Heaven’s My Destination, by Thornton Wilder (Harpers, $2.50), is a novel to laugh at and puzzle over. In the past, Wilder has won our respect by his precise and beautiful prose, by his skillful employment of literary sources, and by his fastidious, æsthetic, and somewhat classical concept of life. In this new book, however, he impresses us with his ringside knowledge of hard-boiled America: he climbs down from his ivory tower, takes off his coat, rolls up his sleeves, and then takes a good swing at contemporary life. Have certain Communist writers challenged Mr. Wilder to come into the arena? Well, here he is.
Heaven’s My Destination tells one year’s adventures in the life of George Brush, a commercial traveler, selling textbooks throughout the Southwest and saving souls whenever he has the chance. George Brush is a Methodist Reformer with big ideas. He is a pacifist; he has read Gandhi; he is a Buchmanite, a Don Quixote, and a pure fool all rolled into one. In his efforts to reform America he gets involved in some of the most ludicrous, laughter-provoking situations imaginable. But for all their comedy the issues which Brush tries to solve, and for which he is brutalized by his fellow citizens, arc issues which in slightly different guise are troubling you and me in our logical moments here and now. Brush, being the most logical man alive, finds how contemptuous most people are of either logic or big ideas.
This short novel will certainly provoke laughter, and with the more thoughtful readers it will provoke that self-examination which the author must have had at the back of his mind. One can almost put one s finger on the passage where the current veers away from comedy and into a more serious stream. Following that marvelous court scene Gieorge Brush is less and less to be laughed at. But I must say that the tragedy which overtakes him does not seem to me so much a tragedy of flesh and blood as a tragedy of Conflicting ideas. Gieorge is not a person with whom one can easily sympathize. If we are to pity him, — if indeed the story is intended to pass from comedy to pathos, — we must derive our pity from those characters in the book who liked and who themselves pitied the young reformer. There are two of them, Jessie Mayhew and Lottie, George’s sister-in-law. But these two possible poles of feeling have been abruptly short-circuited by the author. And in the break-up of Gieorge Brush’s home, in the ensuing disorganization of his life, he is undone by the most lifeless and unbelievable creature in the book — I mean Roberta, his wife. She and ticorge between them divorce the climax of any feeling, and thus a character who might have moved us to pity becomes in the end an animated halrack on which to hang theories. But, though it be scant in its emotional content, this novel is definitely rewarding in its ideas, its comedy, and the rightness of its detail.
Such chivalry as survived in the last war was generally to be found in the Air Service. Any new addition to that small shelf of aviation memoirs is eagerly scrutinized. But, despite encomiums of men who are better flyers than I shall ever be, I must express my disappointment in Heaven High Hell Deep, by Norman Archibald (A. and C. Boni, onetime lieutenant in the 95th Pursuit Squadron. Here is a fighting chronicle by an American with a good memory but no particular aptitude for writing. He intends to give us an honest and unvarnished account of his training, his patrols at the front, and his days as a prisoner in Germany, and with the honesty and exhilaration of his source material I have no complaint. But in telling his story it disappoints me to see his prose again and again veer into the staccato vernacular of cheap fiction. Beauchamp’s death and the matter of the incendiary bullets, both of which should be high points of the narrative, have about them a theatrical aspect which is simply the result of inadequate English. A number of Mr. Archibald’s episodes are told with an acceleration that keeps the reader turning page after page. But to compare his account at any point with High Adventure, by James Norman Hall, or with Winged Victory, or with The Lafayette Flying Corps, is to recognize at once the difference between forced and forceful writing.
I spoke last month of some wise and mellow essays on poetry, — The Poet as Citizen, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, — remarkable, I thought, for their horizon, their sagacious notes on the greatest poetry, and their decisive evaluation of English poets ancient and modern. (And when someone talks down to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, 1 like to be there to listen.) ‘Q’s’ view of the literary scene is spacious and long-sighted, perhaps, a little too spacious for the modern temper, which likes above all else to go fast and be specific. The Georgian Scene, by Frank Swinnerton (Farrar and Rinehart, $3.50), is certainly a book to delight the intellectual palate of our time. Here is trenchant criticism, and swift appraisal of the leading English writers — some ninety of them — who have been in the clear since 1910. Their work is surveyed with pithiness, good humor, and a fairness which is remarkable. And interspersed with these terse and vigorous opinions of books are the innumerable deciphers of character, biographical details which bespeak Mr. Swinnerton’s wide acquaintance and which do skillfully illuminate each man he has in mind. He disclaims any intention of judging the authors ‘by a single aesthetic theory’; what he is after is to determine as succinctly as possible a quality which he calls ‘original talent.’ The categories in which he places his novelists, poets, and dramatists have a sensible embrace, and the windows he opens into the study of PostFreudians and Post-War Pessimists I find particularly invigorating. That he can discuss his contemporaries with such reliable understanding and without the least pretense of cleverness is a tribute to his hale masculine pen. This is the best bird’s-eye view of modern English literature I have seen.
Beginning May the first, and thereafter at sixmonth intervals, the Atlantic will prepare a List of Recommended Books. This will not be published in the magazine, but will be available for distribution to institutions and to individuals.
