The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

How large a percentage of Americans are gamblers at heart? One in five perhaps? It is hard to estimate because the instinct ranges from those who bet their silver in the numbers racket or take a chance on the Irish Sweepstakes all the way up to the Charlie Ponzis who are betting hundreds of thousands on the old proposition that a fool is born every minute. We know that the more hazardous the occupation, the higher the stakes: cowboys and miners from the goldfields came to town ready to shoot their wad in a single night at cards; the crap games in army camps or on transports outward bound are legendary; and in World War II the poker games in the Air Force were the most ruthless. We know too that there is a vast amount of egotism in every reckless gambler: not only is he sure that he can beat his opponents, he is sure he can beat the odds. It is not desperation at home that turns the pepper-and-salt cashier into the big-time embezzler; it is the sight of so much money and the certainty that he is smarter than the outfit and can’t lose.

A clear head through the long hours at the table (a good pro is seldom a heavy drinker), the deadpan control, win or lose — these are natural assets; but the most important one for anyone gambling on cards is a prodigious memory: the capacity to remember what has been exposed is indispensable, especially in games like Twenty-one that are played with a dwindling pack. The professional who bets on the ponies or sits night after night at Monte Carlo probably spends as much lime working out his odds or “perfecting” his system as a certified public accountant spends at his desk, and in the vast majority of cases, does not earn as much. The fever at Las Vegas is no different from that in the wide-open New Orleans of more than a century ago. One can be sure that those who have it and Survive are blessed not with luck but with a memory of mathematical precision.

In his autobiography, THE ODDS AGAINST ME (Simon and Schuster, $6.95), JOHN SCAUNE describes his boyhood addiction, his swiftness with figures, his manual dexterity with dice, cards, or any form of sleight of hand, and his fantastic memory, which, with his burnings, helped him to do better than break even. One culls a long vagarious book like this expecting not literature but the unabashed, accurate disclosure of the gamblers’ world in the twentieth century by a man who knew the odds and how to handle them.

John’s parents were Italian immigrants and strict Catholics; his father was a miner, then a stonecutter, his mother was perceptive and quite aware that the brightest of her children was getting his education not so much in night school as in the amusement parks. His dexterity was incredible: he could clean out any gang at the shell game, tossing coins, or three-card rnonte; he was fourteen when from watching the card sharks he learned to stack or palm cards— and saw the stabbing of a cheat. From his friend Ame in the Lane Novelty Company he had a postgraduate course in marked cards and loaded dice and in the infinite combinations employed by a dice mechanic. With his agility he could outsmart and outdeal any shark, but it was his common sense that prompted him to make his living as a magician. Scarne had a disarming curiosity; it was his passkey to the world of carnivals, and without it the famous “Cherokee Indian” would not have taught him how to eat fire, swallow swords, or chew glass. His mastery of such feats accounts for some of the liveliest of the early chapters, although his explanation of how he does his tricks leaves me as baffled as if I had been watching them.

The braggadocio in such a career is redeemed in the telling by the author’s audacity and candor. His lifelong friendship with a tall Irish lad named Jim Braddock leads him to the ringside and to a graphic description of the Baer-Braddock bout; his magic with the cards leads him unscathed through a tough encounter with A1 Capone’s gang, just as his daring and skill lead to the respect of Houdini. With his wizardry, he posted a $5000 challenge to any magician to perform a trick he could not do — and there were no takers. In his maturity he came to be the highest-paid consultant on gambling, with a rather weary contempt for what it stood for.

He sat on the laps of the gods. His mother was a famous beauty and an actress; his lather, Sir William Rothenstein, was an artist and a passionate Liberal much beloved by his contemporaries. W. H. Hudson, before he had lost his wonderful sight and hearing, Tagore, Augustus John, Joseph Conrad, William Michael Rossetti, and Yeats were familiars in the household, and each of them took more than a passing interest in young John Rothenstcin. As a boy he played war games on Hampstead Heath with H. G. Wells and Wells’s sons, Gyp and Frank. Such attention would be overwhelming for many youngsters, but its effect on SIR JOHN ROTHENSTEIN was to call out his love for British painting, to sharpen his critical faculties, and to endow him with a sparkle of conversation and a delicate sense of humor which light up many pages of SUMMER’S LEASE:Being Volume One of an Autobiography (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $6.00).

As the son and grandson of painters, who has been exposed since boyhood to many of the finest artists and writers of his time, it seems to me inevitable that Sir John should have received his education as much from personal encounters as from study. One of his earliest recollections is of reading aloud with his father after tea “the historical plays of Shakespeare, from the English poets, Ivanhoe and Treasure Island, Froissart’s Chronicles and lives of great Englishmen, in particular from Lockhart’s Life of Nelson.” To a boy so impressionable this would mean more than what he took home from the rather progressive schools to which he was sent.

At Oxford, which he entered with the aid of a cramming school and at some strain on his father’s finances, he lived a charmed life. Fie went up in the 1920s when there was a good deal of hard drinking and hard usage for the nonconformist left over from World War I, and although he succeeded in taking only third-class honors, he did graduate with a degree, which is more than could be said for his good friends Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Alan Pryce-Jones. With them and a circle of the elect, including John Strachey, Lord David Cecil, Richard Hughes, Anthony Eden, and Maurice Bowra, he belonged to an uninhibited dining club known as “The Grid.” His roommate was William Gerhardi, an Anglo-Russian six years his senior, the novelist-to-be, and the author of the sprightliest letters in this book. He was on easy terms with T. E. Lawrence —“a dedicated man without a cause” — who was then writing The Seven Pillars of Wisdom at All Souls, and his characterization of Lawrence is the finest I have read anywhere. It was at Oxford that his friendship with Max Beerbohm came to full flower, probably because young John personified the grace and charming indolence which Max celebrated in Zuleika Dobson.

The wonder is that he was not spoiled: that he did not take to drink or sex after his early failures in London as a writer and journalist; that he was humble enough to follow the advice of Paul Sachs, who set him on his course as a teacher and apprentice curator in the United States. And it is everlastingly to his good fortune that in Lexington, Kentucky, he found his Elizabeth and took the gamble of marrying her on $1500 a year. In Summer’s Lease one sees the forming judgments and the capacity for friendship and for connoisseurship which were eventually to recommend John Rothenstein as director of the Tate Gallery of London.

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY (Knopf, $3.95) is a short novel laid in Italy, with such a feeling for words and with characterizations so deft that I find it a delight. SHIRLEY HAZZARD, the author, was born and schooled in Sydney, Australia, and shortly after the war, accompanied her parents to the Far East; since then her experience has been cosmopolitan, including years in Europe and long devotion to the United Nations. To her short stories and now to this restrained and lovely narrative she brings an acute knowledge of people and a perception of the countryside, in this case a small town north of Florence, which, for its power of suggestion, makes one think of Katherine Mansfield.

Tancredi, a rather fastidious architect in his forties who has been attractive to women, is now feeling sorry for himself: his beautiful but troublesome wife has separated from him at last. In this bruised state he has gone for consolation to Luisa Brandi, a widow of his father’s generation, a woman of style and sapience, who by good chance has visiting her an attractive niece, Sophie, half English, half Italian, whose virginal diffidence arouses the inquisitive, ever hopeful lover in Tancredi.

The lives of these three people as they are entwined for the brevity of Sophie’s visit compose an affair of picnics, a thrashing storm that devastates the crops and garden, a festival which is a relic of the Middle Ages — “one of the most splendid sights in Italy. It may also be said to reproduce in miniature all the rancor and intolerance of the world” — and a courtship which is broken off, reunited, and as stylized as a minuet. That Sophie shall surrender is just as inevitable as that she should decide the moment when the affair is over. Within its limitations this is a delicate and pensive piece of work; throughout, Miss Hazzard has command of a sure and felicitous prose, and it is a pleasure to watch her people respond to each other in a situation which is so picturesque and sensuous.

A hunter and conservator, FRANK: DUFRESNE has been studying bears for forty years, much of that lime in Alaska. His book NO ROOM FOE BEARS (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 16.00) properly begins with the grizzly’s habitat Admiralty Island, with its snow peaks and great forests of Douglas fir, some twenty miles from Juneau. Here is the greatest concentration of browns and grizzlies on the planet, one bear per square mile.

The book opens with a tense situation when the author and his friend Hosea are caught overnight on Admiralty in an impenetrable fogbank with two freshly killed Sitka bucks; they doze off over their campfire and waken to find that they are being stalked by a big grizzly who has no intention of being distracted. Hosea says that one grizzly out of twenty-five is ready to do battle against a human. Is this their lucky number?

Excellent chapters depict what the polar bear has meant to the Eskimos. Here the author is quoting from his old friend Pooshuk, who tells him of the snow bear’s taste for whale meat, decayed or otherwise, and of how he saw one leap on the back of a surfacing whale and come up with a clawful of gravy. Curiously there are no polar bears in the Antarctic; in the Arctic there is but a single species, whose home is a floating pan of ice which circles them over the wildest wastes in the Northern hemisphere.

The mid chapters have to do with our yellow bears and the brown, and the comedy when the cubs are playing. But always as an undertone is the realization that the bears may be in danger of extinction before the end of this century. The hunting of the polar bears by aircraft, the lack of protective laws in Alaska, the cutting of the forests all point to the elimination of the halfton browns and grizzlies and the gradual thinning out of the smaller blacks.