First Person Singular

The palm for perfect timing this spring goes to Simon & Schuster for the Inner Sanctum edition of Tolstoy’sWar and Peace ($3.00). Thirty-nine other publishers must now be kicking themselves for not having acted on this impulse, which has oft been felt but ne’er so well expressed.

Praise of War and Peace is superfluous by this time. It makes no difference whether you think you have read it: the time to reread it is now, and I am sure that this is the most accessible edition in English that has yet come from the press. Here are end papers to show you the map of Napoleon’s and Hitler’s Invasions. Here is a list of the characters to guide you through a book of this magnitude. And last and best, here is a Foreword by Clifton Fadiman, an essay in elucidation and the perfect curtain raiser for the five-act drama to come. The publishers have availed themselves ot the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude. It you are really bookminded, compare this text with Constance Garnett’s translation in the Modern Library, and then ask yourself whether the perfect translation — a translation as vital and sensitive as Moncrieff’s Proust — has yet been written. I don’t mean to take the edge off your appetite; I want you to appreciate what a job it is to cope — in the original — with a novelist of such energy, power of characterization, and such subtlety as Tolstoy.

Peter Fleming, like R. C. Hutchinson, Geoffrey Household, and H. E. Bates, is one of the battalion of brilliant younger Englishmen now submerged in the Army. While on leave, Mr. Fleming put together in A Story to Tell and Other Tales (Scribners, $2.00) a baker’s dozen of his short stories written in the 1930’s, and prefaced them with a delightful note on the state of the short story in our time. The essay itself is quite as good as what follows. Indeed, it points up the narratives with its honest admission that here is one author who refuses to subordinate plot to character and atmosphere. Personally I am with Mr. Fleming all the way. I think the American short story has been sicklied o’er with moodiness, mud, and social problems in the past decade, and if signs mean anything, I will give ten to one odds that those writers who can make a narrative stand up and go places will be the men we are reading in the months directly ahead.

Mr. Fleming has a deft and smiling style, he will draw you a character in a flash, but what I really like about him is his capacity for action and the unexpected. If you want to see what I mean, read his ‘A Story to Tell,’ ‘Under the Bandstand,’ and ‘Ace High.’

Seventeenth Summer, the Intercollegiate Prize Novel by Maureen Daly (Dodd. Mead, $2.50), is a refreshing story of calf love. The quirks, the naïveté, and the impulse of adolescence have been caught with the most disarming candor in a narrative which is eager, intuitive, and a little too full of feminine detail for Everyman. But l think Tarkington would say, ‘ Well done.’

It will be a very fine novel indeed which takes the Pulitzer Prize for 1942 away from Itachel Field’sAnd Now Tomorrow (Macmillan, $2.50). I like this book for its sturdy, beautifully drawn heroine, Emily Blair, New England to the core, but new New England — her father a mill owner, her mother a Pole fresh from the boat. I like it for its consistent, warmly lit, and very human delineation of Blairstown, the mill village North of Boston. Emily’s family for three generations have owned the Peace-Pipe Mill and they ran it with a paternalism which was admirable—but not good enough to last. The Irish and the Poles took root, and with their children came the demand for bargaining power: they did not want things done for them, they wanted to do for themselves. Emily might have sided with Uncle Wallace and Aunt Em and the other directors. And yet, thanks to her mother, she could never forget the people across the bridge; that bridge on which she so often stood, watching the white water, symbolizes the distance between the big house on the hill and the worker on strike. ‘I have to see both sides,’ she said, ‘so I just seem to be caught between.’ Emily is a character for whom you instinctively feel deep sympathy. The deafness which closes in on her at the time of her engagement is described with all the hurt, bewilderment, and indignation which we — any one of us — would feel, were we arrested in midcareer. See how skillfully we are made aware of her in her sensitive world of silence and of sound. I should call this story unspectacular. I should call it warm-blooded and deeply understanding of its people — Jo Kelly the organizer, with his answering spark in either dog or man, Vance the blunt young doctor, Maggie with her Irishisms, Aunt Em so upright and isolated by time. It has been rears since I have read any story of New England so true, so touching, and with such integrity as this. EDWARD WEEKS