First Person Singular

Pleasant to be able to talk about books again. Literature suffered an almost total eclipse this spring, and I suspect that many authors will be overshadowed for months to come. A friend mine, an editorial writer, put the case accurately. He said, ‘ I read the morning papers as soon as I get down to my desk. Then I spend the next half hour moving pianos around in my mind. After that I try to work.’ In such a state of mind it was next to impossible to read books.

Now that we’re beginning to get our second wind, it is not quite so bad. If you like printer’s ink you will find a welcome serenity in Country Editor, byHenry Beetle Hough (Doubleday, Doran, $3.00). This is an oasis book, the oasis exasperated journalists, editors, and printers dream of when their jobs begin to bind. Mr. Hough was bitten by the country bug back in 1920. He tells us he resigned from a New York corporation ‘whose gross sales were almost million dollars a day’ and with his wife Betty went up to Vineyard Haven, where they bought a country newspaper. ‘I always say, “We print six hundred papers,”’ the retiring editor told him. W hat Mr. Hough did to that paper, and what the Vineyard Gazette and Edgartown did to him, are the substance of this shrewd, genial Yankee book. The Gazette was founded in 1840, the town is three hundred years old: to win the confidence of both, Mr. Hough has to keep track of the past and the present; he has to keep track of the ancient white houses, the salty people, the homely adventures of island and sea. His story meanders agreeably and is the better for being true.

The headmaster of my prep school used to offer a prize of five dollars to any boy who could copy out a page of McMaster’s History precisely as it was printed. As I recall, no money changed hands. Invariably you would drop out a comma or semicolon or forget to dot an i. Could I do I would offer five dollars in gold to anyone who could discover the autobiography of a literary man who was happy in school. Whatever they may say in their fiction, when the time comes to take off their hats and tell their right names they all confide that their days in school were lonely and inadequate. Such is the thesis of Chanler Chapman, who in The Wrong Attitude (Putnam, $1.50) describes in a most engaging style his years at St. Paul’s School, Concord. Son of one of the most brilliant critics this country ever produced, Chapman had the independence of his father and the tenacity to want to graduate. Every teacher knows that there are two danger zones in the year, January and the early spring, and in these zero hours of boredom Chapman’s humor would rise to the emergency, not without risk. He conformed as little as a boy could and still belong, and although he ‘never really liked school or any institution with which I have been connected,’ thanks to masters like the Jeep he learned a good deal. For all its limitation, this piece of recollection is almost perfect in its discernment. As an editor I take pleasure in sentences so alive and accurate. So may you.

Gertrude Stein’s tribute to the France she loves, entitled Paris France (and how careful she has been to make herself clear), has had a heart-warming success. Now from London comes Mrs. Miniver (Harcourt, Brace, $2.00). Mrs. Miniver reminds me a little of Mrs. Dalloway: she is the wife of a London architect, mother of three children (the oldest at Eton). She has a swift sense of humor, loves John Donne and Nashe, and is as British as a lion. In these simple, crystal essays of Mrs. Miniver at the Dentist, Christmas Shopping, and on the Eve of the Shoot, Jan Struther has shown us an individual and a way of life hard to shake. This is mandarin writing, beautifully selected, with hardly a superfluous phrase. Anglophobes won’t care for it. But those who wish England well will rejoice that, of the ever-dwindling quota of new books from across the water, this reached us here and now.

Anyone who has read Sbining Scabbard will recognize that R. C. Hutchinson is one of the ablest novelists now writing English. His new book, The Fire and the Wood (Farrar & Rinehart, $2.50), was begun in the peaceful summer of 1938. It was finished in an infantry training centre in the spring of 1940. In that interval one suspects its theme had grown cold.

The novel has the aspect of a case history; it tells of a raw-boned German scientist obsessed with what he believes to be a cure for tuberculosis, and of how he tries to cure a slovenly little housemaid. Not until Josef’s experiment fails, not until he is carted off to a Nazi concentration camp, does the element of individuality begin to light up the gray scene. To me this is a tour de force, remarkable for an Englishman to have written under such conditions.

EDWARD WEEKS