First Person Singular
by EDWARD WEEKS
THE war books which I have selected this month indicate the patterns of writing which have already been developed by a war psychology.
Since Pearl Harbor we have not yet produced any book as naïve and as funny as Ed Streeter’s Dere Mable, which sold over half a million copies in 1918. But I have seen two fresh versions which will amuse any parent with a son in training. I mean the delightful caricatures of camp life, Private Berger by Private Berger (Rand McNally, $1.00), and secondly the collection of grinning, good-natured sketches in prose, See Here, Private Hargrove (Holt, $2.00), in which Marion Hargrove (also a private) takes himself and the Army for a ride. Private Hargrove is not really discontented in the Army (no man is). But he doesn’t like his Sergeant (who does?); he misses his privacy; his awkwardness continually lands him on K. P. — and soon he is griping as only a buck private can. The author is at his laughable best when describing what actually happened to him or when setting down those marvelous bull sessions which fill in the chinks. He is at his second best when he becomes conscious of what he is doing and proceeds to talk to you like an older brother. The naturalness and gayety of this book are, I think, a little marred by this note of tonic fraternalism.
The Raft by Robert Trumbull (Holt, $2.50) is a recording by an expert journalist of what three American aviators endured during their thirty-four days on a rubber raft, eight feet by four. Chief Petty Officer Dixon, Tony Pastula, and Gene Aldrich, radio man and gunner, are fair specimens of our flying forces. When they were pitched into the Pacific a thousand miles from nowhere, their courage and resourcefulness saved their lives. Two of the men could not swim; they were not buddies; yet the loyalty and the sanity with which they clung to each other and the raft, and the leadership with which Dixon kept them afloat, make up a true story worth remembering. But the mere record is not what Hakluyt would have given us. Trumbull catches the details. What he misses is the rough flavor of speech and the sharp edge of individuality as it shows under stress.
The Commandos by Elliott Arnold (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, $2.50) is an adventure story which takes us behind the German lines. Alan, the American hero, is a soldier of fortune who fought in Spain and has now proved himself one of the toughest raiders of the Norwegian coast. Alan fights like Daniel Boone, and when you see him training the less agile Poles and English under his command, you realize how really tough the commandos must be. The raids are told in lean, hard prose, and they are the best of the book. The love-making (Alan has a Norwegian mistress very adept at seducing the Nazis) and much of the dialogue are patterned on Hemingway. And I notice one weakness which recurs in these adventure stories — one which I am sure John Buchan would not repeat: the tendency to make the Germans more stupid than they are. Paul Dichter, the German lover, is a stooge straight from Hollywood. I should like to believe there was an army of Dichters waiting for us in Europe. But there isn’t, and it weakens our fiction to say so.
Louis Bromfield was an ambulance driver with the French Army in the last World War. He has known France intimately for twenty-five years and his feelings for Paris and the French are clearly and skillfully released in his new novel, Until the Day Break (Harpers, $2.50). This story of an American fan dancer who stayed on after the German occupation because of her Russian lover, and because with him she wanted to take part in the underground resistance to the Bochcs, has a character and is charged with a feeling far superior to Mr. Bromfield’s recent portrait of New Orleans. La Biche, the old actress; Madame de Thonars, the astrologer; D’Abrizzi, the producer, are unmistakably French. So are Madame Luigi’s kitchen and Roxie’s apartment with its gaudy Rumanian accessories. The novel catches the atmosphere of Paris in decadence and Paris in chains. Mr. Bromfield is never one to spare the sensuous touches, and here he lapses into the melodramatic whenever he thinks of the Germans. The Field Marshal at Maxim’s and “the complicated Gothic perversion” of Major von Wessellhoft have a theatricality about them. If the Nazis are to be the devils in our fiction, let’s give the devil his due.