The Peripatetic Reviewer

You see that there?” said my friend, a rigger who had taken the afternoon off to show me the Kaiser shipyards. He pointed to the tracks beside the road. “That’s the Sixth Avenue El. They brought it all the way out here so that the workers could commute to Oakland and San Francisco.” The old Sixth Avenue El, flat on the ground and working like a beaver, is an amusing example of how the country is being reshuffled and revived under the spur of war.

Richmond is the nearest town to the shipyards, and as we drove through it I noted the multitude of new houses springing up like mushrooms in the rich California mud. I noted the license plates on the workers’ cars — they came from everywhere. I noted the giant cranes which, singly or in tandem, toiled like elephants beside the fourteen cradles. I noted the scooters on which the plant messengers ride, and the h’isters with their rubber tires the height of a kangaroo. I noted the noise under the sheds, the radio voice which keeps each crew under control, and the unrushed efficiency which goes on so steadily beneath the surface confusion.

They work — most of them — in slacks, welding under their King Arthur helmets, tailoring the steel with their torches, cutting out the chalked pattern as neatly as if they were making a shirt. Some of the women were Chinese, some of them were Negresses, and there seemed to be at least one teamed up with each hefty man. Watching this new teamwork in industry, watching them pause and light up and joke together, you can’t help wondering how many of these women, especially the younger ones, will ever go back. If the story of the bachelor girl, of the white-collar Kitty Foyles, seemed so startling to us in the aftermath of the First World War, what about the story of the women in heavy industry today?

The shipyards in Richmond (the community has jumped overnight from 20,000 to 70,000 plus), the aviation plants in Burbank, the clay pigeon factory which has brought Hangtown back to the land of the living — here is the build-up which is taking place in Texas and along the entire Pacific Coast to Seattle. The thing is moving so rapidly that no one has time to figure it out. You can see that most of these transplanted workers from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and points East have found a new home. You can see that Texas and California could double their 1940 population and still have oodles of opportunity left. You can see that these great harbors of San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle are going to be the nerve centers of the new trade to Russia and the New Orient. You can see that the Pacific Coast is doing in five years what it took New England a century to do. Financed by the nation, spurred by necessity, her plants have been quadrupled. New skills have been brought in, and her shipping developed. That’s what I mean by reshuffled.

In the conversion of this industry after the war, the Coast will build her own automobiles and transport planes. She will probably take the lead in housing; and then will unfold one of the great stories of reconstruction — the story of whether Labor welcomes or cold-shoulders the millions of the demobilized. If Labor is wise, its writers will begin to prepare for that reunion now.

Outspoken as he has always been, Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker tells us that the boys in service are grousing about Labor’s attitude toward the war. Naturally the unions resent, the taunt. Naturally the men living under discipline resent the taunt of absenteeism and high pay. There’s a canker here which must be removed, for the last thing we want is recrimination among ourselves when the fighting ends. But what Rickenbacker said has been deeply resented by the men in the unions (one aviation worker called him the “Number One Rat” of this war), and rumor has it that they have been boycotting his book, Seven Came Through (Doubleday, Doran, $1.50).

No prejudice, no emotion should stand in the way of this book. It is a record of a magnificent fight for life. The details of those twenty-one days on the rafts have been burned into the memory of the seven who came through. And this is their leader’s record, for once again Rickenbacker proved himself the natural boss.

An expert journalist may have polished Rickenbacker’s prose, but through it you still hear his rough tongue, you still feel the blazing vitality of a born fighter. From the book emerge certain unforgettable pictures — the sea swallow which perched on Rick’s hat as if in answer to their prayer and which was their first food after the last orange was gone; the watches and the revolver corroding with salt water; Alex’s death; the school of little fish which they caught with their hands and which were “still wriggling when we bit into them.” And interminably the raft, rocking, bucking, swinging as it buoyed them up. But the man who buoyed up their hope was Rick.

Rick looked to the others we see in that highly personal story which has been set down by another survivor, Lieutenant James C. Whitaker, the copilot. Whitaker was the only one of the seven who couldn’t swim a stroke. But he could and did keep a few pitiful notes in a diary, and in his vivid little book, We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing (Dutton, $1.50), he shows you how each individual reacted. He shows you his admiration for Bill Cherry, the Texan pilot with his cool mind and poker face. He tells you of Johnny Bartek and what a solace his little New Testament came to be. He remembers how they prayed. Cherry always began his, “Old Master,” and on one desperate occasion when rain came, “Here she is-—thanks, Old Master.” He shows you how Rick’s coruscating tongue again and again brought out the fight in them when they were almost too weak to care. Up until the time of their crash, Whitaker had scoffed at religion. But as he tells you, things happened to him in that long ordeal to change his mind. He quotes the saying that there are no atheists in fox holes.

The record of what happened to the Americans in those fox holes is now coming in to us piecemeal from the correspondents attached to the Marines. John Ifersey, seven years out of Yale and an editor of Time, has given us the most graphic account of a small local engagement, in his terse, beautifully written narrative Into the Valley (Knopf, $2.00 — why $2.00?). The book is a must for any collector of war stories. See how well he catches the Marine lingo — “trigger happy”; “git or git got.” See how accurately his senses bring back to you the sound and feel of the fighting. See how he keeps his own first person in the background where it belongs. Best of all, see the fine tributes he pays to Sergeant Bauer and Captain Charles Rigaud.

Marines with whom I have talked have nothing but good to say of Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis (Random House, $2.50). The Diary does not tell all they know. How could it? It doesn’t tell their grousing about their equipment and the less able of their officers. But it tells more than any other man has written about that hell hole which is already one of our proudest battlefields. Marines like the Diary because they liked the six feet four of Tregaskis. He had no lace on his pants. He took what they took. He kept a faithful tally of those enlisted men and officers who did the dirtiest jobs on that Unmentionable Island. And in his chronicle he mentions them by name and home town. The Marines like that, just as they like his unsparing account of the courage and tenacity of the Japs and of how they kept fighting at Tulagi and Tenaru. There are pages in this book which are not pretty. But it is well that we back home should know what our men are up against as they jump from foothold to foothold.

In One World (Simon & Schuster, $1.00) Wendell L. Willkie is making his report to the country of what he saw and learned in his flight around the world. It is a hopeful report and one which has been written with courage and candor. He and his aides, Joseph Barnes and Gardner Cowles, Jr., were flown 31,000 miles in forty-nine days. There was little time for note-taking. The thirty days they spent on terra firma were intent with talk, inspections, and hospitably. But Mr. Willkie has a photographic memory and the flashes of conversation, the etched scenes, and the slowly forming conclusions of his trip are now fitted together in a telling and sympathetic narration.

It was Mr. Willkie’s mission to gather facts and impressions and to leave behind him an appearance of friendly interest — and I judge he was deeply successful. He is a keen and skillful talker. He has to a marked degree the American curiosity about how the other fellow lives. He has our native impulse to pass on good advice. He writes with humor. When the Axis radio complained of his presence in Turkey, his answer was simple: “I invite Mr. Hitler to send to Turkey his opposition candidate,” His prose takes you into his confidence and leaves no doubt of his conviction. He reports on the ferment discernible in the Near East and he emphasizes the hope of the Egyptians, the Arabs, and the Iranians — their hope for “an orderly transfer to them of a steadily increasing share of responsibility in their own government.” Turkey looked good to him, though here again he is concerned about that nationalism which may prove so troublesome if we cannot invoke collaboration. He says unequivocally that Russia’s hatred of the Nazi system is real and deep and bitter, and as he turns to discuss the future of Russia and China, he is speaking of neighbors, with a vision few American politicians have had in our time.

There are those who will call Mr. Willkie’s philosophy naïve. If Mr. Willkie is naïve, so are we who must vote and take part in the reconstruction. Part of American naïveté is a lack of respect for national prejudice; part of it is a willingness to try what has never been done before. I feel the pull of sympathy in Mr. Willkie’s ideals. His bird’s-eye view of one world is the eagle’s view of millions who go with him in spirit and are now nearing the same objective.

A month before Pearl Harbor, Eve Curie left La Guardia Field on the most far-flung trip a woman correspondent has made. Her Journey Among Warriors (Doubleday, Doran, $3.50) anticipated Mr. Willkie’s and in the nature of things it is a good deal more personal. She flew to Brazil, to West Africa, to Cairo and Libya, to Syria, Iran, and Iraq, to Baku, Kuibyshev, to Moscow, to the Russian front, and thence to Calcutta and China. With her grasp of detail and her ready sympathy, she has brought back an incredible number of impressions which it is important that we share.

Her book makes a poor start. November, 1941, seems years ago in print. Not until she reaches West Africa does she really begin to talk. An exile, she has her eye out for other homeless people, and her pages have heart in them when she writes of the Polish aviators ferrying on the Gold Coast or those other Polish officers and men liberated from the Soviet prison camps and now rearmed to fight Hitler.

Her lovely French presence was an open sesame in the Near East. She felt as Mr. Willkie did the restraint of British officers concerning the Empire. And she saw unmistakably the new stirrings of nationalism in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Persia, India, and China — the old countries waking up from their sleep. She watched what she calls “the poker game of Islam.” She measured the prestige and influence of France as a force of civilization. She noticed how often the Catholic missionaries were divided between the Free French and Vichy. And then, as she caught sight of the Cross of Lorraine on a plane, her thoughts would lift with hope. Her prose portraits are swift, adroit, and very telling: General Catroux; Felix Eboué, the very French Governor of Tchad and a colored man; de Gaulle; the young Shah of Iran; Olga Lepeshinskaya, the ballerina; and Major General Glasov — she catches these colorful individuals as naturally as she does the RAF pilots with whom she jokes.

Miss Curie’s chapters on Russia are among the very best. The Russian wounded told her of how “uncultured” was the “literature” they captured in the German soldiers’ packs. She talked with wounded Russian women, nurses and secretaries who had been at the front. She talked with factory hands who had moved the Kaganovitch plant from Moscow to Kuibyshev (it took them thirty-five days to move, reassemble, and get in production). Many of the men were working two shifts running, then they slept behind the machines. She reports that, generally speaking, religion has lost all influence on the young Russians, and quotes a bishop to the effect that officers and men in the Red Army are “not at all religious.” She visited the front, saw the German prisoners and dead, talked to villagers who had survived the Nazi brutality, and rediscovered that only a country that has withstood an invasion really knows what war is.

Her book is almost too long for war reading. It could have been cut by a third and would have been better for the editing. But have patience, for with her eloquence and her spirit, Eve Curie is a true ambassador of the France we are fighting to regain.

“What gives?” I asked a friend of mine who makes his living on Broadway. “The people want war or Americana,” he replied. “A good play on either score will pack them in.” The same holds good for contemporary fiction: war or Americana will account for most of the popular novels this season.

Ever since he finished Anthony Adverse, Hervey Allen has been giving thought to a vast panoramic story, The Disinherited, the first quarter of which now comes to us in a self-sustaining novel, The Forest and the For (Farrar & Rinehart, $2.50). It is a story of the French and Indian wars, from 1740 to 1760, and particularly of Salathiel Albino, who as a youngster was carried into captivity, became the Little Turtle of the Shawnees, and who after a boyhood as unmolested as that of Rousseau’s Natural Man, returned to the Settlements to wage war against his foster-people. Huge, blonde, and completely at ease in the woods, Sal has the vitality to carry us through the formative years of the American Republic and at least three more novels — perhaps five.

Does Mr. Allen require so large a canvas for his novels? Isn’t it fair to ask why his prose is so spacious? His love of history accounts for a good deal. He is an enormous reader; he loves to pan out from the hard gravel of reminiscence the gold dust he needs for his episodes. It takes craftsmanship and space to fit together so many details. That is one reason.

Some novelists follow an undeviating path. Others prefer to turn aside — they like to pause, to cut back, to make long tangents before rejoining their main trail. They circumnavigate. So it is with Hervey Allen. He began this story with a series of adventures at Richfield Springs. Then he picked up his hero Salathiel; and as he cut back to tell the story of Sal’s youth, he became engrossed. In the end he found he needed an entire volume to describe the boy’s captivity in an Indian camp and his re-emergence as a young Indian fighter. Thus the cutback became volume one, The Forest and the Fort. And The Springs will be volume two.

A tentative judgment is ail one is entitled to make on the first of four novels — the summing up must wait. The sweep of Mr. Allen’s panorama, the image he gives us of the American wilderness, is by its very size impressive. But how about the atmosphere and the details? Are these Indians the Indians of Robert W. Chambers? Are they the savages of James Fenimore Cooper? Has Mr. Allen really taken us behind that difficult, almost inscrutable mask?

The power of invention and the curiosity and humor of the descriptions keep our interest on the go. But do we feel the silent power of the forest as we felt it. in The Trees, by Conrad Richter? Is the wood lore unerring? Did Salathied and the Indians really bring back beaver skins in the summer?

Here are hundreds of characters, some of them — like Captain Ecuyer, Garrett Pendergass, O’Neal and Quaker Japson — brilliantly drawn. But I am not yet satisfied with my understanding of Salathiel’s great bulk. His motives strike me as consistently oversimplified. His courtship is a mere snatch, and of his wife Jane I know practically nothing.

Such queries may occur to other readers, but they will not detract from the spacious pleasure of reading Hervey Allen. I think of him as the Dr. Johnson of our novelists, with his eighteenth-century flavor, his appetite for words, his love of talk and movement, and the masculine humor to give bite to his pages.

Before he enlisted in the Army as a private, William Saroyan reversed the usual process of a novelist. He wrote a motion-picture script about a telegraph messenger, such a messenger as he had once been in his youth. As soon as the film was accepted for production, he reshaped the story into what his publishers call his first novel, The Human Comedy (Harcourt, Brace, $2.75). In it he writes about Homer Macauley, the telegraph messenger of Ithaca (Fresno), California, and Ulysses, his kid brother, and by inference about their older brother in the Army. Homer, dashing about Ithaca on his bicycle with his telegrams of life and death, is the Mercury of War, Ulysses is the Age of Innocence. They are a most endearing pair. Life may not be so honest or so kindly as they meet it, but it could be.

Saroyan’s narrative is unpredictable. He is a master of the thumbnail sketch and the creator of double talk with lovely undertones. In Homer’s talks with the old telegraph operator, in scenes like the hurdle race, the bear trap (from which they cannot extricate Ulysses), in scenes like that of the soldiers at the movies and the raid on the Apricot Tree, you pause and reread—they are the pages of laughter and tenderness. Then right after come episodes so overwritten or a character so flat that your fingers itch for a blue pencil. I intend no disparagement when I point to these corny passages: they help to give Saroyan’s work its common denominator. And if you keep your own box score, you will see how far originality outweighs the Golden Bantam in a book whose small fry and simple verities do touch the heart.