The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE slower you travel, the closer you see. This rule of the road applies to birds and bipeds: it means that a hawk sees more than a Thunderbolt; it means that a man tramping takes in more of the country than a man lulled in the back seat; it means that a traveler on a Greyhound gets a better feel of the spring than a traveler on the airways.

In the springtime with the windows open a bus is the nearest thing we have to the old stagecoach. Jogging along at a comfortable thirty-five, it takes you over the mountains, down into the valleys, along the streams, and through those little Main Streets the train never sees. The motion is too jiggly for reading, so you look and talk. The whole bus talks, intimately, comparing destinations, swapping stories and troubles. “How soon do think It will come?”

says the sailor beside you, outward hound for Baltimore, and the talk veers from Invasion to helicopters and the girl on the corner with her skirts blown back. And all the while we take our cue from the leatherneck driver whose even temper and sure hand keep the company in motion.

So I followed the spring north, coming up through the Carolinas, seeing the perennial contrast of the red clay and the first fresh green, the purple iris and the low blue periwinkle, the pink and white dogwood, like spray in the woods, and ihe young fruit trees, apple and peach, in rows of ballet dancers on the upland slopes. I received the vacant but dignified stares of sitting cows, and I saw the buzzards wheel overhead, and did my best to answer the perplexity of the troubled mother across the aisle. A New England eye misses only the clear, dark water of the Northern brooks. In Carolina the cricks are as red as clay.

Whenever possible, I caught the signs of the times. Here a little country store announces in huge whitewash letters, “Pay less and tote.” We jog on into timber country where a town is known by the while paint it keeps. We swing over South Mountain, across Antietam Creek, through Emmitsburg and within musket shot of Gettysburg. “You let us worry about the Rising Sun.” says the Marine on the poster. “ You take care of the rising prices.” I count the service stars in the farm windows-five was the most I saw in a single house. But I did see several singles in the girls’ dormitories of the State College.

Coming at last to Pennsylvania and Fort Pitt, I dismount and stretch my legs for a closer view of LST’s, the huge landing craft, built to be rammed ashore, which are now floating down the Ohio on their way to Hitler’s fort ress.

Letters reaching my desk from men in Italy, England, and the Pacific frequently bring with them bits of verse which the fighters have found time to write. Never since the Armada have the Navy and Army numbered so many would-be poets as today. So far as I can judge, the men of the Air Corps, ground forces included, are more articulate about their work than those of the other services combined. Perhaps it is the nature of their experience. Perhaps it is because the Air Corps has in its ranks so many young college men who would have been writing anyway. When the heat is off and the planes are grounded and the rain pours down, some of these men have the ability to draw apart and catch on paper something of the exaltation, the high loneliness, the silent fraternity, and the nervous exhaustion which are the elements of a pilot’s life.

IN THIS ISSUE

CANAL TOWN By SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMSReviewed by Walter D. Edmonds

THE LONG BALKAN NIGHT By LEIGH WHITE Reviewed BY James H. Powers

HOTEL BERLIN '43 BY VICKI BAUM Reviewed by Phoebe-Lou Adams

WINGATE’S KAIDERS BY CHARLES J. ROLO Reviewed by Richard Ely Danielson

CHARLES LAMB AND HIS FRIENDS BY WILL D. HOWE Reviewed by Clifton Joseph Furness

WHILE STILL WE LIVE BY HELEN MACLNNES Reviewed by Robert W. Anderson

You see this in The Lafayette Flying Corps — the first work on which Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall collaborated in the Paris of l919, directly after Hall’s return from a German prison camp. Before his capture, Hall had found time to write High Adventure, which told of his training as a pilot and of his first patrols and dogfights, and it was more than coincidence that one of the pilots who escaped from Germany with him was to write years later in Boston a story with the same intense spirit of the Lafayette Flying Corps. I mean Charles R. Codman, author of Contact. Beside these books, I should put that more brooding and nervous novel, Winged Victory, by V, M. Yeates. Yeates was a pilot of the RFC who was prodded into writing by the combined efforts of T. E. Lawrence and Henry Williamson. The war was over and he was dying of consumption when he began it, but in his prose he lived again through those harrowing days of strain and loss when the Fifth Army was retreating before the Germans in the spring of 1918.

During the Long Armistice, it was a Frenchman who kept the standard high. Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were classics of peace by a man of action. Though he was over-age for a fighter, Saint-Ex did his tour over the crumbling French front in 1940, survived, and finally escaped to this country, where he wrote that panorama of defeat, Flight to Arras, which is poignant when it is not too mystical.

All those books were by pilots, by men who flew and then wrote. But in this war, with men flying under the low ceiling of the Aleutians, down the whole length of the Pacific, over the Hump and the Alps and the Andes, in Africa, in Italy, and over the Boche, the sky is literally the limit. There are stories beyond number to be told, and some of them of necessity come to us secondhand. Books like Queens Die Proudly and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo have been strained through the intelligence of the earthbound. I feel myself that something is missing from these secondhand chronicles. They catch the flavor of the talk, the modesty and masculinity, but they miss the lift, the sense of flying, which the pilot himself does give.

I value a book like Torpedo 8, by Ira Wolfert, the chronicle of Swede Larsen’s Bombing Squadron, for its racy lingo. “I guess you guys are all going chicken on me,”says the C.O. when there are no volunteers for a crazy mission. “There’s a blue plate special coming up on your port quarter. Get it! " “Then the Japs would stream over and throw rocks. They’d walk their shells up and down this area.” And that reflex action known as “Guadalcanal twitch"-such phrases sum up the arithmetic of death, and when Swede Larsen’s nerves are beginning to fray out, he gives us through his collaborator a mental picture which is unforgettable. In one of the last of the big fights over Guadalcanal, a burning plane went bv him very close. “It came so close that he could see the pilot with his forehead resting peacefully on the instrument board-dead, probably, but looking like a man sleeping. (The odds are it was a Jap.) The tragic picture of the man resting peacefully through the last moment before a crash into the sea citing in Swede’s mind tenaciously through the whole assault, no matter how he tried to throw it off.”

Of the books by the airmen themselves, the first in point of time and distinction is Folling Through Space by Richard Hillary. He was a young volunteer pilot who would almost certainly have written without the stimulus of the war. He fought through the Battle of Britain, crashed, and was badly burned. Then in the long period of convalescence while his skin was being grafted, he began this book which exposes more sensitively than any other the unsentimental devotion and the nervy hypnotism of death which characterized those few survivors to whom Britain owed so much. His prose is strongly tinged with the influence of T. E. Lawrence, and in it is the same fatalism of a man under sentence. Hillary rejoined his squadron, but with not enough resilience to survive his second crash.

In this fateful year, I would single out three airmen deserving special attention. First, Lieutenant Colonel Bierne Lay of the Eighth Air Force, whose account of the Fortress raid on Regensburg was by all odds the most graphic American narrative to reach us this fall. The second is a poet, John Pudney of the RAF, whose verse, Flight Above Cloud, says obliquely and with that sudden thrust the truths which any squadron knows. Third is the chronicler of the most famous, least publicized transit line in Hitler’s Europe, the French Underground, which restores to England night after night the bombing crews and the buzz-boys— the fighters—forced down in enemy country. Fair Stood the Wind for France by Squadron Leader H. E. Bates is a novel about an English bombing crew, which begins in mid-flight and which comes down to earth with that shock and anxiety possessing all men reported as Missing. Bates’s prose shows us the surpassing loyalty which knits a crew together, and it deepens our understanding of what men are good for in the miasma of pain and suspicion.

In our generation there is a love of the air comparable to what Conrad’s characters felt for the sea. Women are as addicted to it as men, and the first American woman to write of this passion creatively is Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In North to the Orient and Listen! the Wind she wrote of actual pioneering flights which she made with her husband before the war. The itinerary of their travel was lifted above the usual level of flight by her love of the air, her feminine sensibility to the hazards involved, and her poetic feeling for words. This experience she has now sublimated in a short novel, The Steep Ascent, which she rightly says is neither fiction nor biography but “a fictional account of an actual incident. . . . Fundamentally it is simply a woman’s story, the story of a woman’s ordeal”; in this case the ordeal of a wife — she is pregnant — flying in a two-seater with her English husband (a member of the Schneider Cup team, a daring flyer) on their way from England across the Alps to Italy. Within the plexiglas of the cockpit, her mind lulled by the motor, she relives her life in reverie. In the hazardous moments above the Alps, the two planes of her existence, the trivial and the tragic, come to their point of intersection.

This, then, is an explorer’s book, about a woman in a new element. It is instinctive in her farewell with Peter, the five-year-old; it is sentimental, as in her thought of the tanks at Cambrai; it is apprehensive in its undertone of what the coming war will do for the earth below; and, best of all, in its sensuous details it is a woman’s reaction to the power and beauty of flight.

From out of the past and from a different London come these posthumous stories by Virginia Woolf. A Haunted House and Other Stories sounds a far cry. “All through her life,” says her husband in his Foreword, “Virginia Woolf used at intervals to write short stories. It was her custom, whenever an idea for one occurred to her, to sketch it out in a very rough form and then to put it away in a drawer. Later, if an editor asked her for a short story, she would take a sketch out and rewrite it, sometimes a great many times.”Possibly this method of her writing restricted the nature of her work. For these stories are the swift projection of a mood, and one feels that, at times, where a story such as The Shooting Party bears evidence of having been fussed over later, the mood becomes diffuse and the narrative soon loses its quick, piercing power.

As the title suggests, the prevailing mood of this book is one of loneliness. The opening story, A Haunted House, gives you the feel of the thing in the first two sentences: “Whatever hour you woke, there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure — a ghostly couple.” And then, in fewer than 1500 words, by the deftest of clues and the least tangible of emotions, Mrs. Woolf leads you into the heart of the old house, to show you the two couples, the one living in, the other haunting, the bedroom. By such fourth-dimensional writing is a lifetime reduced to ten minutes.

Loneliness is the theme she plays again and again, with variations. It may be the solitude induced by music, as in The String Quartet; or the pathetic isolation of the gawky woman in The New Dress; or the frozen antagonism of The Man Who Loved His Kind. Mrs. Woolf has caught her people in moments of sharp revelation, and the memory of them, hurt and exposed, returns as if we had known them. In the background, one occasionally sees Mrs. Dalloway — and her presence, as always, lends grace and warmth to the page. But in only one story. The Legacy, — and my favorite, — are there both narration and surprise. For the rest, these are beautifully set interiors from whose windows we catch a glimpse of that appealing, frightened countenance, “of what momentarily she called the soul — a widow bird, a bird perched aloof. . . .”

The Royal Game, a short novel of power and distinction, has been published together with Amok and Letter from an Unknown Woman, Stefan Zweig’s earlier and unforgettable masterpieces. Any one of these three is an anthology piece; together they stand as a memorial to that great talent which was wasted when, a refugee in despair, Mr. Zweig took his own life in South America last year.

It may be morbid, but it is also natural, for us to see in Dr. B., the hero of The Royal Game, a resemblance to Zweig himself. Dr. B. is a Viennese refugee, a lawyer who once held quiet power and distinction in the Vienna of Franz Joseph. Now, driven into exile, he has taken ship for the Argentine. Notable in the ship’s company is Mirko Czentovic, the stolid Yugoslav genius, the world chess champion, on his way to a South American tour. In a manner so swift and explicable that you cannot lift your eye from the page (and mind you, I don’t know a single move in chess), these two are pitted in an antagonism across the chess table which mounts as you understand the psychology behind it.

Dr. B. has learned his chess the hard way, as perhaps Schuschnigg might have learned it, in solitary confinement, as an exercise for the mind and a sanctuary for sanity. Zweig’s description of the torture of the doctor has the macabre quality of Poe at his best. Watching him in the ship’s cabin as he fingers the scar on his hand with that nervous impatience which sends him pacing around and around the table, we know that he is playing for his life.