The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

A LATE EDUCATION
by Alan Moorehead
Harper & Row, $5.95

Alan Moorehead is one of the few distinguished war correspondents who have gone on to write better and better books. His Gallipoli is a classic of that ill-fated campaign; his travel histories, The White Nile and The Blue Nile, are as full of information as delight; and his beautifully illustrated volume Darwin and the Beagle is the most engaging biography of a trailblazer.

In his new book he is looking at himself. A Late Education: Episodes in a Life, is as clear-cut as a cameo, without pretense or a wasted word. He tells us that he was a slow starter, small, and not good at games, who loathed his school in Australia; a boy who earned his way through Melbourne University by writing a daily column about its doings for a newspaper. Properly to begin his career he had to reach London, and when he landed at Plymouth in 1936, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of England. “My Australian eye,” he writes, “was adjusted to thin grey leaves with hard sunshine in between and the hard dry plain beyond, and now, by contrast, this explosion of lushness and greenness was delightful. It enveloped one, hid one away, gave one a sense of lazy virility. And in the same way the warm and gentle rain enveloped one and so did the terraced houses.” In London while he was scrabbling for a foothold in journalism, he fell in love with Katherine, who was already engaged to marry an older man, but who devised such interludes of bliss for the bright-eyed boy from Down Under. When Katherine drives herself off to the altar, Alan leaves to cover the Civil War in Spain, and in the Bar Basque he has a short, irritating encounter with Alexander Clifford, the Reuters correspondent and the man who will prove to be a rival and his best friend.

Their friendship endows the book with the liveliest and most touching passages, beginning with their early adventures as bachelor-journalists and maturing as their by-lines make them famous and their wives make it a foursome. They were as different as men could be, Alex a congenital pessimist, gloomily certain in 1940 that the Nazis would prevail, and Alan the irrepressible Micawber. They ate and drank together, and each man’s copy was the better for having been sharpened on the other’s mind. They capitalized on the jealousy between the papers they represented, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, and when Alex cabled London: “Moorehead of the Express proceeding to Cairo stop shall I follow?” he was instructed, “Follow Moorehead,” as Alan, playing the same game, was instructed to “Follow Clifford.” Once in Cairo, they vibrated between the Gezira Sporting Club and punishing forays into the desert. The Front was not clearly defined, and when in Cyrenaica they drove into the Italian lines and were pinned down by heavy fire, it was Alex who made the decisions and was less afraid. They were in their early thirties, and their talk, their aspirations, the play of their minds come back to us as if relayed by satellite from their two camp beds in space.

Often each was on his own, as when Moorehead was making his dangerous passage to Valencia on a hell-tanker under the Panamanian flag and a drunken Russian skipper, or again, when he was gaining his first impressions and lasting love for Paris. The chapters on disengagement after the Armistice are more subtle in their adjustment, for now each man was trying to determine his worth in peace. In his rented villa in Florence, Moorehead was struggling with a book and going to school with Bernard Berenson; as he puts it, “I, the young Australian without background or connections, knowing nothing of painting or architecture, or indeed of half the subjects which were discussed so easily and in so many different languages in that elaborate and platonic house.” It is rare in any season to find a book that recaptures youth as feelingly as this and yet preserves the mellow appraisal of men and middle age.

AMERICA AND RUSSIA
IN A CHANGING WORLD
by W. Averell Harriman
Doubleday, $5.95

We have been very fortunate in our Russian experts. We were the last of the great powers to recognize the Soviet Union, and before President Roosevelt broke the ice, three Americans of exceptional quality were readying themselves for the day when the doors would open: George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and their senior, W. Averell Harriman. Mr. Harriman made his first personal contact with the Soviet Union in the mid-twenties, when he went to Moscow as the representative of an American syndicate operating a large manganese concession in the Caucasian Mountains. He had talks with Trotsky and spent some time at the mines, which he visited in an ornate private car of Czarist vintage, trundling four picturesque days on the trip from Moscow to Baku. Then and later, when he closed out the concession at a modest profit, he was learning the approach to and the sensitivities of the Soviet mind.

Harriman’s new book, America and Russia in a Changing World, is, as he says, “somewhat of an accident.” It developed from a series of three lectures on the Past, the Present, including Vietnam, and the Future which he delivered without notes at Lehigh University. They were, of course, taped, and when he read the result, he realized, as most speakers do, that they would have to be rewritten and more fully documented for readers. In a skillful arrangement of type we have the best of his improvisations, and as reinforcement, the documentation, the two together constituting a half-century of personal and, I must say, very persuasive observations of the American and Russian intelligence in confrontation.

As a diplomat Harriman has depended upon his frankness in stating our position; his humor, which found an instant response in Khrushchev; his memory for detail, which could impress Stalin (said Stalin when he heard of our landing at Omaha Beach, “The world had never seen an individual operation of such magnitude— an unbelievable accomplishment”); his skill in bypassing a stone wall, as he bypassed Molotov; and his swiftness in realizing what the other fellow is thinking. He had been remonstrating with Kosygin about the Soviet’s training of guerrillas to disrupt the countries in Latin America, and asked why they were doing it. Kosygin: “But they speak for the people.” Harriman: “But they don’t. They couldn’t. There is just a handful of them.” And when Kosygin reiterated, Harriman knew he had in mind the few Bolsheviks that took over Petrograd in March, 1917.

Harriman realizes that the competition between America and Russia will continue; he believes that U.S. trade with the U.S.S.R. would open an understanding with young Russians now denied; and he is “utterly convinced that there is a trend toward greater freedom, which no one can stop.”

This is what diplomacy is about, and there is not a soft spot in Harriman’s armor.

VANDENBERG
by Oliver Lange
Stein and Day, $6.95

From time to time American novelists have tried to shock us out of our selfishness and into a more active responsibility for this great country. In 1935 when dictators were on the rampage, Sinclair Lewis tried to do it in his novel It Can’t Happen Here, and it was a failure. John Hersey, in his lachrymose story White Lotus, labored to show how appalling it would be if Red China took us over, but it became incredible. Now, in Vandenberg, an author who prefers not to use his right name has predicated his story on what the United States will be like in the late 1970s under the Russian Army of Occupation after Washington has been wiped out by germ warfare. His publishers say, “Everything in Vandenberg is fiction; everything in Vandenberg is absolutely true,” and allowing for one’s resistance to such ballyhoo, the fact remains that this is a chilling novel written with a sense of outrage, and better than the two I have mentioned because the author has had Solzhenitsyn to go on. That brave Russian novelist has told what Communism does to crush the independent spirit.

Vandenberg is a cobra of a book; let it catch your eye, and it is hard to look the other way. Gene Vandenberg, the hero, is a battered American painter, a veteran of World War II, who has been getting along painting landscapes in New Mexico, finding in his girl, Terry, and paisano wine consolation for his two lost marriages. The Occupation Military Government at first regarded him as hostile, and for a time he was brainwashed in a concentration camp; then on his release, with his hulking, retarded son, Kevin, he hides out in the mountains, living off game, wary of capture. He is ripe for revolt; how he gets his revenge is the story; and the rasp of his temper in the excerpts from his journal makes the reader wonder if Americans are really as spineless as Vandenberg believes.

THE GRANDEES:
AMERICA’S SEPHARDIC ELITE
by Stephen Birmingham
Harper & Row, $10.95

Stephen Birmingham’s new book, The Grandees, is all about the Sephardim, a small elite of American Jews whose involved and often glamorous ancestry goes back to the thirteenth century in Europe. To aid him in his research, he has drawn upon a privately printed Who’s Who, compiled by a New York scholar, Americans of Jewish Descent. The Grandees is a tapestry of family histories with a long prelude describing those Sephardic families who were the power behind the thrones of Spain and Portugal. Mr. Birmingham concedes that they made the mistake of siding with the Moors and of helping to unlock “some of the Northern fortresses.” This was not to be forgotten, and when at last under Ferdinand and Isabella the Moors were expelled, the Sephardic Jews went with them into exile.

The chronicle takes on more life as the refugees find their foothold in America. I am interested in the founding of their first synagogue, the Shearith Israel in New York, and the offshoot of it that took root in Newport. I am interested in their gamble in the slave trade, and in their divided loyalties at the time of the Revolution. But the Horatio Alger success story which brightened Mr. Birmingham’s earlier book, “Our Crowd,” is not so evident here; nor is there such beguiling idiosyncrasy. The Grandees, in the author’s hands, are stuffy in their pride and I quickly get my fill of their genealogy.