The Peripatetic Reviewer

WILLIAMSBURG, Moscow, and New York City: three landmarks in man’s progress toward tomorrow.

Williamsburg, seen in the stillness between four and five on a November afternoon, is a beautiful reminder of a time when man went about his business on his hind legs and when he lived close for creature comforts. Save for the red of the oaks and the canary yellow of the ginkgoes, the leaves arc down, and through the bare branches one sees how intimately the little wooden houses crowd together. The green turf, the box hedges, the white fences form a pattern of privacy, and the windowpanes, as the light dims, are warm with the flicker of the open fires within. The air holds the musty fragrance of the moist box and of the bonfires now smoldering. Bonfires always turn the mind back, and as one walks through the quiet of this seventeenth-century town, it is easy to imagine the gentle unhurried existence and to forget the passion and uncertainty which once dwelt here. To most of us Williamsburg stands as a monument to tranquillity, a monument to a moment of independence and to an age undisturbed by the bomb or the gasoline motor.

Moscow, in its street scenes, is a reminder of where America was forty years ago: taxis and privately owned cars are few; the long black Zims reserved for officialdom are conspicuous; on the broad avenues the pedestrians have the right of way; there are bicyclists, though not half so numerous as those in little Holland; and the Army trucks, which do most of the transport, are occasionally interspersed with a motorized hayrick or a lumber truck with its logs chained together, such as Manhattan has not seen in a century. Moscow is a quiet city and a remarkably clean one. Women with long wicker brooms work ceaselessly on the boulevards, and citizens are discouraged from leaving wastepaper in the subways, or, indeed, anywhere in sight.

Moscow has its monuments of the past — the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil’s Cathedral. More humble are the houses of peeled logs, built after Napoleon’s fireworks; weather-beaten, with their windows of potted plants, their refrigerators — string bags holding the perishables, suspended from the upper stories — and their tiny gardens, they form a most appealing mews. With their disappearance Moscow will become more stereotyped.

To pass from Williamsburg to New York is to pass from costumed colonialism to a motorized maelstrom. The congestion in the pre-Christmas season was the worst I have ever experienced. Indeed, the traffic was so snail-like and frustrating that people took to walking for sheer relief. The police and the tow cars were doing their persistent best to keep the cross-town arteries open, but the zanies are always with us, and as I was taxiing through the Upper Sixties, a smart blonde in one of those limitless Cadillacs triple-parked and went clicking away on her high heels, leaving a one-car lane through which we could just squeeze. People of that mentality should be permitted to drive on Sunday afternoons only.

The impossibility of finding a cab at the theater hour; the frantic distress of the traveler, airport bound, who is ignored by the homing cabs in the late afternoon; the bumper-to-bumper creep of commuters into the Lincoln or Holland Tunnel — such are the punishments of those who try to move in a crowded room. But what makes New York even more of a punishment these days is its grime. There was a time when the sky above the great canyons was of an incomparable translucent blue. It had a beauty and a vibrancy that seemed to have been wind-washed from the sea, but now when there is no wind the air is foul. The fumes from the cars, the fumes from the fuel oil, the fumes from the industries on either bank have formed a cloud by day and a pillar by night — as those who are in the planes stacked above it can attest. Your eyes smart, your sinuses puff up, and if you wonder why, look at the soot on the white window sill. This city, once famous for its cleanliness, is being smothered by air-borne dirt. Isn’t it time that New York City called in a doctor from Pittsburgh?

“Cars, cars, cars! Isn’t there any place for people?” expostulated Nikita Khrushchev as he looked at the chaos in Manhattan. The time has come when the city authorities must decide. They must cleanse the air and restore the circulation of the most spectacular city on this continent. They must decide what to do about commuters, transients, and shoppers, and where they should be encouraged to leave their cars on the periphery. They must face the question of how many residents are to be permitted to park their cars overnight on the streets, and they must face the unions on the question of how many of the city services can be performed at night.

As we recover from the stun of the segregation riots in New Orleans, those of us who live in the North may take consolation in the thought of our more enlightened attitude. But are we really any more tolerant in our acceptance of the Negro as our neighbor? In Boston, the Negro housing is segregated about 90 per cent. I remember the difficulty encountered in Cambridge, where for a time it was thought that Ralph Bunche would be a temporary member of Harvard’s teaching staff, and how in desperation a faculty couple on leave finally placed their house at Mr. Bunche’s disposal. I also remember the neighborliness which Roland Hayes has enjoyed in Brookline for more than two decades. The record is an uneven one, and for the most part it is kept under cover.

PEACEABLE LANE, a novel by KEITH WHEELER (Simon and Schuster, $4.50), the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, forces the issue into the open. This is the story of a new $30,000 housing unit in Westchester and of how the eleven families who live on Peaceable Lane react when they find that a Negro is proposing to buy into their midst. That he would be an undesirable addition is generally agreed, although with varying shades of intensity. The three Jewish families who have known what it is to be excluded are torn on this point, but what rallies them is the thought that the instant the Negro takes possession, their property value will decline, perhaps as much as $10,000 a house. The most conspicuous of the group, Peter Yale, a news commentator and espouser of popular causes, is the most rancid in his opposition. When it becomes clear that they must pool their resources and outbid the invader, the man who collects the money and signs the paper is Matt Jones, a rugged Westerner whose direct way of dealing with men and crises has not been inhibited by his work in advertising. Matt’s impulsiveness, his hitting out, and later his selfdoubts and renunciation are what give this book its integrity.

This is a didactic novel from the word go, and I admire the way in which Mr. Wheeler has illuminated a conflict at once so sensitive and reproachful. The members of the little community he has delineated with skill: the misgivings of the two Jews, Solomon Weissman and Zack Gold, are truly conveyed, and the resentment of the women, ranging as it does from the spitefulness of Laura Cusack to the timid remonstrance of Estelle Outerbridge, is deplorable but not unlikely. The sense of outrage which pervades the community when the Negroes put the heat on is shocking, but so too is the feeling of infection, the feeling of guilt, which spreads from house to house as they realize what they have done, when Bronson has been bought out and his empty house is on their hands. “Yes,” Gold said somberly. “But he left his mark on us all the same. The thing I hate having to remember is that he opened up the weakness and meanness in all of us.” This is an indignant lesson in human relations which we had better look at thoughtfully.

PETER USTINOV has always, in both his plays and his fiction, turned his rueful gaze on the contrasts between nations and nationalities. His first collection of stories, Add a Dash of Pity, reveled in the eccentricities of Spanish bullfighters, Swiss scientists, Hungarian violinists, and Russian littérateurs. Now, in his first full-length novel, THE LOSER (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $4.50), Ustinov recounts the adventures of the most conscientious of German militarists, the fanatical Nazi lieutenant Hans Winterschild, during the chaotic conclusion of World War II in Italy. Hans as a boy was brought up in the military tradition to which Hitler added his peculiar refinements; he was tested in the invasion of Poland and more sternly on the Russian front. Full of scars and medals, Hans is sent to Florence to recuperate, and here in his sudden attraction to a young courtesan the frozen integrity of his character begins to melt. This is a people and a way of life whose happiness he could never have imagined.

Rambling, elaborate, and delightfully funny, this novel has all the versatility of Peter Ustinov’s baroque imagination. No other young writer could bring to such a subject so cosmopolitan a point of view, so compassionate an insight, so resourceful a gift for storytelling.

In TRUMPETS FROM THE STEEP (Houghton Mifflin, $5.00), LADY DIANA COOPER brings to a close her three-volume memoir. This English beauty, hostess par excellence, and wife of the intelligent, debonair statesman Duff Cooper has always enjoyed the adulation of English society. As the daughter of the Eighth Duke of Rutland, as the loveliest debutante of the 1914 season, as the star of Reinhardt’s Miracle, she has woven a shimmering gossamer of friendships. She is at home anywhere in the theater, is a loyal supporter of writers, painters, and journalists, and is on intimate terms with “Clemmie” and Sir Winston Churchill, whom she regards as “the greatest of living men.” Her memory is vivid, probing, and fair; her letters, which she often quotes, recapture the affection or anxiety of the moment, and every page shows the indelible style of her gay and loyal character. Her new volume, encompassing the years 1939 to 1948, is the most deeply felt of the three, for during much of it Britain was on the rack.

Duff Cooper, who had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty, over Munich, was reinstated in the Cabinet by Mr. Churchill, served as Minister of Information, and was then sent as ambassador extraordinaire on hazardous missions to Burma, India, Australia, and finally as the British representative to the Free French in North Africa.

For all her blithe spirits, Lady Diana is a worrier; she who loathed flying and far-flung assignment now found herself in charge of the most bizarre households. At one point in Algiers she had Victor Rothschild in one room on a bomb dispersal mission; Evelyn Waugh, Randolph Churchill, and Philip Jordan in sick bay recovering from their burns sustained in a crash landing in Yugoslavia; and Eve Curie, who, in still another room, “with her beautiful face, khaki and medals, dreams of echelons and mêlées and garde-à-vous. The house is overloaded and has burst its boiler. . . .” Her apprehensions add a sensitivity to her letters to her son, whether she is describing the Blitz, the ominous overconfidence in Singapore, or the negotiations with “the intractable Wormwood,” as the English called De Gaulle. She grieves over her separation from John Julius; she mourns the loss of friends as dear as Rex Whistler, Conrad Russell, and her sister Marjorie; and though she and Duff have a halcyon reward in their happiness in the Embassy in Paris and in their retirement at Chantilly, the book ends on a note of resignation: “I’ll write no more memories. They would get too sad, tender as they are. Age wins and one must learn to grow old.” What follows is a definition of widowhood, the most poignant I have ever read.