Reader's Choice

First novels can be almost anything, including accidents that only a hopeful publisher could love. This month has produced two that are worth notice as accomplished work and interesting reading by any standards. Both THE CROSS OF BARON SAMEDI (Houghton Mifflin, $4.50) by RICHARD DOHRMAN and DENNIS MURPHY’S THE SERGEANT (Viking, $3.50) have military backgrounds and concern the power of evil.

Mr. Dohrman’s book tells a story that is very old, basically very simple, and as sound today as it ever was: a good man’s struggle against the wickedness of the world. Now of course this theme can easily become didactic or saccharin, and the author deserves nothing but praise for the skill with which he has avoided tract and treacle.

The novel is set in Haiti during the brief U.S. occupation of the late twenties, and the hero, Lieutenant Wiley of the Marines, is in charge of a remote hill district where he is supposed to be keeping the peace and putting some starch into the local constabulary. Wiley is a Vermonter with firm notions about his responsibility to his corps, his immediate duty, the prestige of the United States, and his own private version of what constitutes proper conduct. In the confusion of service friendships, voodoo rituals, Haitian politics, and a disastrous marriage, these responsibilities become irreconcilable. Wiley really tries to compromise like a sensible twentieth-century man, but in the final crisis proves as splendidly intransigent as Don Quixote.

With a huge cast of well-presented characters, plus a solidly constructed plot that sweeps together brawls, intrigues, a state ball, and a fulldress voodoo ceremony and keeps them all in perfect order, The Cross of Baron Samedi is as thick with interest as a briar patch with thorns. It is not an easily readable book, however, and this fact is due to Mr. Dohrman’s prose. The author has removed the word “nor” from the English language and has reinstated a number of other words that have roosted in Roget’s Thesaurus for decades, none of them previously missed. When he writes conversation he is direct and idiomatic. When he writes what Lieutenant Wiley is thinking, he begins sentences in the middle and charges off in all directions. If his object is to distinguish the lieutenant’s thoughts from objective events, he certainly succeeds, but the device has the unfortunate side effect of making Wiley seem muddleheaded, a condition which all his actions deny.

The Sergeant is a much shorter and simpler book, describing in unpretentious style the influence of a veteran professional soldier on a boy serving the standard stint in the Army. Sergeant Callan is a dour exhero and a stickler for military correctness. When he arrives at a comfortably sloppy supply depot in France (the time is vaguely the present), the men ticket him at once as a hard case, a poor outlook for everybody. They are quite right. Working by technically legal means, taking sly advantage of each man’s individual weakness, the sergeant quickly has the whole group under his thumb, too cowed to enjoy even the few miserable pleasures available to them. He then takes on the more difficult job of gaining complete moral control of Private Tom Swanson. The sergeant’s appetite for power appears to be insatiable, and is undoubtedly vicious. The fascination of the novel, which all but compels reading at one sitting, is the question of where Callan’s limits lie and what will happen when he reaches them.

As a study of a discreet bully with the law on his side, Sergeant Callan is horridly convincing. He roars like a lion and coos like a dove, grows earnestly paternal and blubbers into fits of misunderstood virtue. No matter what he does, the undercurrent of malice remains unmistakable. His weakness is that he himself does not recognize the motive behind his contemptuous hatred for other men; when it finally comes to the surface he is as startled as anyone.

Young Swanson, a relatively uncomplicated character, is nicely developed within his limitations and makes an entirely suitable foil for Callan. Bright enough to be wary, he is too inexperienced and good humored to resist entirely the sergeant’s attempt to remake him in his own image, while Callan’s psychotic ingenuity converts each conceded inch into an ell. Their struggle develops the eerie ferocity of any good story of demonic possession, and ends with a satisfactory bang.

Mr. Murphy’s control of his characters and his plot wavers only when Swanson is off the post and dealing with his French girl friend. This girl and her family represent the normal world from which the sergeant is trying to lure Swanson, a fair enough scheme, but they are too blatantly angelic to be convincing. They are not a patch on the sergeant for interest. Mr. Murphy can claim distinguished company in his predicament, if it’s any consolation. Milton had much the same trouble. Somehow the devil always gives an author more scope.

In his introduction to THEODORE ROOSEVELT: THE FORMATIVE YEARS (Scribner’s, $10.00), CARLETON PUTNAM diffidently confesses that he undertook a detailed life of Roosevelt because, when he himself wanted to read one, he couldn’t find any. He also admits to a liking for his subject. These are good motives for any biographer and they have caused Mr. Putnam to turn out an admirable first volume.

To anybody whose memory doesn’t reach behind the 1914 war, Teddy Roosevelt is likely to be identified as the man who made noises about a big stick or, even worse, as the bugler in Arsenic and Old Lace. The enthusiasm that he aroused in his own time remains a mystery. It is this failure of comprehension that Mr. Putnam has set out to correct by showing how the world looked to a man of Roosevelt’s generation and how Roosevelt looked to his contemporaries.

The method is perfectly sound and has clearly required an immense amount of digging. Mr. Putnam has had access to a number of unpublished papers and diaries and has made good use of them. Bit by bit he builds up a picture of the Roosevelt family, of the conscientious elder Theodore and of his wife, a Southern beauty whose peppery, amusing, affectionate chatter crackles out of letters a hundred years old. Largely by adroit use of anecdote and quotation, Mr. Putnam makes it clear that the Victorian insistence on moral correctness, financial honesty, good manners, and church attendance had no element of hypocrisy in the Roosevelt tribe. These people believed in their way of life and were proud of it. Because they were proud of it, it must have been much less burdensome than later generations imagine. No more burdensome, probably, than a faith in psychiatry or Cadillacs.

Since Mr. Putnam wishes to show Roosevelt in his own time and place, he makes no attempt to re-pose him to fit a later landscape. There is no speculation about repressions or subconscious desires. The author acknowledges that the general sickliness of all the Roosevelt children may have had a psychosomatic cast, which is a generous concession in view of his description of New York City at the time. With sewage stagnating in the gutters and unfortunate immigrants packed into the slums like eggs in a crate, the wonder is not that children were sick but that the population didn’t die off wholesale.

Despite his distress over Roosevelt’s habit of describing every girl he liked as pretty and sweet, Mr. Putnam makes a charming story of the young man’s courtship, which was very romantic and late Victorian on the one hand, and quite modern on the other; he wore out a dog cart and reduced a horse to sheer bone. The marriage was idyllic but short. At twenty-five, Roosevelt was called home from the Albany legislature to find both his wife and his mother dying. His grief at his father’s death had been intense and prolonged. It is not entirely unreasonable that he never spoke of the dead bride again, even to their daughter.

The final chapters of the volume cover Roosevelt’s growing influence in politics, his interest in reform, his scuffle with Blaine, and the start of his lifelong love affair with the vanishing frontier. The description of his try at cattle raising in Dakota is excellent. Roosevelt naturally was present only at intervals, but his absence does not deter Mr. Putnam from a thorough account of the terrible winter that froze out the cattle business on the Little Missouri. As the author points out: “Hermann Hagedorn summed up the situation well in verse . . .

That wind blew Roosevelt out of ranching.

By the end of the book, Mr. Putnam has created a decided feeling of personality. His Roosevelt is, at twenty-eight, a rather formidable, decidedly likable young man, perhaps a little too sure of his world but still agreeably flexible about what he intends to do in it, and above all, real, a state of things that neither affection nor research guarantees in a biography.

5 PENS IN HAND (Doubleday, $4.50) is a collection of ROBERT GRAVES’S essays, stories, and recent poems, a sort of pudding which, prodded anywhere in its 360 pages, will obligingly disgorge a plum. The essay material includes some further remarks about The White Goddess; a splendid recipe for discovering what a poet is really about, with Milton, to whom Mr. Graves will never become resigned, serving as guinea pig; disrespectful but well-founded notes on entrenched scholarship; speculations on mythology; literary reminiscences, crisp and lively; and a few book reviews of permanent interest.

The stories are labeled “mostly funny,” and they are. They are designed in a manner that is no longer officially fashionable, being based on compact situations worked out in action with an unexpected flip at the end. The danger of the form is that the reader will detect the flip before it comes. Mr. Graves rolls his narrative along at such a clip and disposes his red herrings so beguilingly that detection never catches him. The tale of the worthy couple who become obsessed with making compost heaps that they cannot bring themselves to degrade by use is a fine bit of deadpan lunacy, and all the stories, with their speed, neat construction, and witty prose, fill me with a desperate nostalgia for the days when short stories were expected to be short.

The poems which round out the collection are a mixture of light and serious. Mr. Graves adheres sternly in his own poetry to the principles of grammatical logic and lucidity in which he finds Milton so wanting. It is a system which, in less expert hands, might lead to ossification, but Mr. Graves’s verse grows continually more easy and resourceful. All the poems are elegant, and the best of them glitter with the light that never was on land or sea.

I WANTED TO WRITE A POEM (Beacon Press, $3.95) by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS is a curious little book, subtitled TIIE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE WORKS OF A POET. Miss Edith Heal, the editor, conceived the idea of a bibliography of the works of Dr. Williams, each title to be followed by whatever comment the poet chose to make, and brought the list together in a series of conversations with him.

What Dr. Williams has to say about his books is various and unexpected. Sometimes he merely recalls publishing details; sometimes he explains what he was trying to do or how he intended to do this but did that instead; sometimes he goes off into memories of what else was happening in his life at the same time. There is little about the technique of writing but a strong impression of the energy and devotion that underlay the process.

The early section of the book is the most rewarding, for there Dr. Williams describes his amazed discovery of poetry and his first attempts to write it. It began as a secret pet, but in college he started to take it out for airings. “This was my Keats period. Everything I wrote was bad Keats.” He knew Hilda Doolittle, then a freshman at Bryn Mawr, and eventually roused his courage to show her a poem. “It was an ode, after Keats T presume, on of all things the skunk cabbage.” Miss Doolittle’s response fortunately was not fatal.

THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR (Holt, $3.95) is another of those all but unbelievable spy stories that have been popping up ever since World War II. This one seems more fictional than most because ALEXANDER KLEIN, in writing it, has chosen to handle the affair as if it were a novel, providing conversation lavishly and making no distinction between what he has invented and what he has on the direct authority of the people involved. From a scholarly point of view, it’s a deplorable method, but it docs produce a rattling talc.

The spy in question was — still is — an oilman named Eric Erickson, born in the United States but for some years a citizen of Sweden and conducting his business there. At the start of the war, the United States ambassador to Sweden persuaded Erickson to try to use his business connections to collect information on the synthetic oil industry in Germany. This took some doing, for Erickson had first to establish himself as a reliable Nazi sympathizer, a masquerade that alienated most of his Swedish friends. Even so, the Germans were suspicious and it was not until Erickson recruited Prince Carl Bernadotte as a confederate that he contrived to get into Germany.

Once the game was under way, Erickson succeeded in poking about on ostensible oil-buying expeditions and in enlisting helpers inside the German oil industry. The information he brought back to Stockholm hung around in the Allied files for months, but eventually enabled them to bomb the daylights out of German oil and cause disastrous difficulties for all German military machinery. In the final months of the war, when there was no German oil available for Erickson to buy, he, his wife, and Prince Carl confected a truly fine hoax. They advanced a scheme for building a synthetic oil plant in Sweden to help supply Germany, and Erickson managed one last survey around the Reich to study how the mythical Swedish plant should be set up.

On the whole, The Counterfeit Traitor is a story of slow, careful planning which paid off, and of steady suspense but little outright violence. At one point, Erickson had to scamper over German ruins in pursuit of a small boy who had bolted with a dangerous document, and on another occasion he knifed an inconvenient witness in a telephone booth. At least, Mr. Klein claims he did and describes the scene in nerve-racking detail.

It is probably unreasonable to complain of any account that gives due credit to a man who performed valuable service to this country at the risk of his life and the loss, fortunately temporary, of his friends, and who took no pay for his trouble, hut there is something about the tone of Mr. Klein’s telling that makes the whole story seem faintly shabby. Mr. Klein too often gives the impression that truth is not quite good enough.

In 13 DAYS TO GLORY (McGrawHill, $3.95), LON TINKLE, book editor of the Dallas News and a professor at Southern Methodist University, retells the story of the siege and fall of the Alamo. The first few pages do not do the book justice, Professor Tinkle having yielded to the temptation to invent a journalistic opening which history neglected to provide, but once this hurdle is out of the way, it’s a good piece of work.

With the stage set, the couriers off for reinforcements, the Texans installed in the old mission, and Santa Anna’s troops settling down for the siege, Professor Tinkle gives the history of the principal figures on the Texan side. Part of the Alamo’s epic character is certainly due to the quality of the men who died there: Crockett, the extravagant humorist; the ambitious young hothead, Travis, who turned out to be as good a commander as he thought he was; and James Bowie, the old eagle, who never lost a fight or started one. Professor Tinkle does well by them and also explains the events that led up to the Texan rising against the Mexican government. It’s a complicated undertaking, but by clever interweaving of past and present, he manages to get in the background without obscuring the battle, and even to elucidate the political squabbles and military bungling that prevented any relief from reaching the besieged.

The Alamo was held because the Texans supposed it would be disastrous to abandon San Antonio to the Mexicans; yet the Alamo was lost, the garrison killed to the last man, and in a matter of weeks the victorious Santa Anna bumbled into Sam Houston’s trap at San Jacinto and was chewed to bits. But possibly the Texans would not have won such a victory at San Jacinto without the war cry of “Remember the Alamo!”

THE GREAT DAYS (Sagamore Press, $4.50), the latest novel by JOHN Dos PASSOS, is a disappointment. Mr. Dos Passos habitually views almost everything with disapproval and in the past has produced some persuasive support for his position, but this book is no more than a querulous wail that men grow old and Utopia does not arrive.

Specifically, The Great Days is the story of Roland Lancaster, one of those immensely powerful and popular foreign correspondents who seem so much commoner in fiction than in fact, now down on his luck, out of a job, and trying to enjoy a fling in Havana with a redheaded girl. The girl is the sort of neurotic baggage who raises immediate doubts about her companion’s good sense, and nothing Mr. Dos Passos has to tell about Lancaster’s previous life dispels the suspicion that the man just isn’t very bright.

Whenever the going gets rough with the redhead, Lancaster takes to reciting his autobiography to himself, and by the end of the book he has skimmed over thirty years of history. (Difficult, that girl.) He has indeed had a hard time. His sons (whom he has neglected) have turned out poorly. His wife (whom he could not have loved so much, presumably, had he not loved travel more) is dead. His friends are, and always have been, brutes or slobs or drunks or all three at once. He has suffered the immense agony of reporting, uninjured, the Pacific war and the Nuremburg trials, and still nothing turns out right. It would be a terrible indictment if Lancaster were a convincing representative of Americans in general, but the fellow is too dreary, too humorless, too fantastically adept at making the worst of every situation to be anyone but himself. The case is not helped by Mr. Dos Passos’s prose, which sets one foot ahead of the other with all the grace of Frankenstein’s monster.

THE WORLD OF EVELYN WAUGH (Little, Brown, $6.00), selected and edited by CHARLES ROLO, the Atlantic’s regular reviewer, has recently been published.