color and conflict which James McNeill Whistler imparted to almost everything he did. It is attractively printed and a delight to read, the format such as the artist himself would have enjoyed and the illustrations pointing up the high moments in his career.

The wit is Whistler’s own, spontaneous, with rapier thrusts, laughable or cruel. His sallies made him one of the most spectacular of the Victorians; and in this book his wit comes to us not as epigrams under glass but as the natural result of a pro vocal i ve event — the table talk at one of Jimmy’s famous breakfasts, or the exchange at the opening of an exhibition, or the retort to insufferable criticism.

In his perception of Whistler as man and artist, Mr. Pearson, the biographer, has himself achieved a succession of portraits. We first see Jimmy as an American boy without roots: his father was a West Pointer, an engineer who resigned from ihc Army and went to St. Petersburg to build roads for the Czar, and who died there at the age of forty-eight. The widow with her two sons drifted through Europe and eventually hack to Pomfret, Connecticut, where the boys went to school. At the age of seventeen Jimmy entered West Point, the head of which was then Colonel Robert E. Lee. The cadets called him “Curly" because of his thick black hair; he was full of fun, good at cooking, a failure in chomislry, and insubordinate, and they bounced him in June of 1854. He was head of his drawing class at the Point. After attempting to make him an engineer, it gradually dawned on his mother that he was an artist or nothing.

Whistler’s student years in Paris, the dimmest phase of his career, marked him as a gamecock — lit’ was five feet four — audacious, always in debt, a born talker, and a spry man with the girls, It was not until he turned to London in the late fifties that he began to make a name for himself: there his etchings of the Thames and his paintings of Jo, his Irish model and mistress, with her lovely red-gold hair, brought him to the attention of the Royal Academy. For ten years Jo acted as his housekeeper, caring for his natural son (not hers), selling his pictures. keeping his creditors at bay; and she only left his roof lo make way for bis mother, who came to live with him at the outbreak of the Civil War.

It was Whistler who introduced to England the decorative qualities of Japanese painting and who, working through his association with Rossetti and C. A. Howell, developed the craze for Chinese porcelains and Japanese prints, for pastel shades, and for the “greenery-yallery” tints which W. S. Gilbert made fun of in Patience. Whistler’s white rooms and his famous “blue and white" porcelain wore laughed at and thought to be as eccentric as his portraits, which he insisted on calling Nocturnes. The critics encouraged the public to laugh. Whistler hit back and so began the feud which was to occupy him to the end of his life — a feud which led to his famous libel suit against Buskin, embittered friendship after friendship, and eventually exiled him from the place he held most dear.

Mr. Pearson makes a deft reference to Whistler’s “permanent black eye . . , he always felt that other people were trying to hit him"; he shows how Jimmy’s sensitivity increased until he “lived in a constant itch of irritation whenever he was not lost in his work.” He perceives Jimmy’s aversion to reality in art, and traces it to the loneliness of an artist who had disowned the place of bis birth.

I feel there is authority in his interpretation of Whistler’s painting, and in the sketched profiles of those who touched Jimmy’s life: the friendly impostor, C. A. Howell; Frederick Layland, the wealthy shipowner and the subject of one of the greatest portraits; the Greaves brothers, the boatmen who became Whistler’s assistants; Ruskin, the antagonist; Jo, and Maud, and Mrs. Whistler. “I have hardly a warm personal enemy left,”said Whistler at the close of his life, but what warmth, gaiety, adoration, and anger he consumed before he reached that isolation!

The Boyds of Black River by Walter D. Edmonds (Dodd, Mead, $3.00) is a refreshing chronicle out of the past, a series of related stories about the black Boyds of upstate New York who trained trotting horses for the Grand Circuit, went shooting or fishing according to the season, and relished the family feuds, the country meals, and the Kentucky bourbon which was ready to hand in their sprawling house on the hank of the Black River Canal.

We see the Boyds through the eyes of Teddy Armond, a nephew of the family. Teddy is hotly loyal, quick to defend the clan against slur or stranger, essentially modest, and with the fresh senses of a boy of twelve. Big things are happening lo him for the first time, and because he is plucky and straight as a string the elders admit him by degrees to their confidence and shared experience. Teddy’s hero worship of Doone Boyd, the lean, black-haired young bachelor, his unbounded admiration of Doone’s handling of Blue Dandy, who is to prove the champion of the stable; his protective affection for Kathy O’Chelrie, the New York actress who comes to visit and who stays to marry Doone; Teddy’s pride in Leonidas, his beautiful white bull terrier, the best fighter in the county — these are the leads to a pleasurable book, of a serene and innocent age when Americans could live unto themselves and did so with gusto.

Take Three Tenses, A Candle for St. Jude, and The River, the novels of Rumer Godden I like best, are each of them a guidebook to an emotional experience — the first in wartime London, the second in a ballet studio, and the third in India. Miss Godden does her writing with a rich palette; like Kipling, she spent her most impressionable years in India and is happiest when depicting the conflict and color of that baffling place.

Sophie Barrington Ward, the heroine of her new book, Kingfishers Catch Fire (A iking, $3.00), is an English widow, an attractive romant ic who with the best intentions succeeds in doing almost everything wrong. She and her husband were living precariously in Kashmir when, on his sudden death, she was left with a desk full of debts, a minute pension, and the drafty security of a houseboat in Srinagar. As the winter comes on she is pulled down by typhoid and pneumonia, and with her young daughter Teresa and her small son Moo she is carted off to the English Mission. On her convalescence, had Sophie been sensible she would have thrown in the sponge, returning to England to the care of her aunts and the protestations of her old suitor Toby. But Sophie is a fool, impulsive and improvident. While still unsteady on her feet she takes a five-year lease on Dhilkusha, a remote summer house on the mountain: here she and the children will live “as peasants,” cultivating the garden and dealing generously and intuitively with the Hindu and Mohammedan villagers who, though she seems not to notice it, are as predacious as hawks.

Teresa sees trouble coming and tries to block her mother with hard little impacts of truth, but Sophie is having too much fun decorating her new home and purchasing little extravagances from Profit David, the rug merchant. She won’t even heed the sharper warnings of Nubir, the caretaker, and the only real man on her side. Misgivings proliferate, her baby is stolen by the herd children, and Sophie is fed some of her own herb medicine, not to her advantage.

It is a tribute to Miss Godden’s skill that we can follow the escapades of such a ninny with the feeling that all this is inevitable and true to life. The natives; Sultan, the houseboy; Pundit Pramatha Kaul, the wise landlord; Profit David, and Nabir are wonderfully well drawn. Indeed, it is they who carry the story - they and the beauty of Kashmir.