The Peripatetic Reviewer

by EDWARD WEEKS

In his essay, “The Purpose of Biography,” Albert Jay Nock labors to draw the line between what he calls “matters of legitimate private interest and those of legitimate public interest.” There is a good point here, for as one remembers the sour books of the debunking era, the disreputable Washingtons and Lincolns, there is no doubt that biographers did then invade the privacy of their victims and that autobiographers, catching the contagion, felt that they would not be heard unless they were more confiding than the next. An autobiographer without reticence is usually an author without self-respect.

This question of what to write down and what to leave out is not confined to sex or medical details or to family pride; it is just as decisive when a man speaks of his achievements or neglects to speak of his failures. There is an impeccable reticence in The Education of Henry Adams, and very early in the book comes the admission of uncertainty, the selfdoubt and semi-failure which, as a young civilian, he felt at the time of the Civil War. I think that early admission goes far to attract the reader to that often prickly connoisseur. The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page was one of the most affectionate books of our time, and looking back at it across the two decades, I can remember two remarks of his which won me the moment I read them —once when he said the only things a man needs to be happy are a good bed and a comfortable pair of shoes, and again when, speaking of his rebuffs in journalism, he said, “I never got a job in my life that I asked for.” And then added, “But all my life better jobs have been given me than I dared ask for.” I remember— for I edited the manuscript — the fastidious reserve with which Hans Zinsser wrote As I Remember Him, and I remember how touched I was by that passage in which R.S. struggles with himself to determine whether he shall follow his muse or go down the long new road of science.

Thus it seems to me that there are “private matters” in every autobiography which are of immediate concern to the reader, and if they be not shared at a proper time in the introduction, the reader begins to withhold and soon to withdraw his confidence in what he is reading. And by “private matters” I do not necessarily mean a man’s genealogy and the bright-child recollections of his schooldays. I have always been impatient with the tradition which decrees that an autobiography should begin with one’s great-grandparents (on both sides) and march in short pants through several chapters of growing up before we come even faintly within sight of the man we want to know. I should like to see more autobiographies begin in the middle of things—begin as your friendship with the man might, were you lucky enough to know him in maturity, and then show us by introspection, as a novelist would, those formative influences which made him what he is today.

Such is Stendhal’s approach in his conversational autobiography, The Life of Henri Brulard. He opens the door talking to you as a man of fifty; on the second page he mentions casually by name the four women who were partners in his “unhappy love affairs” — “And I never possessed them,” he adds — and by the seventh, ruminating, he has owned up to his boredom as a young dragoon under Napoleon. It is at once engaging and mature, and in no time you are attentive.

The final test of an autobiography comes in the man-to-man judgment. How much can the author be taken at his word? How much is he writing for effect? So the reader keeps probing beneath the surface. Most auto biographers are forthright by intent—as forthright as Anthony Trollope. It is only the exceptional writer who deliberately stretches the reader’s credulity. When Rousseau begins his Confessions with the proclamation that he is like no other man who ever lived, your suspicions are up in arms. When Casanova tells you of his conquests, when Cellini preens himself in his audacity, — when Albert Jay Nock in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man tells you how everlastingly right he was, — the man from Missouri that is in every one of us gets restive and begins to read between the lines. An autobiography is judged first as human nature, then as literature.

Critic and editor, Latinist and biographer, flyfisherman and “cautious adventurer,” these are the several selves which make up Ferris Greenslet, and although the title of his autobiography, Under the Bridge (Houghton Mifflin $3.00) plays up the man in waders, it is really the struggle between him and the man of letters which gives this book its flavor.

He caught his first trout in Upstate New York and his first nibble of a book from William Dean Howells, who gave him a signed copy when he was twelve, and from Edward Eggleston, who gave him the run of his superb library on Lake George. He was book-wise at an early age: reviewing poetry for the Nation before he had his doctorate, and while still in his twenties publishing (with Charles Eliot Norton’s advice) the biography of James Russell Lowell. When he topped that with his life of Aldrich, Houghton Mifflin installed him in their sanctum and for the next thirtyfive years deferred to his editorial judgment.

Editorially, F.G. is farsighted and witty. Certainly his scholarship helped him land such wily old trouts as Henry Adams, Georges Clemenceau, and John Jay Chapman, just as his skill with the fly-rod and his understanding of the British helped him to build up the most distinguished list of war books published on our side during the years 1915-1919. He spotted Queed, The Little French Girl, and Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln, knowing in advance that they would be enormously successful; he published John Buchan, Earl Grey, Colonel Repington, and Colonel House for the solid worth that was in them; and in the first novels of Willa Cather he recognized the most authentic genius to come his way. He added Havelock Ellis to the list of Concord philosophers, and might have added Ulysses, too, had his directors been less conservative.

An able editor, F.G. is also a shy one, and there are moments when I wish that the critic in him had not been quite so restrictive of the man. His reticence has a way of closing the door just when your interest is rising. For instance, he wants us to feel the magnetism of his beloved teacher, George Edward Woodberry. So he quotes the rhetoric — lava now grown cold. But how the man taught, how he differed, and why he resigned from Columbia at his peak — all this is behind the door. Again, F.G. dismisses in a single phrase that call which has come twice to my generation and twice to him — the call to arms. Not for a moment do I question his answer, but surely he would have brought us closer to him had we seen his conscience at work.

Finally, I know he does himself less than justice in speaking so impersonally of his editing, especially in the latter half. Many are those books that have benefited from his constructive generosity, mine among them. There is more scope for affection and humor in the story of his editing, had he chosen to tell us.

I should call this the reverie of a man of letters whose features are illuminated as he broods before the fire by the flickering warmth of his humors, — his delight in Virgil which tuned his ear for the memorable phrase, his Shandean humor (as when he recalls the knitted decorum of the Fields mansion), his fellow feeling as revealed in his dear friendships with John Buchan and Leslie Thompson, his impatience with the percentage side of publishing, and his solace in the trout streams and the deft, selective company of Isaac.

The war will force autobiographies out of men who, in the normal course, would either have waited or would never have written. In time of peace a missionary doctor like Gordon S. Seagrave would have been too all-fired busy fighting off malaria, goiter, amoebic dysentery, and the venereal diseases which made the Shan States (Burma) such an unsanitary paradise. But when the Japanese tidal wave poured down the Burma Road, bombing, wounding, and despoiling everything in its path, Dr. Seagrave and Tiny his wife were routed out of the hospital in Namkham which they had built with their own hands. With their staff of Chinese, Shan, and Kachin nurses and their loyal native doctors, they joined up with General Stilwell, and followed him on that long back-breaking retreat, keeping alive or at least relieving the misery of the Chinese, Burmese, and British wounded. When the Japanese used the hospital and nurses’ home at Namkham for their barracks and were bombed out by American aviators, there went twenty years of hard work and dreams. And from that moment Dr. Seagrave became an autobiographer: while the indignation was hot in him, he wanted to tell the story of what his hospital meant to him and to others before it went up in smoke.

Burma Surgeon (Norton $3.00) is a book by a doer rather than a writer. It tells the true, rugged story of that one white man’s burden which we can never relinquish: the responsibility of bringing surgery and medical attention to disease-ridden people. Dr. Seagrave’s father and grandfather before him were missionaries in the East, which explains his zeal, his belief that you can do almost anything you have to, and his pleasure in being unorthodox. He writes as he operates — swiftly, efficiently, and with unprofessional compassion. His pages are plainspoken about the body, but not blood-stained. They open a window for your understanding of Burma and its race problems; they leave you with the hope that if one man could educate and cleanse his corner of that dark world, the process will surely be resumed when the Japs are out of it.

No war has been more faithfully reported than this. The writing comes not from a chair-borne detachment at GHQ but from individuals as exposed as infantry. Those who saw the film Desert Victory know the risks taken by the British cameramen who caught the Eighth Army in action. Richard Tregaskis on Guadalcanal, Ralph Ingersoll at El Guettar, Ernie Pyle in Tunisia, shared the foxholes of the men they were writing about. Here Is Your War (Holt $3.00) is a running commentary in very personal terms of our African campaign. It is the collection of Mr. Pyle’s newspaper columns threaded together in sequence and well illustrated by Carol Johnson’s spot drawings. This is homely writing by a man who sees the campaign always in terms of the individual. Mr. Pyle has that split vision Tilden used to talk about: he always takes the ball on the rise. Whether he is running for cover or for chow or toward the wounded, what he sees stays with him, and when he finds time to tuck it away in his notes, the details are still alive.

He has the habit of naming the men who attract him. “One of my closest friends was Lieutenant Leonard Bessman, a lawyer from Milwaukee. We had almost definite proof that Bessman was captured and not killed, so we all hope to see him again. Of all the soldiers I have ever known, he was the most sensitive to the little beauties of war and the big tragedy of life. Maybe that was because he was a Jew, or maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. . . . We sat around on our cots at night and laughed about things we hud heard Lennie say, because they sounded so melodramatic, yet, knowing him as we did, we knew they weren’t melodramatic at all and that Lennie meant what he said. A good example is the day he was trapped, overwhelmed and captured. He was far up forward of our advance troops, for that was his job, and suddenly he found himself cut off, with a German tank in front of him and a machine-gun nest on his side. Lennie jumped out of his jeep, pulled his .45 and yelled at the heavily armed enemy, ‘Come on out and I won’t shoot.’ In other people that would have been artificial bravado; but Lennie really meant it.”

Whether he is writing about the German machine gunners deep down in the rocks, or the disgruntled Algerian farmers, or the infantry mascots, or our bomber pilots and stretcher bearers, he measures experience by his own civilian yardstick. He reports the war as if he were an uncle of the boys he has seen, who got taken along and wants to be sure we understand. And in such writing there is more than a little of autobiography.

Biography was the part of literature which Alexander Woollcott loved best. In the attic of his mind were hundreds of little boxes labeled “Katharine Cornell,” “Alfred Lunt,” “Stephen Foster,” “Thornton Wilder,” “Irving Berlin,” “Noel Coward,” “Justice Holmes,” “G.B.S.,” “Helen Keller,” “Emily Bronte,” “Harpo Marx,” “Alice Duer Miller,” and these boxes held the souvenirs of his friends past and present. Their contents were constantly being replenished with new, strange, circumstantial, and usually affectionate bits of information. In that caricature of him, The Man Who Came to Dinner (which I think he inordinately enjoyed), there is no trace of the sentiment which those who loved Mr. Woollcott will longest remember. In the play one sees only the feline paw. Whereas actually he was a hero-worshiper who was saved from sentimentality largely by the teasing and extravagance of his prose, and who, whenever occasion offered, preferred to write about the courage, the quiddities, and the kindness of his friends. Those were the qualities he stored away in his attic and that now lie uncovered in his posthumous volume, Long, Long Ago (Viking $2.75).

These forty chapters were rewritten and mulled over in the midst of illness. The author had no illusions. He knew his time was limited, and perhaps for that very reason the papers about his particular friends of the stage and Tin Pan Alley, and those recounting his last visit to England, have in them a hail and farewell which I find poignant. No immigrant story has ever been better told than his of Irving Berlin; no tribute ever came more spontaneously to the hard-working Katharine Cornell than the 4.00 A.M. ovation she received in Seattle. As A.W. tells it, it will keep. Note in passing that superb bit which the author pulls parenthetically out of the hat: young Guthrie McClintic’s first program note on the actress who was later to be his wife — “Monotonous. Interesting. Watch.” See how affectionately he teases the memory of George Gershwin; watch the detective skill with which he traces the Luck of Johnny Mills; hear him have his last word with George Bernard Shaw. He had been flirting with the idea of filling a small volume with the more gaudy murder cases of our time, and six of them are included here, two of which — the Hall-Mills case and the Elwell case — are still in search of the murderer. Of secondary interest are sidelights on Jane Austen, Housman, Father Damien, Emily Bronte, and Barrie. For what truly matters are the stories of the living, the thumbnail sketches of those actors and musicians and writers whose careers touched his own so intimately that when he wrote about them it was second nature to include himself.

As I lay the book down, I wonder on what earlier model he formed his style. Was it Charles Flandrau, whose Diary of a Freshman first turned his thoughts toward college — Flandrau whose use of the superabundant word, whose use of the parenthesis, and whose charming manner of gradual explanation his own resembles? That would be my guess.

What does a battleship talk about? Well, if you have a man like John Mason Brown on the bridge, you can be sure that the scuttlebutt will be different from what it is on other ships. Lieutenant Brown was the Bridge Announcer stationed on the flagship of our Sicilian task force. With a movable mike and that effervescent flow of words which has made him one of the top platform speakers in peace, he kept the 1400 fellow travelers in his battlewagon amused by his running account of That Town which they had just left (was it Norfolk?), the adventures of the convoy over, the first sight of Gibraltar, North Africa as an ideal battleground, how to behave with the Moslem ladies, and as a climax, what was taking place in the dark and dawn of the landing at Scoglitti.

As a lecturer, Mr. Brown was unorthodox, and it is to his credit that he has not been subdued by his gold braid. He never talks down, he quotes from Dover Beach, Henry Adams, Hazlitt, or Shakespeare in the more placid intervals, and he keeps to hard facts when the heat is on. As is true of every broadcast, this chronicle, To All Hands (Whittlesey House $2.75), loses some of its timeliness and spontaneity in being rewritten. But if a tonic of this kind is a morale builder on a battleship — and Admiral Kirk’s introduction suggests that it is — then I guess Father John’s little bottle is as happy a solution as you could find. The photographs are superb.

Americans have always had a vicarious pleasure in watching a native son move from a humble farm house to the Governor’s Mansion, and I should not wonder if this rise assumed even more prestige in the years directly ahead. The bases of power are shift ing, and our democracy will be strengthened if those responsible for it are as well regarded as those who have cleaned up a million.

Wilbur L. Cross is a living contradiction of that silly gossip so often repeated in the Long Armistice: that no good men go into politics. Your ward heeler would have said that he was too good to be trusted — why, the man was a college professor, he had written books, been Dean of some graduate school at New Haven, and then when he had reached the age of retirement, out he came, full of bounce and Yankee wisecracks, to show his homestate, Connecticut, how to run its business. Of course he hadn’t the ghost of a chance in that Republican stronghold: no Democrat had reached the governorship in fifteen years. But somehow Uncle Toby squeaked in, and ran the state so well, despite a recalcitrant Republican legislature, that he was re-elected for three more terms, finally retiring when he was seventy-seven. Some nutmeg!

The one secret most politicians keep to themselves is how they got elected. But this autobiography, Connecticut Yankee (Yale University Press $5.00), is a book of salty honesty. The Governor tells you how he got elected, tells you what he said, how he learned to stump the slate, and what he did to hold people’s confidence. He writes without lugs, and there is hardly a trace of pretense as he speaks of his humble start and of the good luck and good management which moved him up.

There is a great deal of successful living in these pages, and the more you read, the bet ter you like the author and the way he does things. His Connecticut ancestry and his short-pants preamble are a little long for most oullanders: what pulls us through them is the dry Connecticut humor which made Mark Twain feel so at home in Hartford. The Governor writes with a twinkle and soon you begin to look for it. I relished every word of his undergraduate life in Yale College sixty years ago and I grinned at the way he describes his invitation to teach at New Haven ten years later. “Professor Lounsberry cooled my enthusiasm somewhat by saying that my appointment was for one year only, subject, however, to renewal if all went well. The only assurance he could give me, he added equivocally, was that ‘Yale is a good place to go from.’”

I admire the way he took hold of the Yale Review, and the glint of hard humor and good sense with which he overrode that Faculty Committee which saw the periodical as a tilling ground for young Ph.D.’s. I cherish the picture of his writing “at home in the midst of a happy family, in the early years while the [four] children of the household at times are running from room to room playing their games. There was no command for silence, for I had trained my mind to concentrate on the work at hand.” I enjoyed every day of his research in England on Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding. And, by jingo, I do tip my hat to the way he fought and vanquished the political bosses of Connecticut. He needed shrewdness, and a liberal reserve of good humor, to survive. And he needed the idealism which shines between the lines of his forthright prose.