First Person Singular

First-hand testimony about Russia was never of more interest than at this moment when our thoughts return so persistently to our dimly understood ally. Can Russia withstand a spring offensive? Is there the likelihood of a Pan-Slav movement as Hitler’s power begins to ebb? Our late Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies, attempts no such prophecy, but he does give us much shrewd and lively observation in his semi-official volume, Mission to Moscow (Simon & Schuster, S3.00). Mr. Davies was sent to the U.S.S.R. ostensibly to clean up a trade treaty, actually to apply his lawyer-trained, businesslike mind to the largest x in the European equation. His coming must have been a breath of fresh air in the diplomatic corridors. He certainly covered ground in his two-year mission. As a former chairman of the FTC and an authority on our heavy industry he was keen to inspect the new plants of the U.S.S.R. — and off he went. As one of our most successful trial lawyers he sat in on the trials of Bucharin and Radek; with an interpreter at his side he witnessed the military purge from the front row, and, while he did not know Russian, he did know what men were like under stress. He and Mrs. Davies patronized the ballet, they made an extensive collection of Russian paintings, and their informal movie parties at the Embassy loosened the red tape. The book is made up of Mr. Davies’s formal reports to the State Department, excerpts from personal correspondence, and intimate quotations from his journal. Here is an invigorating estimate of the Russia with whom we shall have to deal when our side wins.

Last winter I asked Mr. Somerset Maugham where he thought the best writing of this war would come from. It would come, he replied, from the defeated — just as it did in the last war. John Steinbeck’s short novel, The Moon Is Down (Viking $2.00), tells the story of a tiny little community which has just been overwhelmed by the Nazis. The village (it could be anywhere) with its coal mine and its dock has been skillfully betrayed by a fifth columnist, the home guard (of twelve men) wiped out, the mayor, the doctor, and the people hopelessly confused. But the invader, Colonel Lanser, is not happy: a veteran of 1917, he knows that the community will not remain as calm and passive as his lieutenants imagine. ' Defeat,’ he says wearily, ‘ is a momentary thing . . . we will shoot this man and make twenty new enemies’ — and the conflict which follows proves that he is right. Like Of Mice and Men, this narrative obeys the discipline of the theatre: the timing, the telling dialogue, the absence ot introspection, all accentuate the sharply defined scenes. By confining the action to a single household — the mayor’s — Steinbeck localizes the immediate feeling of defeat; then in the slow antagonism of the military and the conquered he reduces to very human terms the terrible vindictiveness that must now be underground in Europe and Asia.

Out of defeat and ennobled by it comes Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Reynal & Hitchcock, $2.75). Here in a prose that Conrad would have praised are the courage and philosophy with which a French aviator went up to meet his fate against overwhelming odds. In this true story of the French Air Force in May 1940, Captain de Saint-Exupéry describes the experiences of his own decimated escadrille (six planes out of twenty-three survive) and more particularly what is happening to his plane, his observer, his gunner, and himself on a dangerous sortie over Arras. The credo of a fighting man and the story of a great aviator in action, this narrative and Churchill’s speeches stand as the best answer the democracies have yet found to Mein Kampf.

There is an old saying that a novelist should rewrite his first chapter when his book is finished — and that, I suspect, is what Daphne du Maurier did in her Frenchman’s Creek (Doubleday, Doran, S2.50), for in her first twenty pages are all the clues to the romance which follows. The lovely descriptive phrases invite you back to the seventeenth century and to a now-forgotten manor house on the Cornish coast. To Navron comes Lady Dona; she has been disgusted with her London life, her thick-witted husband, and his roistering companions of the Court. But the fire is even hotter than the frying pan: before she knows it, she and Navron are besieged by a shipload of innocent Breton pirates whose leader has the heart and quick wits of Robin Hood. This is all in the great tradition of make-believe and yet two things are lacking: the inner spark and the complete illusion. I feel a drag in the dialogue, I feel a flatness in the characters — in short, I feel that Miss du Maurier has not created anything like the overpowering illusion in Rebecca.

EDWARD WEEKS