The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

A SORT OF LIFE
by Graham Greene
Simon and Schuster, $6.95

This, the first slice of Graham Greene’s autobiography, is a chronicle of the years in which he found himself: passing from unhappy boyhood, through adolescence to his adventures in Oxford, his early marriage, the publication of his first novel, when he had twenty pounds in the bank and a child on the way, and the period of failure that followed. Protracted accounts of boyhood are usually unbearable save to the few readers involved in them; what makes Graham Greene’s the exception is that he was the victim of more fears and phobias than any other boy outside the loony bin.

The little town of Berkhamsted, an hour’s train ride from London, was influenced by two big families of Greenes, the rich Greenes and the intellectual Greenes, and Graham’s father, who was a schoolmaster, was naturally in the lower order. Graham, the third of four brothers, was hypersensitive and timid. He lived with a terror of dark passages, bats, and the thought of drowning in the neighboring canal. He dreamt of shipwrecks and, with a recurring terror, that the house might catch fire at night. His father’s school was not a happy place for him, except on holidays when the boys were away and all the bookshelves were open for his gluttony. To escape the boredom of that school he tried variously to poison himself, and when the teasing and the rigor were more than he could bear, he ran away. There is of course an indulgent exaggeration in all this, but in it we do see the painfully vivid imagination and the love for escapade that he has never lost.

As a reward for his bolting, young Greene was sent to be analyzed by Kenneth Richmond in London, and here in the Richmond home in Lancaster Gate began “perhaps the happiest six months of my life.” Breakfast in bed, on a tray neatly laid, hours of private study under the trees at Kensington Gardens, London a few steps away, and Graham independent save for his daily session with his analyst. Writers came to the house: Walter de la Mare, the poet, Naomi Royde-Smith, who had published Rupert Brooke’s early poems, J. D. Beresford; and the patient, what with keeping his dream diary and his immersion in history, forgot his scars in his search for himself.

On his return to the school, he was different and so was it; in his friendships with Peter Quennell and Claud Cockburn, he found an exhilaration to counterbalance the letdown from London, and the deep boredom which “would pursue me all my life.” At Oxford, where he edited an undergraduate paper and was striving for an honors degree, he was troubled by sex and, naturally enough, uncertain of his ability. His poems, even when published, did not deceive him. He had his periods of heavy drinking, and when at the mercy of his moods he would play Russian roulette with a live cartridge in one of the six chambers, the trigger always clicked. Eventually the revolver was abandoned, but this gambling with his life became a habit—as he foretells his reckless trek through Liberia, the dangerous journeys to Tabasco in Mexico and to the Congo, and the secret service he performed in Malaya and during the French war in Vietnam. His marriage to Vivien, a Roman Catholic, and his conversion were the saving grace of an adventurer who, however defeated, had the persistence to become one of the abler writers of our day.

UPSTATE
by Edmund Wilson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95

“Is the writing of this Talcottville book a last effort to fill a vacuum?” asks Edmund Wilson in the prologue to his new volume, and the answer is “yes,” but an effort worth making. Upstate celebrates the history and family traditions of Stone House, that capacious, sturdy mansion of limestone whose white-pillared verandahs provideshade and an air of intimacy to an otherwise stern facade. Here Mr. Wilson’s forebears have long dwelt, and here since the death of his mother in 1951 he has spent much of each spring and summer reading and writing, conjuring up the past, and inviting the spirit when alone.

Upstate is a medley: there are a few fixed pieces, such as the sprightly account of the religious movements which originated in northern New York in the latter half of the nineteenth century; there are character sketches of writers—Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, Walter Edmonds, Vladimir Nabokov, Van Wyck Brookssome biting, some appreciative; and in the main a running commentary disclosing, in a journalistic self-portrait, the pride, the curiosity, the neighborliness, the maladies and fundamental happiness of being a literary squire in this tiny pocket.

If Mr. Wilson did not write so well, and if he did not have such amusing crotchets and such discerning insight, this book would be parochial. I soon gave up the struggle to separate the perpetrators of the family feuds, and of minor interest is the decrepitude of Mr. Wilson’s neighbors and his own occasional bouts with dentistry, drinking, malaria, and gout. But strewn through the medley are rewarding passages: his castigation of John Foster Dulles; his jaunty, competitive visit with Nabokov; his anger about what the young vandals are doing, even in that remote section; his comparison, so often reinforced by Elena, his wife, of the cowfragrant peace of Talcottville with the exhilaration of his other home at Wellfleet on Cape Cod; and above all the patience and love with which he has refurbished this stronghold.

DEATH OF THE FOX
by George Garrett
Doubleday, $10.00

The fox in George Garrett’s long novel is Sir Walter Raleigh, probably the most versatile of the favorites of Queen Elizabeth: he was a good poet, a daring seaman, the owner of two splendid houses, Sherbourne in Dorset and Durham House, from whose study he surveyed the world of the Thames, a man of style, who, highly articulate, made enemies with his tongue, and a gambler who took chances that got him into trouble. His marriage to Bess Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, was a lasting one, but it infuriated the Queen and landed Raleigh in the Tower, where he was to spend more time than he did at sea. His hatred of Spain and his blazing performance at Winchester, where he successfully pled for his life, turned James I against him, and his execution was a foregone conclusion. While he waited in the Tower, he composed his fascinating history of the world.

Death of the Fox is the story of the last three days leading up to Raleigh’s beheading, told in endless passages of retrospect by the principal actors involved: King James, Sir Henry Yelverton, the nervous, unworthy Attorney General, and most extensively, of course, by Sir Walter himself. The author has steeped himself in the vitality of Elizabeth’s court as he has in the deathly debilitation in the Tower; he admires the valiance of Sir Walter’s spirit, and with a colorful imagination and mellifluous prose he comes close to capturing the atmosphere of the past. But as a scheme I do not believe his novel succeeds. There is a serious risk in committing so much of the story to what has transpired in the past. The long tape of retrospect slowly unwinds from the great drum of the book with such brief interludes of direct action and with such confusion in chronology and in identification that the main actors come to assume a pose, as in Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, and their vitality vanishes.

THEY CALL IT A GAME
by Bernie Parrish
Dial, $7.50

Professional football, which monopolizes the television screen from the kickoff Friday night to the last play Monday evening, has proved to be a gold mine to the networks, to the sports owners, but not, according to Bernie Parrish, to the players, who take the beating.

Bernie Parrish was one of four children whose parents were divorced when he was six, and he soon realized that his only way up and out of Gainesville, Florida, would be an athletic scholarship, leading him into professional baseball or football. He was “average size, a little on the thin side from running too much and eating too little”; he was ten and all of ninety-four pounds when, as tailback on the Golden Leopards, he threw fifteen touchdown passes and ran for another sixteen touchdowns as the Leopards won the junior-league championship. By the time he was ready for college, he had won the reputation for being one of the fiercest tacklers in Florida. As a candidate for All-American in both football and baseball, he left college to sign a $30,000-plus bonus contract with the Cincinnati Redlegs, but the minor leagues didn’t appeal to him, he couldn’t get his mind off football, and when the Cleveland Browns picked him as a rookie, he returned the unearned half of his bonus, and staked everything on football.

Parrish loved playing; his speed, fierceness, and intelligence made him one of the best defensive cornerbacks in the business, and under Paul Brown’s coaching, he was one of the main reasons why Cleveland won the world championship for 1964. He was elected to be the players’ representative and then set out to organize the Players Association into a union with real bargaining power. At this point he was blacklisted, and as his suspicions mounted, the game turned sour. Parrish’s description of professionals in training and in action, of the injuries and the doctors, of the punishment given and taken, and of the exhilaration of a winning team is the best that has been written, and I understand that he did most of the writing himself.

The crusading half of his book is a rugged indictment of how the billiondollar monopoly of television, the owners, the coaches, and the press create a front which denies the possibility of unionization, opposes a fair cut of the annual profits for the players’ pensions (the average playing expectancy is eleven years), and of how they rule out the rebels as Parrish himself was erased. Parrish names names and figures, and those who are prepared to believe him will look more cynically at the spectacle this autumn.

THE CONDOR PASSES
by Shirley Ann Grau
Knopf, $7.95

The Old Man, as everyone called Thomas Henry Oliver, is the highflying great ruffian in Shirley Ann Grau’s hard-fisted and immensely convincing novel. The Condor Passes. Oliver, when he deserted his mother’s farm at thirteen, was over six feet, very broad and muscular, with shining black eyes and fresh, high coloring. Money was what he was after, any way he could get it, even as a pickpocket or pimp. Sex meant little to him; he took it where he found it. He was seventeen when he reached the West Coast, and for the next ten years he crisscrossed the Pacific trading in anything that could be smuggled: quinine, opium, women, and guns. He acquired fluent Spanish and a smattering of Chinese, survived malaria in Malaya, and when he swam ashore to escape smallpox on the ship carrying him to New Orleans, his money belt was intact. His mother had been buying farms with what he sent her; now he asked her to sell them for the cash he needed.

For the next sixty years, New Orleans was the Old Man’s bonanza: bootlegging, brothels, casinos, a hotel, and a department store serviced by the ferret-faced men he could trust built up his fortune, and when he turned respectable he doubled it in the Depression. For a wife he picked the quiet, gentle Stephanie D’Alfonso, a seventeen-year-old Italian, whose recurring pregnancies kept raising his hopes for the son he wanted. Their marriage is the least credible episode in the book. Anne, his eldest, who was to be more beautiful than her mother, and Margaret, his tomboy, made up his family after his wife’s death, plus Robert, the big blond Cajun whom he virtually adopted, and Stanley, his obedient black chauffeur; they are his dependents and then his bodyguard as his heart begins to weaken and the strokes knock him down but not out.

The Old Man had a genius for conglomerates before that term became fashionable, and the pith of the novel is the reptilian fascination of big money and its poisoning effect on those who will sacrifice anything for it. Margaret, who has inherited her father’s ability, asks, “Would you believe that sometimes I dream that money’s like the yeast bread we learned to make in the convent, growing big and fat and swelling all out of the pans and bowls? Like it was alive, growing and creeping and walking. Like it was taking over the earth.” The Old Man laughed. “It does, and it is.”