The Peripatetic Reviewer

IT WAS an outsize suitcase of black patent leather, reinforccd by wide pigskin straps, a piece of luggage designed for the railway age when porters were always available. It had been given to us for a wedding present, and when well filled was almost too heavy for my wife to lift. We used it only on festive occasions; we were newlyweds beginning life in Boston, but on Christmas Eve we went home to visit our families in Manhattan and New Jersey, and the Big Bag went with us, carrying our presents down and our loot back when the holidays were over. That delectable loot of the 1920s — silk stockings and a rose and ivory teagown sheath by Mme. Jeanne, Charvet tics, soft chamois gloves, monogrammed handkerchiefs of Irish linen — all in reams of tissue paper with somewhere a lilac sachet. And since this was in Prohibition, there would be an underlayer of bottles, the gift of our brother-in-law, a Canadian magnate who brought down on his private car from Montreal such nectar as The House of Lords and Black and White. So loaded, the Big Bag needed a porter with a truck.

The first time I chaperoned my wife and the Big Bag back from New York we had a compartment on the Owl. She was expecting, and the family had insisted that we take a room to ourselves. As we were stowed aboard, it was evident from his breath and loquaciousness that the Pullman porter had been celebrating Christmas as much as we. “Yes, sir; yes, sir,” he beamed at me. “Sure won’t call you till five minutes after we’ve left Providence!" Then he faded away into sweet oblivion, and actually no one in the entire car was called until we roared into Back Bay. We pleaded with the conductor for more time, but there was no help for it, and while we were still dressing, the train backed out of South Station on its way to the Dover Street yards. I remember the abashed porter helping us down into the gray cold, my wife in her sealskin with hatbox and handbag, the long stretch of cinders leading to the trolley — and that bag with its dead weight. Without the help of a kind stranger we could never have made it.

Forty minutes later we were back at the South Station Under. 1 tugged the black monster onto the Escalator, stepped ahead of it, and motioned my wife to stand behind. Since I was facing front, I did not sec the bag respond to the law of gravity; as we neared the top it silently gathered momentum, caught her under the knees, and together they coasted down into a wedge of commuters at the bottom. Of course I should not have smiled; our exchange, when we were at last installed in the taxi, made it clear that this was not my day.

In time the Big Bag endeared itself to our little daughter, standing as it did for summer trips to Long Point and winter visits to West 53rd Street. There was a game she and her mother used to play with it on rainy days. The bag would be placed on its side in the living room, the straps unbuckled, and when the tray was removed, Sara, who was about as wide as she was tall, would fit herself into the suitcase; tissue paper would be spread over her, the lid fastened and strapped, and the bag stood upright. My wife would leave the room and on her return would exclaim, “I wonder what’s become of Sara? Where can she be? Sara!” Giggles from within. “Sara!” More giggles, and the bag began to rock. “I wonder if there could be anything in that bag.” Slow business of undoing the straps, and then as the lid flew up, “Good gracious! There’s a little girl inside!” . . , Over and over and over again.

In her third spring the redheaded elevator boy in our apartment had a special attraction for Sara, and I suppose it was inevitable that she and her mother should decide to surprise him with the Bag. Sara was laid away with the tissue, and when the suitcase was securely strapped, my wife lugged it out into the hall and rang the buzzer.

The door slid open and there stood a new elevator man at the controls, with th-e car full of strangers. Red’s day off.

“Would you be good enough to bring us up some firewood,” said my wife, playing by ear.

But not quite quick enough. The passengers were staring at the suitcase, which had begun to rock. Sara, sensing something wrong, was whimpering, “Let me out! Let me out!”

Silently my wife placed the bag on its side, unlatched it, undid the straps, and as the lid flew up, it must have been habit that made her cry, “Good gracious, there’s a little girl inside!”

No comment from the passengers. The door slammed and the elevator disappeared.

RUMER GODDEN is an English novelist who works in a short compass and whose glowing sentences remind me of Katherine Mansfield. In her recent books, The River, which was laid in India, and An Episode of Sparrows, with its sentiments about a London slum, Miss Goddcn has woven her plot about children; she does so now in her more substantial, most delightful new narrative, THE GREENGAGE SUMMER (Viking, $3.50). This is a story of what happens to a family of five English children who are thrown on their own resources in a little town on the Marne. They are individualists, and when their mother is carted off to the hospital with a dangerously infected leg, they band together against the indignities and mystifications of the French innkeepers. Not since High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes have I encountered youngsters with such loyalty to one another and such ingenuity in dealing with the adult world.

Joss, so nicknamed because of her ivory skin and almond eyes, is the eldest and at sixteen already half woman. We see her as we see the others, through the eyes of the second sister, Cecil, who is the storyteller; ranging down are Hester, who always speaks what the others are thinking, and the Littles: Vicky, who has eyes only for the chef, and Willmouse, who at the age of eight is a Dior in miniature. Dressed alike in their school clothes and without a penny among them once their mother has departed, they compose a rather stubborn problem for Mme. Corbet and Mile. Zizi, the proprietors of Les Oeillets. The little inn with its famous restaurant is a busy place, with the British and American tourists pausing on their way to the battlefields, pausing to stare at the bullet holes in the stairway, the blood stain on the floor (carefully renewed with liver by Paul, the refugee), and the skull which is dug up periodically from the garden by Rex and Rita, the big dogs. The problem for the French staff is to keep the children away from the tourists, and this is perfectly agreeable to the clan, who are stuffed to bursting by the chef, who sit up to all hours, and who miss not a bit of the personal inlrigur.

Their persecutor is the mercenary Mme. Corbel, who keeps the accounts, and when she is at her worst, they take refuge with Eliot, the tall immaculate Englishman. Everyone knows that he is the lover of Mile. Zizi, but everyone does not know how he makes his money in Paris. Eliot stands as their protector, and they pay him their love in return, even when it becomes clear that he is taking more than a paternal interest in Joss. Eliot, indeed, leads a charmed life, and it is the children who discover his secret long before their elders.

This story is the adventure of a month, and a hot French August at that. Cecil, who writes ii down, has the sharp sense of a gardener, and the lovely scenes in the book come to us in the green and gold of Van Gogh. The picnics in the orchard or on the banks of the Marne, the early morning readying of the kitchen, with the succulent viands and the shiny copper, the heavenly drive with Eliot through the forest of Compiegne — this French exposure so different from their conventional existence in Southstone is vivified by “the cocoon of excitement into which we spun ourselves.” The phrasing is perhaps at times a shade too precocious, but the reaction to this green and gold life and to the darker mystery within is very truly that of a wise and spirited child.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was published in 1943. Now, fifteen years and four million copies later, BETTY SMITH has again returned to Brooklyn for the location of her new book, MAGGIE-NOW (Harper, $4,00). It is the not unfamiliar story of the Irish who immigrated to this shore in the 1890s and who moved no further west than the Brooklyn tenements; of the Irish policemen, grooms, and street cleaners who were shepherded by the ward boss and the parish priest and who made just enough headway to give their children a better chance of being American.

The first fifteen chapters give us the background of Maggie-Now’s parents: Pat, her father — the former groom, now a street cleaner — once a pretty boy but now embittered by his early losses; and Mary, the mother — older than her husband, plain looking and plain speaking — who has never ventured beyond Brooklyn, who finds in the Church the consolation for her meager life at home. So far this is Irish stew, plain, boiled fare, tasting exactly as you’d expect.

Maggie-Now is more sympathetic; she is wholesome and buxom; and although her life is confined to the care of her infant brother, Dennie (young enough to be mistaken for her son), and the tedium of housework, she is determined to break free, and she does so after her chance meeting with Claude, the wandering salesman who charms her (though not always the reader) with his fancy talk. Claude is a self-educated vagabond whose wanderlust pulls him away from winter ties with the coming of each spring, and the crux of the story is whether Maggie-Now, with her homely loyalties and unshakable faith, can possibly manage to meet him halfway and to hold him for long. Maggie-Now’s integrity is a quiet gleam in the humdrum oi her Brooklyn life, and her literalness, the fact that she hasn’t a spark of humor, is a handicap to her understanding of Claude. The author uses an obvious device to point up their divergencies by printing their unexpressed thoughts in italics. Maggie-Now has character; “whenever her speech sounded frishy, he [her fathcrl knew it was a sign that she was going to lose her temper.” Claude is more devious; he is not at home with Irish ways — indeed, he is not at home at all after April — and in his elusiveness he proves not only a weakling but unbelievable.

“Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man,” said Carlyle, “but for one man who can stand prosperity, there arc a hundred that Will stand adversity.” To the first volume of his life of THACKERAY (McGraw-Hill, $7.00), GORDON N. RAY appended the subtitle, THE USES OF ADVERSITY, and in those early speculative years we saw young Thackeray in Paris and in Cambridge; we saw his checked and indulgent education; we saw his passion for gambling and how he lost most of his patrimony before he was thirty; and when the money was gone, we saw his most desperate gamble of all, his marriage to Isabella Shawe, who was as penniless as he and who, a victim of puerperal fever, tried to drown herself in the fifth year of their marriage. She was committed to an asylum, and thereafter the satirist had to go it alone, struggling for the support of his infant daughters and for the recognition, whether as artist or writer, which seemed always beyond reach.

With the publication in parts of Vanity Fair, which began in 1846, Thackeray came into his own, and it is at this point that Mr. Ray begins the second and concluding volume of his capacious and understanding life, THACKERAY: THE AGE OF WISDOM (McGraw-Hill $8.00). “London society in 1847, so Sir William Fraser relates, ‘consisted of from 300 to 500 persons; not more. ... A single new face added to this circle would be observed. Everyone knew everyone else; at least by sight.’ ”

This was the final period of aristocratic predominance in English life, and it was Thackeray’s good fortune, as Mr. Ray says, to be admitted to the inner circle; he hugely enjoyed the dinners, receptions, and house parties where he soon became a familiar figure, and the experience mellowed his satirical powers. Very much a man of the world, he was more than ever aware of the foibles and hypocrisy of his London; what troubled him were the taboos, the fact that “The world does not tolerate now such satire as that of Hogarth and Fielding. . . . The same vice exists, only we don’t speak about it; the same things are done, but we don’t call them by their names.” Thackeray ventured closer to the line than any of his contemporaries, and his readers knew it. But it irked him that he had to convey the shadow rather than the substance.

For two decades, save for his war service in the Navy, Mr. Ray has been thinking, editing, and living Thackeray. He is beyond question the greatest living authority on his subject, and one of the most entertaining on Victorian England, and it is not the least of his gifts that he can show us his hero, with his aspirations, his affections, his angers, and his failings, in such a cordial natural prose. From such a vast book each reader will take away his particular pleasures. Mine arc in watching Thackeray’s ever-maturing relations with his daughters, Anny and Minny; the ins and outs of his emotional friendship with Mrs. Brookfield; the rivalry with Dickens, in which Thackeray was constantly under the attack of the Dickens gang, led by John Forster; the discipline with which he prepared himself for his highly successful lectures; the visits to America, and his flirtation with Sally Baxter; his editorship of Cornhill; and most of all, the steady development of this “Horace in London,” with his genius for fusing the elements of his own experience into the great chronicles of his era.