The Peripatetic Reviewer

ONE enters the Soviet Union, as I feel sure our Russian visitors enter New York, with certain convictions, preconceived in the Cold War, which one expects to have confirmed, and then, after the encounters and contentions, after the personal exchanges and the spontaneous acts of kindness, we each return with what I am sure must be a mixture of surprising and disturbing reflections. I cannot attempt to assess what the Russians take home; it is enough if I can sort out my own impressions.

I had no idea of how hurt Russia was in the war. This shows itself in so many ways. One can see the pockmarks, and in the back streets, the shell holes inflicted on Leningrad, where one building in every three was hit, and one can see the cripples who were wounded in its two-year siege; what one can only guess at is the number of those who perished there from malnutrition and tuberculosis. “Where were you during the war?” I asked Yuri, our young interpreter, whose mother is a famous surgeon and whose father was killed in the defense of Kiev. “I lived in the Army hospitals,” he said. “Studying?” “No, just trying to get enough to cat.” He stretched. “Seems as if I‘ve been eating for eight years to make up for that hunger.” (Yuri today has made it; he weighs over two hundred pounds.) Americans always remark the Russian women engaged in heavy labor, which with us is reserved for men — driving trucks, repairing roads, handling the cement or the hods on the rising apartment houses; what we overlook in that comparison is the manpower destroyed by the Nazis. The new census figures for the Soviet Union, published last summer, show 55 per cent women, 45 per cent men; and with a preponderance like that, the women must work. The census does not bother about dogs, which are virtually nonexistent in Moscow today; the war must have wiped them out. I saw only one.

War is always the exterminator, and the Nazis were much more cruel and thorough than the French under Napoleon. To a people who chin themselves on achievement, the crushing of Hitler was a victory as great as any in Russian annals. They think their armies were mainly responsible for this, and thus the war and the suffering and sacrifice it imposed will be a major theme in novels, poems, plays, and films for years to come, not only for political reasons but because the Russians knew they were fighting for survival. They write out of a suffering more widespread and deeper than ours, and the emotional response in their theaters is unrestrained.

No photograph in any American periodical gave me a true picture of the Russian people. Just as no photograph of Madame Khrushchev does justice to her (she has a carriage and presence not unlike those of Myra Hess), so no photograph of a Russian crowd can convey their soberness, their intelligence, their patience, or their purpose.

The picnic parties in the great park of Tsarskoye Selo, as they spread the cloth and unwrap the lunch, do not kid around as we might do; they go about their pleasure soberly with no horseplay. The young couples who chip in together for a table at the Gaar Restaurant in Moscow on Saturday night have none of that boisterous laughter which erupts so easily from Americans. The Russians dance to American jazz, the orchestra blaring away at a piercing pitch, and they dance well, perhaps best of all in Leningrad, but they are very intent about it, and serious. I danced in several night spots and never saw a drunk. The only ones I did see were young men on the streets in the late afternoon, with the traffic officer obviously winking at them, since it was clear that they were being helped home out of circulation. All told, they numbered fewer than one would find in Boston’s Scollay Square on a weekend.

It would be natural for an editor to measure a people’s intelligence by their attitude toward books, and it seemed to me that the Russian public has a greater hunger for books than we have. One of the most popular jaunts on Sunday is the trip by water to the Peterhof, that exquisite palace built by Peter the Great on the Gulf of Finland. The Germans blew it up out of vindictiveness, but the exterior has been restored, and the fountains, the terraces, the statues, and the gardens are as they once were. Here in summer come thousands to bathe on the long gray shingle, to walk beneath the birches, to have tea or ice cream in the enclosure (Russian ice cream is first class), and to laugh at those who, like Paddy Chayefsky, dare venture into the fun spot, a rocky pit where one’s weight releases a hidden, drenching fountain. I noticed that many of the young people on the boat carried books wrapped up in newspapers, which they settled down to read as soon as we had cleared the harbor. These book readers were everywhere, and sometimes I asked them what they were reading. A soldier on leave was deep in Stendhal‘s The Red and the Black, and a brightlooking student was immersed in geometry.

As we were having tea in the Peterhof enclosure, a naval officer — a four-striper — sauntered by, caught my eye, and went through one of the friendliest pantomimes I have ever witnessed: clasped his two hands at me and shook them in the air, smiled, nodded, shook his head, dismissing the possibility of hostility with an elaborate gesture of cutting his own throat, smiled again, saluted, and then went down the sandy walk looking back over his shoulder for a final wave — all in a matter of seconds.

I realize that I was in Russia in a season of extraordinary responsiveness. One saw this most openly at the American exhibition in Sokolniki Park. Tickets of admission at the outset were confined to Party members, and with them it was a matter of pride to be critical. The abstract paintings were a target of special abuse, and the average American house an object of skepticism. But the atmosphere became noticeably sunnier when Mr. Khrushchev’s visit to America was announced; by then the younger technicians and householders generally were being admitted, and their eagerness, their curiosity, and their delight were undisguised. The fashion show drew tight-packed crowds who responded in kind to the salty Russian commentary of our master of ceremonies, Vera Bacal. The Russians certainly liked those clothes, and the youngsters who were in them. The mechanics, of course, lingered over the outboard motors and over and under the new cars, and the women tried every household gadget and all but locked themselves in the electric refrigerators, but what was equally intent was their absorption in the Circarama. The desire to query us about our things and our country, or to listen to one of their friends as he put the questions, broke out in little seminars in the park as it did almost every evening in Red Square. The night of our arrival, we went down to the Kremlin shortly before midnight, and there, seated in what on May Day would be the reviewing stand, was a long-legged American undergraduate answering and explaining about the United States to a circle of some thirty listeners.

“What do people keep in those black string bags that are hanging from the windows?” I asked Yuri as we drove by a block of apartments.

“Butter and other perishables are what I keep in mine,” he replied. “That’s true of all of us who are waiting for refrigerators.” Yuri, who is a lecturer at the university, and certainly among the better paid, lives in one room of a four-room apartment, the other three being occupied by six adults and four children.

“You must have to do your studying in the library or late at night,” I said. “What hope have you of getting something better?”

“Oh, there’s a long waiting list,” he said. “As a bachelor, I can’t hope for any change in less than four years.”

“And if you goL married?”

“Well, then I would only have to wait two or three.”

I used to think that in the British queues during the war were the most patient people I had seen, but the Russians today wait just as patiently and longer for what they want. They stand in line for hours to see the Czechoslovak Glass Exhibition, the Armory in the Kremlin, or the Tomb, and if visiting VIPs are thrust in ahead of them, they take it with a smile. Their patience is strengthened by their confidence that they will eventually get there. The cotton prints, the nylon stockings, and the gay scarves have totally changed the appearance of the women in three years; better shoes will come next, and after that, so they believe, a larger apartment and the household equipment they have been waiting for, and peace.

These are purposeful people. They are perfectly confident that they will get the things we have, in time, and to get them they are willing to work hard. In our group discussions we occasionally spoke of success in America and remarked that having more did not always mean more happiness, and we might just as well have tried to signal an express train with a hair ribbon.

In my youth the bedroom romance used to keep us wondering how long it would be before the frail would be undone, whereas in ALEC WAUGH’S new novel FUEL FOR THE FLAME (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $4.95), it is a question of who, among the bevy of seductibles, will remain chaste. The story is laid in a fabulously rich oil island not far from Borneo, where the heat and propinquity and boredom make the English and Eurasian staff members of the Pearl Oil Company more than usually amorous. The little kingdom is ruled over by an ailing Buddhist despot, and when his son and heir, Prince Rhya, who has been educated and indulged himself in London, returns to the island with his tall, beautiful English bride, the stage is set for a typical Daily Mail conspiracy. The book makes bland and diverting reading, requiring no effort for those with a mild cold.

PHYLLIS MCGINLEY, whose light verse is of fresh and delightful quality, is in private life a happy suburban housewife and the mother of two teen-age daughters. In the lively papers which compose her new book, THE PROVINCE OF THE HEART (Viking, S3.00), she has provocative things to say about American women, about the need of a third hand for those dedicated to a career, about the morality to be stressed for growing girls, about the treasury of family humor, about the delusions of college, and about the honor which she feels too many of her sex have lost. This is a book to be shared with the family, for there is a hassle in every chapter. One is tempted to quote, and I have space for only one: “So what in the end shall I tell my daughters about chastity before marriage? Of course, I shall be sensible and point out the ordinary social penalties attached to any other conduct. . . . But I shall also say that love is never merely a biological act but one of the few miracles left on earth, and that to use it cheaply is a sin.”

In the introduction to THE JOY OF MUSIC (Simon and Schuster, $5.95) Leonard Bernstein states firmly that “only art can substitute for art. And so the only way one can really say anything about music is to write music.” Then he goes on to say a great deal about music with a clarity and directness and regard for the limitations of nonmusicians calculated to fill the lay reader with joy and gratitude. The book contains several essays on the meaning of music, the qualities that make a great composer, the difference between a “nice Gershwin tune” (Mr. Bernstein wishes he could write one) and a composition. It also contains the scripts of the television programs that he did for Omnibus, with musical scores and drawings where the pictorial effect is necessary for complete understanding. These pieces are not only remarkably informative about such matters as the formal characteristics of jazz and Bach’s use of harmony and counterpoint, they are presented in a text which is a small triumph in itself, a successful fusion of the colloquial speaking voice and a highly readable prose style.