The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

THIS is the season of the cuckoo and the commencement address. In my time I have delivered not a few and suffered through many more, and it must not be thought that I am looking for business if what I have to say is critical.

The first commencement speaker I can remember was Clarence Mackay of New York, and a rather imposing figure he seemed to us of Pingry as he took his place on the dais. But boys are a noticing audience, never more so than in the excitement of graduation, and when Mr. Mackay rose to speak, what we noticed was not favorable. His waistcoat with its white piping could not conceal his large paunch; it was plain that he intended to read his speech and that he disdained a funny story or any quip about the New Jersey mosquitoes, then a national joke. No, he began by solemnly asserting that our seniors were like little boats setting forth on the Sea of Life; and the more he belabored that simile, the clearer it became that Clarence knew darned little about sailing: some of us “would run free with the sun and wind at our backs,” others “would find themselves in a stormy sea, making little headway” (how could these both occur at the same time?), “the more daring might crowd on sail until a jibe [he pronounced it “jib” but corrected himself] cost him the lead.” We got the drift, and our side-glances to each other said simply, “He stinks.” And he continued to do so for thirtythree minutes by the school clock.

As an undergraduate I was to learn that ministers, professors, and politicians were equally unreliable at commencement: each has grown accustomed to filling forty minutes and finds it difficult to have his say in less. But if there is one emanation stronger than any other which is wafted toward the platform on a broiling June day, it is the urgent truth that the bulk of the audience has come there to see the degrees conferred — and for God’s sake get on with it!

Timing is the first consideration. The finest commencement address I have ever heard — and President Conant pronounced it so at the time — was the one Thornton Wilder delivered at Harvard; it; was perceptive, so penetrating that it stirred the fourteen thousand, and it was all said in eleven minutes. Wilder was explaining the seniors to their parents, explicitly, and in so doing he avoided two temptations which often mar the occasion: he did not grope back into childhood hoping to find a link between the generations, and second, he used his generalities sparingly and only after he had vividly documented his case. The older I grow, the more allergic I become to generalities.

When Americans foregather for graduation it is a moment of liberation, and they are in a mood to be enlightened but not admonished. I recall a commencement at St. Mark’s School, close to Dr. Thayer’s retirement, at which two fellow headmasters were to speak, the Rector of Groton and Dr. Claude Fuess of Phillips Andover. The Rector came first, and for half an hour he lectured the audience on divorce. As some present had changed partners, this made for a certain tension. Then it was Jack Fuess’s turn. “I think I must begin,” he said, “with a story about a Virginia gentleman who in the Civil War was driving a load of manure to a market town between the lines. It was raining hard, and before long he overtook a Negro, to whom he offered a ride under the canvas cover. Then they came to a Union picket. ‘Halt, who goes there?' ‘A Virginia farmer with a load of manure and a nigger.’ ‘Pass, Virginia farmer.’ A little further on they were again stopped. ‘Halt, who goes there?' ‘A Virginia farmer with a load of manure and a nigger.’ When out of earshot, the Negro raised the tarpaulin. ‘Massa,’he said, ‘the next time they asks you that question, would you mind puttin’ me first?' ” The laughter saved that day.

Here, then, as the fruit of experience, are Six Rules for Commencement Speakers.

1. Keep within twenty minutes. Remember that Lincoln only needed seven for the Gettysburg Address.

2. Make at least two humorous allusions to show that your shirt is not stuffed.

3. Shun all references to “the sea of life,”“the playing fields of Eton,” and “our national goals.”

4. Be sparing of generalities, especially the pious ones. They will fall on deaf ears.

5. Draw from your own experience, using actual episodes, but as little as possible from childhood.

6. If the speech has been written for you, at least have the decency to read it in advance.

Because they are such close students of human nature, doctors should be among the best delineators of our time, but professional reticence quiets some of them, and the vast majority are too busy and use their pens only for prescriptions. There are four who have achieved literary eminence in this century: William Carlos Williams; Harvey Cushing, the brain specialist; Hans Zinsser, the pathologist; and more recently, Lord Moran; and in the three latter cases war gave an unexpected impetus to their words.

Lord Moran was president of the Royal College of Physicians when in May of 1940 he became Winston Churchill’s doctor, appointed by the Cabinet and accepted without enthusiasm by the Prime Minister. But from then until Sir Winston’s death, this stalwart, independent physician was to live in understanding and affectionate intimacy with his patient. He soon came to feel, as did General Smuts, that Churchill was irreplaceable and that Britain’s survival depended on keeping this man going. When Winston’s struggle with a stubborn window in the White House brought on a dull pain over the heart and symptoms of coronary insufficiency which commonly called for six weeks in bed, Sir Charles had to decide whether his patient’s recuperative power and the gravity of the business at hand permitted him to take a chance. That Moran was right comes clear in this exchange later: “Now, Charles, you are making me heartminded.” “You’re all right. Forget your damned heart.”

When fever and fibrillation at Cairo a year later warned the doctor that Winston was in danger of pneumonia, it was Sir Charles who canceled the meeting with General Alexander and cabled the Cabinet what to say. Not the least fascinating part of Lord Moran’s insight is the way he explained the vulnerability of the body to Churchill, so that the patient became a partner in the cure. “I recall,” the doctor wrote, “that he declaimed to me ‘King Robert of Sicily’, a poem of eighty-six lines, five days after his stroke in 1953, with only a few mistakes. He then asked me what part of the brain stores memories, and went on to tell me that he could recall in detail many incidents in his trench life at Plug Street in the First World War, whereas in the Second War one great event toppling over another seemed to wipe out the last.” From such evidence I should say that Lord Moran is one of the great writing physicians and that his CHURCHILL: TAKEN FROM THE DIARIES OF LORD MORAN (Houghton Mifflin, S10.00) is a close and magnificent portrait of Winston, his strength and his weakness.

It was just as imperative that Lord Moran should know what was tormenting Churchill’s mind as what was disturbing his liver, and because of the doctor’s discretion and his strength of character, he became the recipient of many confidences from both British and American sources. He saw from the ringside the crises in military leadership and in statecraft, and he writes of them in a sinewy, stirring prose. When Churchill sends his beloved ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, to the East without air cover and against the advice of the First Sea Lord; when in September, 1942, Brendon Bracken warns the doctor, “If we are beaten in this battle [El Alamein], it’s the end of Winston. Is he sleeping all right?”; when Sir Charles is witness to the violent explosion between FDR and Winston over India, and to the tension between the two leaders over the Second Front; or when he is told of the PM’s anger at Stalin’s jesting over the post-war execution of 50,000 Germans, the physician knows that he must resort to palliatives stronger than sleeping pills — the calming talk which comes when men trust each other.

Lord Moran shows us the anger as well as the love which at varying times he felt for the man he served, and he shows us as I think I have never seen before in print the enormity of the decision when the doctor must judge how long the indispensable leader, now past his zenith, can be kept going. Whatever his misgivings, “Pa” Watson could not interpose himself between Roosevelt and the fourth term. In 1955 Lord Moran was faced with the same problem: the family and Winston’s intimates knew that after his series of shocks he was slipping; Lord Moran also knew that when finally relieved of office, Churchill would have no further purpose in life.

This book is the heartheat of history, by a doctor wise in his diagnosis of men and motives. He is immensely likable; his portraits of Alan Brooke and Marshall, Alexander and Lord Cherwell ring true; and his revelation of how Churchill overcame his faltering as a speaker, of the fits of despondency — known as “Black Dog” — and how the PM learned to obliterate them, and, most important, of the difference between the fierce striving of the moment and the serenity with which Sir Winston recalled the events in his books makes this a record of lasting value.

The short novels of CONRAD RICHTER are known for their integrity and careful craftsmanship. Pioneering is in his blood, as it was in that of his clergyman forebears, and the best of his work other than The Sea of Grass has been laid in the deep forests and along the hazardous Eastern frontier in the early eighteenth Century. In The Trees and The Town, the latter a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Richter wrote of the Indian from the white man’s point of view. Now in A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS (Knopf, $3.95) he writes of the frontier, of Fort Detroit, the Great Lakes, and the settlements in Pennsylvania as they must have seemed to a white girl who has lived so long in Indian captivity that she thinks as one of them. When Stone Girl, with her small dark son, Otter Boy, is brought “home” by the Jesuit priest who has identified her, she comes resentfully and with suspicion. Save for the love of her child, emotion has been drained out of her; she comes looking for hostility, and she finds it.

Research goes into a story of this nature, and for me the most pleasant part of it is that which has to do with Stone Girl’s life with the Lenni Lenape before she begins her long journey — we must have this if we are to believe in her basic loyalty, and I regret that her husband, Espan, is such a bloodless shadow. The whites as she finds them are an arrogant, tricky lot — only her Quaker grandmother shows any compassion for her; and this wall of contempt which shuts her in wherever she goes results too often in episodes that are so cold that they seem lifeless. Nor has Mr. Richter quite solved the difficulty of dealing with the Indian idiom; the dialogue is too crowded with unpronounceable words immediately followed by their English equivalent, and the result is archaic and stilted. I wonder if the day will come when someone, perhaps of Cherokee blood, will tell the Indian tragedy in its true, compassionate, gripping detail.

It was my privilege to edit almost the entire output of the collaboration between Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. The friendship of the blond Viking from California and the dark modest poet from Iowa began in Paris, where they met after Hall’s return from a German prison camp in 1918. They stayed on to write the official history of the Lafayette Flying Corps, in which they both had flown, and in the process their partnership found bedrock. Idealists, imbued with gallantry, who were resolved to quit civilization and write, they thought first of Bermuda, but Tahiti seemed equally inexpensive and more remote. There they settled, and for the next two decades created the books and the legend which Colonel PAUL L. BRIAND, JR., has depicted with fidelity in IN SEARCH OF PARADISE, a dual biography (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, $6.95).

At the outset they shared quarters in Papeete, and for several lean years each wrote on his own. Hall sent back to the States poems and essays which found more rejection than acceptance; Nordhoff worked on the longer narrative and came up with a good one in The Pearl Lagoon. It was desperation which drove them together as a team, and in 1927 when they collaborated in writing Falcons of France, a novel about the Lafayette Escadrille, in which Hall’s old wing commander, Harold Willis, was one of the heroes, they realized how remarkably they complemented each other, Nordhoff the narrator driving the story forward, Hall the lover of beauty forever pausing to describe and reflect. Falcons was a moderate success, and at this turning point Hall recalled a little book he had picked up at a Paris bookstall, the story of Captain Bligh and the most famous mutiny in the British Navy. This was the talisman which united their talents in the writing of the Bounty trilogy, The Hurricane, and the successful books that followed.

Colonel Briand, professor of English at the Air Force Academy, is at his best in the chapters about the First World War. Hall’s adventures as a machine gunner with the British and then as a pursuit pilot make a story in themselves, and the author had, of course, Hall’s war books to draw on. Throughout he has taken a good deal of liberty with the dialogue; some of it doubtless is an amplification of letters, but much of it is invented. His account of the working and temperamental years on Tahiti lacks the poetry which Hall would have brought to it and the reticence Nordhoff would have preferred, for Nordhoff’s proud spirit chafed at the criticism of his native marriage, and when his drinking became heavy, it was Hall, as the colonel rightly says, who did the bulk of the work. Lacking as it must the inspiration of both men, this is a faithful account of their method and an honest appraisal of their books.