The Peripatetic Reviewer

WITNESS TO HISTORY, 1929-1969 by Charles E. BohlenNorton, $12.50

This memoir, as the author says, is by a diplomat “lucky enough to have witnessed and participated in every major development in American-Soviet relations from 1929 to 1969.” Since Bohlen does not type and not even he can read his handwriting, he dictated a vast chronology of 700,000 words and then spent more than two years checking, cutting, and amplifying. He wished to relate the events as they happened with the impressions that occurred to him at the time, and with enough explanation to quiet the more extreme critics. Revision of one’s text is as arduous as. and more exasperating than, the initial composition, and in this task he was helped by his questioning editor, Robert H. Phelps. The book which emerged is of major historical importance, not so much for its style as for its perception and the light which it sheds on the statesmen and the major crises of our time.

“Chip” Bohlen was one of the staff which Ambassador William C. Bullitt took with him to Moscow in February, 1934. Bohlen’s most evident qualifications were his Harvard degree, his fluency in French acquired at the insistence of his mother who had lived for four years at the United States Embassy in Paris, and his working knowledge of Russian as a language specialist in the State Department.

It was a picked group: Loy Henderson, who had been studying the Soviet Union for years; George Kennan. who like Bohlen had been trained for the assignment; and the gay, good-humored Charles Thayer. They shared the Ambassador’s belief that it would be possible to establish friendly relations with the Russians and there was a brief honeymoon when the corps de ballet was entertained at Spaso House; when Bohlen and Thayer went to the Caucasus to shoot gazelle after a hilarious drinking bout on the train with Marshal Budenny; and when it was still thought that Stalin would be approachable. “It was not until the extent of the purges became known,” writes the author, “and the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed that my attitude toward the Soviet Union hardened.”

In the summer of 1938 Bohlen was made the senior Russian-language officer in charge of political reporting. Specifically, he had to determine the Soviet intentions: whether Stalin would join France and Britain in collective security against Germany or seek an accommodation with Hitler. In this he received surprising help from Johnny Herwarth, his tennis friend in the German Embassy, who tipped him off about the Soviet-German rapprochement before the pact was signed. Johnny’s motive, as he learned later in passing on this highly secret information, was his hope that the West might do something to prevent the deal, because he was convinced that otherwise it would lead to World War II. And this is the reason why Washington knew the hard truth long before London. When in 1940 Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo asked for a Russian specialist to keep his eye on Soviet-Japanese relations, Bohlen was transferred to Grew’s staff, and he was in the East when Germany attacked Russia. “I had not,” he writes, “expected Hitler to do anything so stupid—nor had Stalin.” Then came Pearl Harbor.

On his release from internment in Japan, Bohlen resumed his direct contact with the Soviet Union. Now the crucial issue was to assist the Russian war effort and at the same time prepare for the invasion of Europe. At a meeting of the Foreign Ministers in Moscow, Bohlen acted both as adviser and translator for the American delegation. This was to test his stamina as never before, for in addition to translating he had to take notes and, after the negotiators had retired, dictate the record of each day’s meeting, a task not finished until early morning. The Ministers’ meeting was a prelude to Teheran and Yalta and in each conference at Roosevelt’s right hand Bohlen performed his dual role with a skill which won him the admiration of FDR, Harry Hopkins, Cordell Hull, and Averell Harriman. I find the pages in which he was checking the utterances of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt utterly fascinating: Roosevelt improvising at the risk of being imprecise; Stalin, cigarette in hand, implacable, never showing any agitation, as he taunted Churchill; and Churchill with his visual approach to speaking. “He would start a sentence and then repeat it, sometimes two or three times, before the picture would come to his mind. Then he would take off on his grand oratory.” As Bohlen was quick to observe, the effort to inject humor was usually disastrous. When Stalin with his sardonic smile suggested that some 50,000 or perhaps 100,000 German military officers should be liquidated, Churchill missed the joke and took it seriously. Nor was Bohlen easily fooled. When Hopkins asked whether the Soviet Union was prepared to honor the Yalta Agreement, Stalin said testily, “The Soviet Union always honors its word,” then lowering his voice he added, “except in case of extreme necessity.” The Russian translater omitted the last phrase, then Bohlen said to him in English, “I believe there is a little more, Pavlov.”

What is so good in this book is the author’s judgment of men. Bohlen says that Molotov’s “granitelike resistance” was a major factor in Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union; he says that Alger Hiss had no influence on FDR at Yalta; he speaks of Admiral Leahy “in his snapping-turtle manner”; he calls Edward Stettinius “a decent man of considerable innocence”; he acknowledges his deep concern after Yalta, where Hopkins had been so desperately ill and where the President himself was failing, and reproaches himself for not having attended the President on his home trip on the cruiser Quincy. (But FDR had not asked for him.) Dulles was his most disagreeable chief, who “exiled” him to Manila; General Marshall the one he most admired. He writes eloquently of his career-long friendship with George Kennan. Kennan, the man of forethought and apprehension; Bohlen, sharing much of the same pessimism, as he got the job done. We were fortunate to depend on two such extraordinary diplomats, both, as this book attests, great gentlemen.

by Julian Green, translated from the French by Bernard Wall Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $6.95

This is the story of the conflicts of faith and of an infatuation which has its beginning and end in Copenhagen. To that lovely, easygoing capital in the summer of 1939 comes Roger, a Frenchman of twenty-four whose curly black hair and fine physique attract attention in that land of the blond. He knows that war is imminent and he is there for one last fling before being called up. Roger can have his pick of girls on the boulevards, but craves something better, and he employs a letter to Miss Ott, who has a reputation for arranging love affairs for foreigners. In her early fencing with Roger, it is apparent that she enjoys acting as a procuress; but for some reason she will not encourage his attention to Karin, with whom Roger has had a chance meeting at Tivoli. Karin at nineteen is as attractive as she is elusive, and quite aware of the admiration she excites. Roger’s pique turns to passion; he learns that she is alone in the world, supporting herself as an illustrator, her Lutheran religion is her anchor, and she is still a virgin. In his pursuit, he traces her to church and, experienced lover that he is, he detects in her notes to him and her sudden reappearances a sign of yielding. She fends him off, disturbed by his agnosticism, but in their walks in the “adventurous wood,” in their drives together, and with the Frenchman’s ardent attention, surrender is inevitable.

In the first half of the novel it is Roger’s infatuation which Mr. Green has evoked with such skill. When the story resumes in 1949, it is Karin’s plight which stirs our pity. Her days and nights with Roger, before she lost him to the war, left her defenseless, without faith, an easy catch for the young German officers in the Occupation. Now at twenty-nine, reviled as “the German woman,” Karin is ostracized. When Roger reappears to plead forgiveness, it is she who is aroused and infatuated, he who is resistant. During his four years in a German prison camp, he has become a Catholic convert and conceives it his mission to redeem her—a reversal of their roles which is skillfully developed. But one cannot help wondering why he is so immune to her appeals. In Mr. Green’s suave prose the attractions of the flesh are much more compelling than the devotion to the spirit.

HOME TO THE WILDERNESS by Sally Carrighar Houghton Mifflin. $7.95

In the book which established her reputation, One Day on Beetle Rock, Miss Carrighar told of the vivid world of wildlife which frequented Beetle Rock in the High Sierras on a day in June. In her autobiography she tells of the human jungle into which she was born and of how she escaped. Her birth was dreadful; high forceps were used and her mother’s coccyx was broken, a traumatic experience which left the parent with an abhorrence for her disfigured baby. Sally’s childhood was bleak; she knew she was unloved and was constantly reminded that she was unstable; her mother’s impatience was paranoid and in one paroxysm of rage she all but strangled the child. “Waking and sleeping I lived with two nightmares: the memory of my mother’s face as she came into that room, and the pressure of her hand on my neck.” Nor did the antagonism lessen as the daughter’s character developed. The worst motives were attributed to any irregularity, and not unnaturally, the girl developed a heart murmur which increased under the strain. In all of this her father might have played a protective part had he not been so absorbed in his business.

Sally had found in music an emotional outlet; at Wellesley College in the person of Miss Katharine Liddell she had an English instructor who began to tap her feeling for words. But the elation was too much for her. “The heart problems,” she writes, “began to creep up,” and at the end of the second 1 year she was sent home to rest, a disappointment which her mother solaced with the words, “You think your childhood has been a tragedy and that I am to blame for it.”

It is Miss Carrighar’s erratic climb toward liberation and a happiness she found on Beetle Rock which enliven the last half of this grueling confession. She has her first taste of the Ozarks as a fishing guide; in Hollywood she learns to write movie adaptations of stage plays; in San Francisco, with no training other than her native intelligence, she wrote articles for a financial sheet. The Coast Investor; and during the Depression she was on the verge of starvation, so hopeless that a bottle of sleeping pills seemed the only answer. When the landlady revived her, what brought her life into focus was a flock of small birds, linnets, that ventured inside her room to be fed, and after that the common sense which directed her to the best psychiatrist she could find, Dr. Carl Renz. How he set her on her feet and how she was passed from biologist to biologist, until at last her knowledge of wildlife was recognized, is the triumphant part of this book, so well summed up in the words of Dr. Robert Orr: “She comes in here and asks questions I have not thought of before, and we begin taking down books and discover that no one else has thought of them; so then she goes up in the mountains and tries to find the answers herself.”

John Leonard is editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of This Pen for Hire.

Margaret Manning reviews books for the Boston Globe.

Edward Weeks and Phoebe Adams write regularly in these pages.

Peter Davison’s (page 51) autobiographical book. Half Remembered, will be published in August.

David Ignatow (page 55) was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Mark Rudman (page 71) has completed his first book of poems, called Scrapings.

Ann Stanford (page 94) edited the new anthology, The Women Poets in English.