The Peripatetic Reviewer
THE HOUSE OF LIFE:
Rachel Carson at Work
by
Houghton Mifflin, $8.95
In The House of Life Paul Brooks, Rachel Carson’s friend and editor at the close of her career, has written an admirable but guarded account of her life, with special emphasis on her accumulating force as a writer and conservationist; and he has selected from the five books she published and from her fugitive pieces proof that she was as eloquent a marine biologist as William Beebe and more lion-hearted.
Someone once called Miss Carson “a nun of nature.” As a very young woman she supported herself and her mother by working for the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, and on holidays she found her happiness in exploring a beach or a tidal pool and watching the shorebirds she knew so well. In her quiet evenings her mind was stirred by Moby Dick, The Sea and the Jungle by H. M. Tomlinson, Henry Beston’s Outermost House, and the stories of an English naturalist, Henry Williamson, who for a time lived as a hermit on the Devon moors. His Hawthornden prize book, Tarka the Otter, with its brilliant description of the otter’s life on land and in water, became the model for her first book, Under The Sea-Wind (1941), in which she chose for her heroes a black skimmer, the mackerel, and the eel. She was not dissuaded by its failure, but her new job in the Fish and Wildlife Service was demanding, and it was not until ten years later, after her research at Woods Hole and the prodding of Will Beebe that she at last captured an international readership with The Sea Around Us.
In the office she was a person of light and humor; she brought zest and reverence for life to whatever she did or wrote, and in her imaginative essays on “The Birth of an Island” or “The Clam” or “Our Ever Changing Shore,” she blends the feeling of a poet with the observation of a scientist. She was a slow writer, averaging five hundred words a day, and it was her outrage at what pesticides were doing to the birds she loved—and to how much else?—that provoked her climactic book. The long research, the persistence against grief and illness, and the courage which went into the making of Silent Spring Mr. Brooks has told magnificently, with scorn for those who wrote her off as “hysterical” and ignorantly or deliberately refused to acknowledge the folly of drenching this country with DDT. This is a timely book and an earnest one.
THE BOYS OF SUMMER
by
Harper & Row, $6.95
One of the younger alumni of the sports page is Roger Kahn, born in Brooklyn and brought up by a father who doted on professional baseball and by a mother who read James Joyce aloud. As the only son of intelligent parents, Roger matured with an ambition to write and with an adoration for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The New York Yankees were then the killers, the conquering Romans, and the Brooklyn Dodgers were the talented, ill-fated Greeks. Thanks to his brilliance as a reporter, in 1952 when he was just twenty-one, Roger Kahn got his heart’s desire to cover the Dodgers in training camp and throughout the long season for the New York Herald Tribune.
From this experience has emerged his action-charged book, The Boys of Summer. One should understand why the Brooklyn team was nicknamed “The Dodgers.” Brooklyn is an extensive, flat community which was once served by many trolley cars; to survive, Brooklynites had to dodge the trolleys, so naturally, when the town could afford a professional team, it was called “The Dodgers.”
There are three reasons why The Boys of Summer is such good reading that it has been chosen by the Bookof-the-Month Club. In the first place, the Dodgers were the first and for a time the only organization in the two leagues to have black players. In Jackie Robinson they had not only a star but a man of enormous courage and dignity who obeyed the boss: he kept his cool, despite the abuse that was heaped on him; he dodged balls thrown at his head, and the spikes flung at his legs; and by his skill and fortitude he opened the gates for the blacks to come.
Second, the Dodgers’ lineup was a mix of new bloods and the old; Pee Wee Reese, the captain, a Southerner who was Jackie Robinson’s best friend; Carl Labine, a French Canadian from Woonsocket; Carl Erskine, a Scot, with his great curve; Preacher Roe, old and wily, a hillbilly from the Ozarks; George Shuba, the son of Czechoslovakian refugees; Roy Campanella, “Campy,” the great black catcher whom everyone loved and who was to be so tragically crippled. Remarkable men drawn together by a remarkable spirit, and to this kid they spoke with pride of the skills they had mastered, with humor of their misery in defeat.
The final reason is this: years after he had ceased reporting, Roger Kahn tracked down every one of the scattered members of the team and spent time with them learning what they had made of their lives away from the diamond. These chapters of reunion are intimate and reassuring.
SAINTS AND INNOCENCE
by
Norton, $6.95
Philadelphia society has moved out to the suburbs, and however apart their homes may be, whether in Chestnut Hill, Berwyn, or Haverford, there is an interlocking directorate of the old families who observe the proprieties, vote Republican, attend the Devon Horse Show, drink Fish House punch, come in town for festive meals at the Barclay, and speak with an unmistakable accent. This is “the cream of Philadelphia society and the seat of its power!” one of the characters in Barbara Rex’s novel proclaims.
Saints and Innocence is the story of the vulnerable marriage between Nora McCarson, an “outsider” who came from Buffalo, and Charley Slade, who is Philadelphia to the core. Nora is of a passionate nature, intelligent and critical, and it was probably her difference as well as her sexuality which attracted Charley when they first met. They spent their early years in New York, Charley working on Wall Street, and Nora, when their only daughter, Grace, was in school, proving herself an able editor and bringing home writers and painters who bored Charley stiff. In this cooling-off period she had her first affair, which Charley suspected, and although he said nothing at the time, he felt betrayed. All this, however, is told in retrospect.
The book begins with their return to the protective atmosphere of Philadelphia. Charley is in the ascendancy, president of a trust company, at home in Mount Pleasant, and a pillar of society. The charity over which he presides is a home for unwed pregnant girls, and at Waywards he is attracted to one of the social workers, a young Quaker, no older than his daughter. When Indira comes to spend the summer with Nora and himself, Nora grows jealous of this pale, dark-haired, determined girl who is appropriating her husband, yet she perceives the possibility of divorce long after Charley has embraced it and does not realize that psychologically he is punishing her.
The book is at its best when, angry and aroused, the couple stalk each other while the various members of the family, Charley’s wispy, impulsive mother, his wealthy, autocratic aunt, his older brother Ira, the senator from Pennsylvania, and their daughter, Grace, intervene. The women in the book are particularly well drawn, and Waywards, where Charley’s idealism leads to something else, is indeed a horror. The shortcomings in the novel are the author’s failure to convince us that the marriage was a go at the outset and the implausible ending, but as a story of an impending domestic disaster, her narrative is tense and believable.
THE HINDENBURG
by
Dodd, Mead, $8.95
Graf Zeppelin, “the crazy count,” incurred the disfavor of Kaiser Wilhelm, and in 1894 he won a patent for a dirigible and got in touch with his neighbor Gottlieb Daimler, who was making gasoline-powered engines. The “zeppelins,” or dirigibles, as they grew bigger established a good safety record for transcontinental flight. Over nine years the Graf Zeppelin carried more than eighteen thousand passengers in a total of 650 flights, and when the Hindenburg was commissioned in 1936, the German dirigible had grown as large as the Queen Mary. The Nazis used the Hindenburg as a symbol of prowess, and it cost money to cross the Atlantic in the big ship. Eighteen round trips were announced for 1937, Frankfurt to Lakehurst, New Jersey, the first to be at 8 P.M., Monday, May 3. But there were ugly rumors that the dirigible might be sabotaged.
In his book, The Hindenburg, Mr. Mooney adopts the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour pattern, which has already proved so effective in depicting the sinking of the Titanic and the San Francisco earthquake. But in his approach to the disaster which overtook the Hindenburg just as she touched down in America, the author fails to arouse our sympathy for the crew or the passengers. He tells us plenty about the history of the other zeppelins, those that flew to South America and those that bombed London in World War I. and he devotes much space, too much in my judgment, to the offstage activity of the victims and survivors of this flight. The research seems painstaking, but whether Rigger Eric Spehl actually planned the explosion at the behest of his girlfriend, Beatrice Friederich, and why, seems to me a mystery and a cold one.
THE BEST OF GLUYAS WILLIAMS
preface by
Dover, $2.50
This reprint of the best of Gluyas Williams’ drawings is a reminder of what a delightful satirist Williams was. His humor is ingrowing and subtle. One studies every figure in these large black and whites to get the full benefit of Dinner at the Club, The Class in Health-Building, the cluttered cabin in Snug Harbor, the Buffet Supper, Luncheon on the Beach, The Health-Building in the Athletic Club. Some are dated but most are not, and they remind us of the day when laughter was spontaneous and uncynical. Williams illustrated all of Robert Benchley’s books, and as Benchley remarks in his preface, his illustrator has “quite unconsciously taken to putting me into all his drawings, commercial and otherwise, as the typical American Sap.”