First Person Singular

‘Fifteen or twenty minutes day by day,’ said Dr. Osler to students at Yale, ’will give you fellowship with the ereat minds of the race,’ and with that truth in mind Robert French and Mary Agnes Leavens have prepared an anthology as handy as it is stimulating — Great Companions (Vol. II. Beacon Press, $3.00). The book is light, easily pocketed, a good companion to walk or travel with; in it are the bracing thoughts of men like Grenfell, Marcus Aurelius, Harvey Cushing, LaoTse, L. P. Jacks, Ghandi, and Alfred North Whitehead, short excerpts all, and yet each has in it that magnetic power of drawing the thoughts of the wayfarer into this goodly fellowship.

If John Mason Brown is the best lecturer we have on the theatre, it is because he is a first-class critic (and has been for eighteen years), a born actor, a man whose witticisms never cheapen his sense. Mr. Brown loves to lecture, and although the calling has undergone certain refinements since the days when Henry Ward Beecher used to travel the circuit carrying his own blankets with him, there is still a large element of adventure in it, as I know from experience — adventure, sudden friendships and equally sudden embarrassments, the nervous life aboard trains and the deluge of hospitality when you descend, comedy which is always unexpected, the delight of holding your listeners in your hand, and the sheer, vain delight of talking. Mr. Brown has published portions of his lecturing memoirs in the Atlantic; now in Accustomed as I Am (Norton, $2.00) he runs the gamut of his experience.

The best caviar in fiction I have tasted this winter is The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New Directions, $2.50). This is the genuine Russian article: the author is Russian-born and although he completed his education at Cambridge, England, it was not until very recently that he began to think and write in English. He makes his bid with a narrative whose delight will be limited to those who read more for the intellectual content than for the emotion received. Vladimir Nabokov has a style of great finesse, a style full of complicated but always rounded metaphors, a style full of interruptions which extend our comprehension and yet dissipate the force, a style in which irony contends against nostalgia. As in Saki, the story touches the emotions only in passing, and then with finger tips. It hints at, rather than reveals, the depth and the larger capacity which the author so surely possesses.

Each year the American booksellers vote to determine the book which stands up as the best ‘discovery’ in the new crop. From the harvest of 1941 they picked out a novel fresh and redolent of Texas, Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry (Viking, $2.50). Mr. Perry is at the opposite pole from Mr. Nabokov. He is bucolic, not urban. The experiences he writes of are those direct and primitive satisfactions that come to people who are close to black soil and to whom hunting, fishing, and the intimate give-and-take of family life are the only compensations for hard work. Sam Tucker, the hero, is a thirty-year-old sharecropper whose enterprise and appetites and good nature give these pages vitality. He has two aides: Nona, his wife, who was once pretty and is still valiant, and Granny, who is as cantankerous as poison ivy. Here is how Americans get along on next to nothing. Here in native terms is the meaning of that word tenacity. Here is the broad and bountiful beauty of Texas at night and by day. Here is what it is to be refreshed by the different rhythms and flavors of a family not your own.

I doubt if Pearl Buck was ever better than in her new novel, Dragon Seed (John Day, $2.50). Here are the elements which the Nobel Prize Committee must have taken into account: sympathy for an alien people, a rock-bottom understanding of family life, a power and diversity of characterization, and a prose which achieves simplicity and is yet capable of compulsion and the finer shades. Dragon Seed has for me a more immediate meaning than The Good Earth. The story of what happens to Ling Tan, that sturdy husbandman, and Ling Sao, his gusty wife (‘I like you hot and gusty,’ he says. ‘ l would not have you a cool and thin soul.’) as they and their household are ravaged by the Japanese Invasion. The situation is a simple counterpart of the world’s disaster. Ling Tan is the born fighter, and like him is his second son, Lao Er; the son-in-law Wu Lien is the merchant, the appeaser who wants peace at any price; and in the beautifully defined relationship between Ling Sao and her daughter-in-law Jade are epitomized the friction and the affection of the old generation and the new. These are the five who give such reality to the little village within dominated China. Their story is to be taken realistically and, if you like, as an allegory, brought from the Far East to the West, so that we may see how a simple folk, older, wiser, and more patient than we are, stand up against a brutality that must not prevail.

EDWARD WEEKS