The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

THE WINDS OF WAR
by Herman Wouk
Little, Brown, $10.00

Herman Wouk is a compelling narrator who uses large canvases and who, without much fuss for style or symbolism, drives his story ahead with an infectious belief in the people he is writing about. In each of his big books there have been unforgettable characters: Captain Queeg and his rebellious subordinate, Willie Keith, in The Caine Mutiny; Marjorie Morningstar in the book she dominates; and now the three who capture our interest in The Winds of War, which is intended to show the irreversible forces closing into the death grip of the Second World War.

The story takes hold in the spring of 1939, and most skillfully the author deploys the five members of the Henry family so that their entwined careers dramatize the ominous and emotional crises of the Hitler years. Commander Victor Henry, a fullback known as “Pug” at the Naval Academy, is four-square, highly observant, tight-lipped; he expects the obedience of his wife. Rhoda, and his three grown children. Pug himself has made an impeccable record, first in destroyers, later as a gunnery redhot, and with his report recommending that the blisters be thickened on the battleships. Now, against his wishes, he is being sent as a naval attaché to Berlin, with Rhoda angrily but competently packing, as a navy wife should. Their oldest son, Warren, who emulates Pug, is on his way to Pensacola to train as a navy pilot; Madeline, their daughter, fed up with college, is being tried out as an assistant for a CBS commentator; and Byron, the youngest, a redhead and the only one who defies Pug, has been languidly researching in Florence under a famous Jewish expatriot, with a hot eye on the old man’s niece, Natalie Jastrow.

The first of the three who make the story live for me is Pug, a combination of Admiral King and Jim Forrestal. His reports from Berlin in which he anticipates the pact with Russia catch the eye of FDR, and in no time he is being sent on confidential missions to Rome and Moscow, where he makes jokes with Stalin in bad Russian. Pug is Navy to the teeth, with no “grease” but plenty of ability, and so correct and lucky that I wish he would stub his toe. Of the youngsters, Byron, who either offends or disappoints his father, attracts us with his uncertainty: he is looking for an answer, not sure what he will do if war comes, certain only of his passion for Natalie, whom he follows to Crakow and Warsaw at the time of the invasion. Natalie is a quixotic, impulsive Jewess, arrogantly intelligent, hard and bright, with an inner warmth she is slow to yield. I count her the best-drawn character in the big book.

The author’s foreword explains that the military treatise by General Armin von Roon, which Pug eventually translates, “is offered as a professional German view of the other side of the hill,” and it is indeed a consistently sustained apologia, the irony of which is not lost. This imaginary document seems to be much more plausible than Pug’s intimacy with FDR and his almost faultless conduct with the other heads of state.

THE WYETHS. The Letters of N. C.
Wyeth, 1901-1945. Illustrated.
Edited by Betsy James Wyeth
Gambit, $ 17.50

One opens any large volume of unpublished letters with the question, “Why must I?” The reason why one should peruse the correspondence of N. C. Wyeth is the man himself. Starting from scratch, his talent was nourished by Howard Pyle. He outgrew his master-illustrator; he resisted the influence of the Abstractionists, and in his maturity became the inspirator of the most distinguished American atelier of our time, including his son-in-law, the painter Peter Hurd, his son, Andrew Wyeth, and his grandson, Jamie. Finally, N. C. Wyeth’s letters, the best to his mother and brother, are rich with color, informal, affectionate, and as observant as Thoreau, whom he admired greatly.

The letters are edited by Andrew Wyeth’s wife, Betsy. She resented her father-in-law’s possessive hold on the family; he seemed to her “a force to be challenged and overcome.” After Mr. Wyeth’s untimely death in a railroad accident in 1945, she dipped into the letters, became immersed in discovering the man she had little known, and emerged to edit the final selection with her remorse, “Forgive my foolish heart.”

Each reader must chart his own course in a volume as large as this. I began reading in 1910, when he had finished his training in Pennsylvania and was illustrating for Scribner’s, both for the magazine and for authors as popular as Conan Doyle and Mary Johnston. He is twenty-eight; his rent for house and studio combined is $23.50 a month. It is August: “The foliage hangs limp and soft like dampened paper. The very birds seem to fly sluggishly through the oppressive atmosphere and their calls seem dull and muffled in the thick air—but no rain!” He tells his mother that he is wild to borrow $5000 with which to buy time, and adds, “My work will consist of persistent study from nature; landscape, figures, portraiture and still life. I shall indulge in practical work only so far as I can dispose of the serious work finished.”

Many of his letters are illustrated, but the prose itself is as alive as blood, as in the prophetic account of his sitting in the smoker by an open window when the train to New York ran down and killed two men. Again, I like his terseness: “It’s interesting how far a man can see from home”; and in an analytical mood, I like the account of his winter in Boston in 1922: “[Charles] Hopkinson is the one man from whom I have received any truly constructive help. He is now in the struggle to pull himself out of the suffocating atmosphere of the ‘intellectualists’ . . . Chas. W. Elliot and his cousin, John Sargent—both of whom I can see (although he will not admit it) pall on him. His struggle, which is a real one, is very exhilarating to me, for in the process of fermentation Hopkinson radiates a most inspiriting tonic.” The kind of tonic Wyeth himself has given to two generations.

EDITH WHARTON: A WOMAN IN HER TIME
by Louis Auchincloss
Viking, $10.00

The art of depicting American society, its loyalties and limitations, its manners and its morals, as it exists in Boston, Newport, and New York, has descended in a direct line from Henry James to Edith Wharton to Louis Auchincloss. Here, then, is a penetrating, well-judged, not unsympathetic characterization of the strong-jawed “Pussy” Jones, who educated herself to become the dowager-duchess of American fiction. The author calls his portrait A Woman in Her Time, and the 110 illustrations, so beautifully reproduced, enable us to see the decorative habitat, the ineffectual husband (childless, he is always photographed holding an armful of puppies), and the luxury with which Edith Wharton surrounded herself.

Mr. Auchincloss reminds us that “childhood is a novelist’s whole capital.” Edith was born on West Twentythird Street in New York in 1862; her mother was a Rhinelander; her father. George Frederic Jones, was well-to-do but not wealthy. Gossip attributed the girl’s keen intelligence to the English tutor of her older brothers, but the biographer scoffs at this talk of illegitimacy. In Boston (her husband’s city), Edith said that she “was considered too fashionable to be intelligent and in New York too intelligent to be fashionable.” Not pretty, but stylish and vivacious, she must have been flattered when Teddy Wharton, a sportsman twelve years her senior, fell in love with her. He was fond of horses, shooting, and motoring, but as his glamour faded and it was plain they could not have children, it was she who began forcing her way out of the rut.

Edith was sixteen when she published anonymously her first slim collection of mediocre verse. She was no poet; but as she matured she read avidly, and in 1893, when Paul Bourget visited Newport gathering material for his book on the United States, he sketched the “intellectual tomboy,” for which Edith Wharton might have been the subject. Teddy could not keep pace with her. On a train ride, she noted in her secret journal, when she showed him a striking passage in R. H. Lock’s study of heredity and variation, he commented as he handed the book back: “Does that sort of thing really amuse you?”

When in 1901 her mother died, Edith was free to spend her family inheritance on the new frenzy of motoring abroad—it was her one remaining bond with Teddy—and to build and decorate The Mount, her elaborate country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, modeled on a famous manor by Christopher Wren. Her trips to London and Paris won her the friendship of Howard Sturgis; Gaillard Lapsley, the Cambridge don; Percy Lubbock, the critic; Henry James, whom she worshiped; and Walter Berry, the friend of Proust and a sophisticated Paris bachelor whom she loved. With the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905, she began her ascendancy as the novelist of fashionable New York; but her need for intellectual stimulus severed her marriage, and with her divorce she became an expatriate.

Mr. Auchincloss is an understanding critic of her work, as he is of her life abroad: he thinks Walter Berry was not her lover, with which I am inclined to disagree; he has caught to the life her teasing devotion to Henry James; he shows her as the bossy, conscientious hostess impatient with Bernard Berenson, who would not attend her picnics because he wanted to nap after lunch. He smiles at her “spiritual fortress,” the two large estates in France, one for winter and one for summer, served by nineteen loyal retainers, where she held court and turned out book after book.

Iris Origo, who met Mrs. Wharton late in life, describes her as “elegant, formidable, as hard and dry as porcelain.” As her biographer rightly says, “the four perfect little stories that make up Old New York ” were the final evocation of the life she once knew. Mrs. Wharton did not lose her zest to interpret the age in which she lived; there were many things in it that angered her, but even before her last decade, exile had severed her from American reality.

THE NIGHT COUNTRY
by Loren Eiseley
Scribner’s, $6.95

The cult of the archaeologist was confined to the wealthy few in the nineteenth century, and what they dug up and removed has not yet been returned to the countries of origin. Lord Elgin, with his marble from the Acropolis, Thompson in what he recovered from the Sacred Well in Chichén Itzá, are but two who cast a spell which reached the universities and eventually the reading public. Even in our time, when moon rockets have swung everyone’s attention to outer space, “no great civilization,” as Loren Eiseley says, “ever before has been more self-consciously aware of the possible doom that confronts it or more curious about those brother thinkers and artists who carved the gods that lie now in temples visited by rain. . . .” We know, from what Eiseley has written here and elsewhere, that he is an explorer of caves and tombs. The dark does not phase him any more than the insomnia with which he has learned to live. He quotes Dr. Zakaria Goneim, the Egyptian archaeologist: “You crawl along some dark corridor on hands and knees, past falls of rock; the light of the lamp gleams on minute crystals in the stratified walls . . . and suddenly you realize you are alone in a place which has not heard a footfall for nearly fifty centuries.”

Like Emerson, Dr. Eiseley is a philosopher whose epigrammatic sentences are clues leading to the unknown. His sentences tantalize the imagination; they lead me on, but his essays in form are elusive. There is no cumulative argument in The Night Country; rather, he walks around Jericho in his talkative way, looking at the ground, turning up an artifact here, another there until gradually the walls recede. With flashes of light he punctures the darkness.