The Peripatetic Reviewer
THE DAY OF THE JACKAL by Frederick Forsyth Viking $7.95
Sunday, August 25, 1963, was scorching hot. It was the height of the summer heat wave with Paris on holiday to celebrate its liberation from the Germans nineteen years earlier. This was the day on which President Charles de Gaulle with his customary disdain for security measures would attend a succession of ceremonies beginning at the Arc de Triomphe, sweeping down the Champs Elysées toward Notre Dame, and finally to the Place du 18 Juin where he would pin the Médaille de la Libération upon ten veterans. It was also, according to Frederick Forsyth, a new English novelist, the day on which the seventh and closest attempt would be made to assassinate le Grand Charles. That the attempt failed we know, for the great man in his grandeur died in bed; what makes Mr. Forsyth’s novel such a cliff-hanger is the skill and cool daring with which the assassin came so close.
By the spring of 1963 the leaders of the OAS, that rebellious fragment of the French Army who hated De Gaulle for having pulled France out of Indochina and Algeria, were living in exile at low ebb. Their earlier attempts to kill the President had failed, their funds were drying up as the industrialists of the Right were losing their willingness to contribute, and only by an extraordinary rash of bombing raids on jewelry shops and branch banks were they able to raise the half million francs, the price demanded by the Jackal, the nom de plume of a well-turned-out blond Englishman, a professional killer without an ounce of pity. They met with him first inconspicuously in Vienna, and again in their carefully guarded hideout in Rome where the Jackal’s terms were agreed to and the first money passed, and with that he went into action. There the story begins, and any reviewer who discloses what takes place beyond this point should himself be bumped off.
The Day of the Jackal invites instant comparison with Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, which I think the finest suspense story of my time. Mr. Household’s hero was a British aristocrat, a big-game hunter, who with his favorite rifle stalked Berchtesgaden and actually had Hitler in his sights when a fleck of ice and a falling pebble behind him warned that the SS guard was closing in. In this case the hunter was the character who held our sympathy; tortured and given up for dead, he managed to recuperate, and on his return to his home ground, England, he evaded and finally eliminated the thugs who had been sent after him, and was all ready for a second try. In The Day of the Jackal, although we watch with fascination what the killer is doing —his airy success with women, his forethought with passports and costumes whose purpose we can only guess at—it is not he, for all his style, who holds our affection. He is too ruthless. The man we watch, who could easily be confused with a provident little rentier, is Commissioner Claude Lebel, the most persistent, down-to-earth detective in France, to whom the government has given extraordinary powers as the Jackal evades trap after trap and his presence is guessed at in Paris.
In any good novel of suspense there must be interludes of relaxation, and it is here that the exceptional writer reveals himself. Geoffrey Household in his interludes proclaims his love of England, his wry, sometimes irritated understanding of English character, his respect for order; Frederick Forsyth in what he shows us of himself in the interludes, when the Jackal is relishing life, not destroying it, is a lover of France. As a student of the French he knows the formal channels and the Système D. through which the Republic achieves its ends, and he has a quite beguiling knowledge of the French Secret Service, especially of the Corsicans, the hundred toughs of the Action Service who are expert with small arms, karate, and judo. In the years leading up to the appointment of the Jackal, there had been a terrorist war between the Action Service and the OAS; now in this truly thrilling story it narrows down to a duel between two men, fought through the provinces and brought to a head in the hot beauty of Paris in August.
THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts Stein and Day, $7.95
San Francisco is one of the four most beautiful cities in the United States and the only one which lives in danger, some think in imminent danger, of an earthquake comparable to that which devastated the town in the early morning of April 18, 1906. As Bret Harte once said, San Francisco is “serene, indifferent to Fate.” Six times prior to 1906 the heart of the city had been burnt out, the flames fanned by a strong wind coming in from the sea; but it was the convulsive opening of the earth’s crust flattening the frame houses, crumbling the reinforced concrete and steel, and severing the water mains which brought on the fire that could not be checked. All of this occurred because the San Andreas Fault, “one of the great fractures of the world,” passes within eight miles of the center of San Francisco.
For years, according to Gordon Thomas and his collaborator Max Morgan Witts, the pressure has been steadily mounting along the fault, and no one can tell when that pressure will be too great for the bedrock to withstand. The area now is much more thickly populated than it was sixty-five years ago. “On the average,” say the authors, “one thousand people settle on or near the San Andreas Fault each day,” their consolation, if they think about it, being that next time there may be a quicker warning and that water power and the knowledge of demolition gained in two world wars should prevent the fire from spreading so far.
It is asking too much of the gods that a Pompeii should be ready for its fate, but the first thing one learns from the Thomas-Witts graphic history of the catastrophe is how unready and politically corrupt San Francisco was at the turn of the century. Mayor Eugene Schmitz was a weakling under the thumb and bribery of Abe Ruef. The fire department had a vigilant chief in Dennis Sullivan, who had been thirteen years on the job; but without funds there was little he could do to meet the Fire Underwriters report stating that the “distributing pipe system is inadequate to meet the demands for water flow necessary to fight a conflagration.” Brigadier General Frederick Funston, who commanded the Presidio garrison, was equally furious with the mayor; he had persuaded the War Department to accept the fire chief’s scheme for a dynamite squad, but the mayor would not appropriate the thousand dollars necessary to house the charge.
It has taken years, many investigations, and countless interviews with survivors to bring the picture of the gay and vulnerable city so clearly into focus. And gay the city truly was with the French restaurants on Jackson Street living up to their naughty reputation, with Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland packing in huge crowds, with young John Barrymore in town just having ended a short run in The Dictator, and with Enrico Caruso starring in Carmen the night before it all happened. Caruso was having a temperamental bout with the Metropolitan Opera Company on this Western trip despite the $1350 he was receiving for each performance. The night he played Carmen, he wore a six-shooter under his cummerbund, and except for the placation of Antonio Scotti and Alfred Hertz, the conductor, he might never have stepped on stage.
The chicken-headed mayor called in a committee of fifty leading citizens who talked and passed resolutions, but it was General Funston who took command of the defenses. His regulars were ordered to shoot the looters on sight, which they did. His dynamite squads blew up building after building in an effort to create a chasm across which the flames could not travel, and his field artillery for the last stand were trained point blank at the elegant houses on Van Ness Avenue. By dint of extraordinary exertions, the Mint and the Post Office were saved; so were other small pockets while, flanked by flames, refugees pelted down Market Street to the Ferry, dragging or carrying the most incongruous objects.
In their professional and very human way Messrs. Thomas and Witts have pieced together a mosaic of courage, compassion, ingenuity, and the miraculous in the course of which men and women rise to the occasion: Eda Funston in the Presidio hospital, Father Ramm at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Lieutenant Armstrong at the Mint, A. P. Giannini saving the gold and silver of what was to be the Bank of America, Bailey Millard, the artist, helping to save the handful of houses on Russian Hill, beating out flames with one of his canvases. Dr. Alfred Spalding still on his feet after thirtysix hours of almost continuous surgery.
Fire and dynamite destroyed 28,000 buildings, but the new city was going up even as the sparks subsided. Mayor Schmitz’s one firm command was to call off the sappers and artillery which had been adding recklessly to the ruin; and Funston calmed down the guardsmen who, triggerhappy, had been doing looting on their own. But the quake also laid bare the bribery in City Hall, and in the investigations, Ruef, the mayor’s bagman, was sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin where, before his pardon, he had time to write his memoirs; and Schmitz, incriminated and brought to trial, was acquitted when Ruef refused to give the evidence.
The photographs of the disaster, especially those by Arnold Genthe, with their stunned, dramatic quality, stress the questions: will this happen again; why is there only one fireboat in San Francisco Bay today; with what risk does the subway tunnel through the San Andreas Fault?
FIRE SERMON by Wright Morris Harper & Row, $5.95
Wright Morris is at his best when writing about Middle America—the middle class and the Midwest—and in this new short novel he is sensitively comparing the present and the past, and the maladjusted in each. The story comes to us through the eyes of an innocent, a boy of eleven, whose parents were wiped out in an automobile accident as they were driving to the State Fair in Sacramento. There were only two aged relatives to care for Kermit when he recovered from his broken back, and in the upshot his great aunt Viola, herself an invalid, thought it best that he move in with his uncle Floyd Warner who is eighty-two and who lives in a trailer colony on the California coast. His misfortune has taught Kermit to accept what comes and to hold his tongue when in doubt, but it has not dulled his sense of expectation, nor his desire to be loved. The story opens after they have been living together for fourteen months, establishing a somewhat wary understanding and affection for each other.
Uncle Floyd has had his trailer on blocks since 1941, and his old Maxwell, also on blocks, has become a vintage showpiece which he could sell for several thousand if he wanted the money, which he doesn’t. His is the neatest trailer in the colony, and his economy revolves about Mrs. Leidy, the court owner, whose watchdog and handyman he is. Floyd is a bachelor, set in his ways, with a strain of rage in his temperament which traces back to his father whom he hated and which he expresses in long and fluent cursing. His sister Viola had written to the boy: “No one curses so elegantly as dear Floyd.”
For all that he had taken refuge in California, Floyd lived with the conviction that no man on whom the snow did not fall was worth a damn, and when the telegram comes from Chapman, Nebraska, announcing Viola’s death and asking what to do about the homestead, he decides to drive back taking young Kermit with him.
Highway travel has changed greatly since he came west in 1941; the Maxwell even when overhauled is barely able to make 35 mph, and the trailer develops a wobbly wheel requiring constant repair. The trip east at an average of 90 miles a day is the adventure in the book, and what they find at journey’s end is enough to drive the old man apoplectic. On their way they keep passing a pair of hippies, a Weatherman and a sexy blonde who somehow always manage to get ahead of them, and eventually Uncle Floyd gives in and takes them aboard in the rear of the trailer, much to the boy’s curiosity. The scenes between the choleric oldster and the irrepressible wanderers, with the boy wide-eyed, taking it all in, are the best in the book. And the tally of the past that awaits the four when they arrive at the farm is both grim and accurate. The pity of collecting all those things.