The Peripatetic Reviewer

DOCTOR BRODIE’S REPORT
by Jorge Luis Borges; translated by
Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Dutton, $5.95

Jorge Luis Borges is an Argentinian and the most poetic and polished writer in the Spanish-speaking world. He was born in Buenos Aires, the son of an intellectual with means to do what he most wanted. His education was Swiss and then Spanish, and he was so well grounded in English (one of his grandparents came from Northumberland) that he could quote Kipling, Conrad, and Chesterton by the yard. When he returned to Argentina and began to write, he drew from many cultures, in his poems and in the dark, haunting, sometimes funny, often cryptic short stories

Borges’ great-great-grandfather. great-grandfather, grandfather, and father all slowly went blind, and his sight began to fade in his fifties. When he came to Harvard to lecture in 1967, he could not see, and his writing had ceased. In Cambridge he found a friend and translator in Norman Thomas di Giovanni, with whose aid he has dictated the eleven realistic stories in this remarkable collection. They were modeled, so Borges tells us in his enchanting Preface, on a series of straightforward, laconic tales written by young Kipling in 1885. But there are, of course, differences. In the first place, the writing and the translation, except in one case, were simultaneous, the story taking shape in English directly and vigorously as it was spoken in Spanish. And because Borges is now in his seventies, it is natural for his stories to take the form of reminiscences, folktales told and retold, which he recalls and embellishes with an emphasis and aftermath that appeal to him. In these days when so much nonselective, no-style fiction gluts the American market, the cool clarity and force of Borges’ prose hits one like a shower bath in August

He reveres ancestors, and they appear in his narratives. He weaves in the old haunts of Buenos Aires which he knew as a boy, the knife-play of the gaucho, the things that were told him by a barfly, a fawning shopkeeper, or his elderly aunt. So Borges takes an episode, stark and elusive, and with the sight of his imagination and his urbane knowledge of human nature, he builds it up into one of those tight, unforgettable tales that tell so much in so little. In his Preface, he expresses the fear that he may have spoiled some of them “with the changes that my fancy or my reason judged fitting. But after all,” he says, “writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”

I agree with the author that “The Gospel According to Mark” is the best; I like “The Elder Lady” for its shimmer of history, “The Intruder” and “The End of the Duel” for their dramatic conclusions, and “The Meeting” for the skill with which the knives become human. All have the rare touch of literary distinction

THE NAIVE & SENTIMENTAL LOVER
by John LeCarré
Knopf, $7.95

John LeCarré, the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, is an authority on counterespionage. But his new novel is a riotous story of Man’s Lib with gloriously funny passages for those who like satire and who will not mind searching through the slough of four-letter words to find the fun. The man liberated is the fairhaired, handsome Aldo Cassidy, a British manufacturer of prams who at thirty-eight has built up a comfortable fortune which he finds it difficult to enjoy. His pleasures are his two sons and his very special Bentley; his displeasures are his father, a braggart and a leech, his wife, Sandra, who makes him feel impotent, and her mother, who lives with them and whom at times he would gladly exterminate. Ever since he came down from Oxford, Aldo has had romantic notions of what he would do if he were less circumspect: make love to his secretary, have his fling in Paris, prove to his wife and to her sentimental friend, Heather Ast, that he is a man of parts and not a mouse

The story opens as Aldo, in his sleek, prestigious Bentley, is driving alone to Somerset for a private look at Haverdown, described by the agents as “a fortified manor house and keep,” which he is tempted to purchase and restore. To his surprise, he is greeted not by the agent but by a witty Irishman who introduces himself as Shamus and whose young wife, Helen, beautiful but naked, with a towel on her arm, was evidently on her way to take a bath. It appears that they had been burning the furniture to keep themselves warm, and Aldo takes them to be the disreputable heirs. But whiskey brings out the truth. They are squatters who go from one empty house to another. Shamus, as Helen explains, is not Irish; he is a Jew with a gift for mimicry and a greater gift for writing. After the smashing success of his first novel, The Moon by Day, he has gone on the bottle, and in basic English, which LeCarré never uses, this is the beginning of the plot. The excitement to come is how Shamus the chameleon, and the seductive Helen, take Aldo for a ride which lasts for several months, as Aldo sheds his inhibitions with all expenses charged to his Company. Shamus when sober is unpredictably funny, and when drunk a torment and a bore. But one must put up with his rampages, as Cassidy so patiently does, in order to arrive at the really skillful scenes in this bizarre book: the first night at Haverdown, the dinner party with Cassidy’s doctor which made me laugh aloud, and the evening of liberation at the Savoy

HIGH ARCTIC: An Expedition to the Unspoiled North
by George Miksch Sutton
Eriksson, $12.95

When he was fourteen or fifteen, so George Miksch Sutton tells us in his Foreword, he got stuck while crawling through a hollow log in Texas after a turkey vulture’s nest. The log lay in a north-south direction, and as he was held fast near the south end, the only way to go was northward, pushing, pulling, and losing his buttons until he emerged an hour later. He has been going north ever since. As in the log, so in maturity he has traveled with an insatiable curiosity about birds and, what is more, with an ability to paint them. After his service as an Air Force officer in the Second World War, planes took him where boats could not, and his delight in exploration, his speculation in observing wildlife, his geniality as a companion in cramped and dangerous places have been beautifully recorded in this account of his most recent trip to “the unspoiled north,” where he was one of eight scientists pursuing their different quests on uninhabited Bathurst Island, halfway between the Arctic Circle and the northernmost lands known to man

Bathurst in June and July was a treeless preserve across whose vast stretches of snow and tundra one could through binoculars watch muskoxen, Peary’s caribou, white wolves, horned snowy owls and the big white hares which eluded them, long-tailed jaegers, rock ptarmigan, ivory gulls, oldsquaw, and King eiders. Sutton was here to paint, and eleven of his lovely canvases have been well reproduced. To hold his end up in the community, he volunteered to cook, though not always as appetizingly as Pierre Lamothe, their regular chef (“my biscuits tasted of soda; and my flapjacks were either as pale as chamois skin and sticky inside, or crisp and black”). But his main contribution was as a veteran watcher, on whose experience the younger men could sharpen their own judgment. Dave Gray was making an intensive study of the muskoxen; Stu MacDonald was studying the courtship behavior of the ptarmigan; Dave Parmelee was watching for the sanderlings he had banded the year before. Phil Taylor had been stalking the nest of a pair of snowy owls and was sure they had horns; Sutton was not, and the controversy raged. One night after an especially good dinner, Phil gave an imitation of a male owl presenting a lemming to his mate; of her acceptance with lowered head wagging solemnly, of her standing straight, shaking out the long plumage of her underparts, and, finally, of her settling on the eggs with a smug, self-satisfied look. The hut almost caved in with laughter

The vignettes are excellent: the old bull muskox waiting for his death, the huskies that pummeled the author as if he were a pillow, the wolves who came so close in their curiosity, the lemmings on their supper table eating crumbs and nipping fingers

THE DOUBLE-CROSS SYSTEM IN THE WAR OF 1939 TO 1945
by J. C. Masterman
Yale University Press, $6.95

It may be the British renown for integrity that makes them, when need be, such masters of duplicity. In the Second World War the most imaginative success of British Intelligence was the operation of double agents, Europeans of whatever country, who came to England by boat, submarine, or aircraft as spies, and who were either captured and converted, or voluntarily became agents for the British. The most reliable continued to receive Nazi funds and directions, and continued to return by wireless, or letter, the information they were asked for—much of it accurate but the most important part deceptively untrue

Sir John Masterman, a university don and an enthusiastic cricketer, was the mastermind in this intelligent, delicate operation, and the British brought to it a care and coordination which made them the best in the business. Sir John discusses the methods by which the double agents were first tested and then, if they proved worthy, primed; he describes the manner in which the British network experimented with the German Intelligence to see if what was being sent from Britain was believed; and most fascinating of all, he depicts the double agents with their wonderful code names, Garbo, Snow, Celery, Midas, Dragonfly, Sweet William, Tricycle, Balloon, Mutt and Jeff, and that rare woman, Gelatine. Each double agent had his British guardian, intimately familiar with the case, and in 1940-1941 the feedback strongly exaggerated Britain’s home defense. Gradually light dawned that the German Abwehr were not only gullible but increasingly under British control

As Britain passed to the offensive, the necessity for deception increased. Now it was the Allied invasions which must be disguised: Duff Cooper in his novel, Operation Heartbreak, dramatized how the Germans were misled about the invasion of Sicily. Masterman exposes the intricacies of deception which, thanks to trusted double agents, made the Germans believe that Operation Overlord would be aimed at the Pas de Calais, not at Cherbourg—and held them to that belief even after the Omaha landings. The reading is complicated by the irritating, though necessary, military initials, but the chapters describing the agents and the major operations are engrossing and authoritative