The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

“KICK a tree for me,”said the famous Mrs. Bell of Boston to a rusticator who had come to call, and those words spoke the disdain of the city lover to whom trees and beaches were simply tenements for insects and to whom the summer was an interval of lowered shades — an interval when one lived within the breatldess cool of t he high ceilings, wit h a touch of 4711 for the temples as the July humidity made even the silence sticky.

Trees mean more to all of us, city dweller and countryman, than they did in Mrs. Bell’s day. There are fewer of them. Blight, fire, and the axe have thinned the woods that earlier Americans took for granted. Then, of all living things, the tree comes the closest to immortality, and 1 think men find solace in that apparent permanence at a time when human life is in jeopardy. This thought came home to me as perhaps it may come home to others in this most verdant spring; and acting on the impulse, I have been identifying the different trees which crown my three-acre moraine north of Boston.

Actually for twenty years I have been making a collection of trees, none of them my own. The best silver beech in my collection is in the Boston Public Garden, and to stop beneath it on a May morning with the boughs lacing overhead and the buds bursting into their early green is to savor t he full meaning of that word “umbrageous.” My favorite oaks are in the Midlands. You see them as you travel across the Ohio or Indiana farmlands, standing like the last of the Mohicans, and adding their solid strength to the farmer who plows around them. The elms — the American elms—are the graceful ladies of the town; their perennial beauty adds character to any village, and to see the elms in Williamstown and on Chestnut Street, Salem, when the lilacs are in bloom is to see the imperishable New England. My prize chestnuts are —or rather were—those which Thoreau measured (three times his outspread arms was their girth) on his walks along the Charles through Sudbury and Wayland, But they were silver limbless ghosts when last I saw them — victims of the blight which almost exterminated the chestnut in Massachusetts. The best lindens I know were planted more than a century ago in Beverly Farms; the most exquisite flowering trees, the camel ias, are in the Sacramento Gardens, and the prize maples in my collection are those which stand, scarlet and yellow against the blue sky, between Peru and Manchester, Vermont—but that is a September story. I have never yet seen a redwood or a giant cypress or a cedar of Lebanon. And somewhere I have lost my fig tree. I found it in the Southwest — was it in San Antonio? — a vast, wide, green umbrella. The picture stays with me, but I can’t remember the place.

Trees are not always beneficent. Living amid a density of oaks, I realize with what terrific swiftness a seemingly healthy limb can fall. The knowledge makes me wary when I see children playing under the boughs. It makes me realize that Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Mary Ellen Chase were not writing fortuitously when t heir characters were crushed by a toppling tree.

IN THIS ISSUE

TIIK TIME FOR DECISION BY SUMNER WELLES

Reviewed by Herbert B. Elliston

LEBANON BY CAROLINE MILLER

Reviewed by Frances Woodward

THE REST OF YOUR LIFE BY LEO CHERNE

Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN BY BEN AMES WILLIAMS

Reviewed by Lt. (j.g.) Robert W. Anderson

At Hampstead they show you the tree under which Keats loved to sit. I was reminded of this as I read Sheila Birkenhead’s account of a party at the Spanish Inn on Hampstead Heath the spring of 1819. It was Joseph Severn who first noticed that Keats had disappeared from the circle, and on going into the night, he found the poet stretched out beneath the pine trees, listening entranced to the singing of the nightingales overhead. “A day or iwo later Keats took a chair into the garden at Wentworth Place and wrole out, during the morning, the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,”in and out and back and forth on a couple of loose sheets of paper.’ Later in t he day Charles Brown saw him folding the scraps of paper carelessly away behind some books in his room and rescued them.”

This episode, one of many in that eager, affectionate book. Against Oblivlon, is characteristic of Severn’s friendship for Keats. Severn had none of the flash of Leigh Hunt, none of the genius of Shelley and Wordsworth (both of whom intimidated Keats), but he had the observant eye of a miniaturist. He loved Keats for what lie was and what he wrote, he certainly enlarged Keats’s knowledge of music, and with the generosity which was to make him more famous than his painting, he broke off his own career to nurse the poet to Italy.

As the wife of Joseph Severn’s grandson, Sheila, Countess Birkenhead has had access to the unpublished family papers. Her romantic biography of Severn is written with affection. Much of the dialogue in it is taken straight from the opinions the young men expressed in letters, and thus is written, rather than spoken, English. When there are gaps in the sequence, imagination follows the probable course. The book at. the outset seems to me posed, like a waxwork,— the young men with their famous names are lacking in personality. The relations between Severn and his father are neither clear nor masculine. But after Tom Keats’s death, the author is no longer arranging and explaining. Keats, Brown, Haslam, and Severn have become animalcd, and as one follows that heart-breaking duet of Keats’s last letters and that diary-chronicle which Joseph was sending back to Mrs. Brawne and to his own family from Home, we feel the sacrifice and see the tragedy more clearly than ever before. The picture of those two battling death is unforgettable. From Joseph it called out immense courage and constancy, for the best medical opinion of that time held that the contagion would inevitably altack him; from Keats it called forth resignation at a time when he had everything to win, and his knowledge of internal anatomy made every change in his condition tenfold worse. The letters tell it in those wonderful phrases: Keats, “Oh what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints” . . . “How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?”; Severn, “I have been beating about in the tempest of his mind so long.” . . . “ I am broken down beyond my strength. . . . I have not slept for nine days.”

This book is valuable not for its aftermath, but as the slory of a friendship, the story of a great heart and a greater poet. Once you are drawn within its warmth, the urge is irresistible to turn back to the Odes and to those most sensitive of English letters.

The Letters of Alexander Woollcott are gusty, airy, consciously entertaining, full of that personal extravagance which either won or offended you, Shy lock-shrewd in their inner judgments of the theater and the radio, capricious in their championship of actors and playwrights, a trace snobbish in the great wealth of the author’s intimates and a trace proud of the enormous number of his engagements, gossipy, eager to touch the mainspring of little people, and with a Sherlock Holmes appetite for ihe coincidences of a great story, the whole, individually and as a collection, being mitigated by a tenderness the more remarkable because of his superb memory and by a relenting affection which made him a truer, kinder friend than his wit might suggest. The letters, save toward the close when he is writing of England and ol Alice Ducr Miller and of this country at war, seldom strike deep. This was deliberate, for il was his manner to convey lightly the truth and the love which we occasionally glimpse in the hermit within.

Nevil Shiite (Commander Norway) is a novelist when his duties at the Admiralty permit. For four years he has been engrossed in problems of aircraft design, but when he comes down with a head cold, can’t sleep, or has a Sunday off, he writes — as John Buchan wrole the Greenmantle series — for his own and others’ relaxation. As a countryman, he has been long in London pent; a fisherman, he has a hankering for t rout streams and woods and he makes that hankering work for him most effectively in his new novel, Pastoral,

Pastoral is the story of a bomber station on the outskirts of Oxford. It is the story of an intensely loyal community who lived a life of ext remes. I hese pilots and ground crews and their attending women, those comely WAAFS who are so efficient at the radio control, are keyed up and impersonal, as the Wellingtons make ready for a night’s run over Germany. The big birds go out at ten-thirty, “Mission completed is radioed back from the target at midnight, and the survivors are home, fed, and asleep before four. To survive fifty such missions as that, a pilot needs luck, steady nerves, and peace of mind. Peter Marshall, a veteran of this particular squadron, has struck the perfect balance between action and quietude. Peter never forgets a thing he has learned over the dark target, and his crew trust him accordingly. But when the ships are grounded, he fishes for pike, borrows a rifle and goes after pigeons, or cycles eight miles by moonlight to see a wild fox and a badger.

Peter was nearing the end of Ins second tour when in a relaxed moment he noticed that pretty girl in uniform, Section Officer Robertson; within (he week he and his anxious crew are exposed to that sudden unbalance which spring and propinquity produce in an unwary male.

The charm of this book is the charm of light and shade. The small talk at the mess, the joshing of Pat Johnson, are as true to life as the cryptic utterance in the control tower when a straggler is “ fixed ” over the North Sea. Peter cycling into camp with his eleven-pound pike is only another side of the same pilot who, a few hours later, is fighting for his life above Hamburg. How much Peter means to his crew, how much he means to Gervase, is never fully understood until his crash landing— the most powerful single passage in a book which is by turns adventurous and pastoral.

The three Sitwells, Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell, have stood for a grace and an independence and a felicity of writing. How much enjoyment is to be had from the tapestry of their lives we have only recently been reminded by Sir Osbert’s new book, Left Band, Right Hand! In appreciation of this and earlier favors, there has lately come tome these gay, capricious verses by a young American poet, only recently released from our army: —

» I was much impressed by your vigorous denunciation of our American way of destroying old landmarks. I, too, have felt a sense of desolation at the “blotting out of the past.” In this locality, it has been the wanton destruction of the land —rather than buildings — which has torn at my heart. But that, too, is surely a desecralion of our heritage. — IRENE BEHTSCHY,Rhame, North Dakota.

» As I look back at the old world which I left in 1926, I for one do not feel quite so poverty-stricken for things of the past as you make out. While the motor parkways around New York and other cities combat sveh shabbiness as the railroads in every country create, there are still many treasures to be found of American architecture, some of them shabby and some of them in the fine patina of age. Talbot Hamlin’s Greek Revival Architecture in America is a guide to such adventures. It is the type of book that Europeans have had for at least two generations, and it is about an American accomplishment that should fill every American with pride and the endeavor to overcome the very faults that caused you to write your vitriolic remarks.— DIETRICH THOVEE, Westfield, Massachusetts.

» So Stephen Benét “invoked a new magic of fantasy in American prose.” God, what a fancy description of grave-robbing! What is a “new magic of fantasy”? If you have so many lazy words kicking around the Atlantic office, please string a few together to identify what Washington Irving invoked with “The Devil and Tom Walker.” — Hits. LEONAR D GAYNOR, Glen Gardner, A ew Jersey.

» Your Potomac Prizes interest me keenly. However, I should like to add one more name, Recall that, last year, novelist-farmer Brom field predicted a dire food shortage for February; that at that time there was to be a crit ical food short age; that we were to be on the razor-thin verge of starvation? In the light of the actual facts concerning the real food situation at that time, Mr. Bromfield is certainly entitled to some special “Potomac” kudo, chromo, or similar evidence of honors for distinguished prophecy. - ERNEST G. BISHOP, Los Angeles, California.

» In a recent review of Ernie Pyle’s Here Ts Your War you mention the fact that he had spiked the malicious rumors that Jewish-Americnn servicemen were not doing their part at the front. As a Gentile with many Jewish friends in the services who are doing t heir part, I approve of what you said. There is reason to believe that these rumors, directed not only against 1 he Jew but also against other minority groups, are part of a planned campaign to create disunity in America. I have examined a book ca lled Fighting for America. In it are listed the names of the Jewish servicemen who have been decorated up to November 1, 1943. Before I had reached the letter “ L“ I was exhausted, and anyway it was 1 ime for “lights out.” Of the 574 servicemen listed up 10 Sergeant “Meyer Levin,” 42 had Distinguished Flying Crosses, 75 the Air Medal, 34 the Silver Slur, 7 the Legion of Merit, 4 the Navy Cross, and 387 the Purple Heart. Sergeant Meyer Levin, who before his death in act ion off New Guinea was (’aptain Colin Kelly’s bombardier, received the Distinguished Flying Cross, Silver Star, two Oak Leaf Clusters, and a Purple Heart. But on the above list he is counted for the Distinguished Flying Cross only. — CORPORAL PALMER VAN GUNDY, Camp Haan, California.

» I appreciate your review of Strange Fruit more than any other I have read so far. I agree with you that the pornographic angle is unimportant. I he four-letter words could have been omilted easily enough. Having been reared in a small South Georgia county-seat town and having practiced medicine for twenty years in one of the larger cities of the state, it is my opinion, and that of a number of friends with whom I discussed the matter, that miscegenation is no longer a problem of any importance in this state. The practice has been on the decline lor fifty years and is now rare.

But Strange Fruit does not even deal with the only type of miscegenalion of which I have any knowledge — that of pure lust in its lowest expression. In this book the author portrays a beautiful, spiritual love affair, bet ween a white man and a Negro woman. That situation I have never known and I doubt that it has ever ex sled m Georgia except in the imagination of the author. The nearest approach to such conditions may have developed in the decadent days of New Orleans a century ago at the time of the notorious Octoroon Balls. So to answer your question as to the prevalence of such tragedy in Georgia, I would say that it is non-existent and that miscegenation of any type is rapidly becoming so.

The Negro characters in the book are finely draw n and I have known many like them. Many problems could be solved if there were more Sam Perrys and Besses to help solve them. But never have I seen as many stupid white people collected in one group as are found in this small town. Dr. Deen is portrayed as a weak nonentity and the rest of the citizens are little better than caricatures. Few things happen in small communities that the local doctor does not know about, and yet there is no evidence that he tried to stop the sordid affair in which his son was involved.

Aou state: “Without the shock (of the coarseness) I doubt if the moral would have gone home.” May I ask what is the great moral pointed out by this book? No solut ion of t he unreaI t ragic siluaf ion is proposed by t he aul hor. In fact no happy solution is possible except complete social equality with general acceptance of intermarriage. Even Miss Smith is apparently not quite willing to face that issue. Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave quite an exaggerated picture of slavery, but it did offer an obvious solution of the problem it presented. Strange Fruit does not qualify for comparison in this important respect.

I am sorry that such a book was written at all, and especially by a Georgian, as that fact would seem to lend authenticity to what seems to mo to he a wholly unjustified and fictitious picture of race relations in Georgia and the South in general. That economic, educational, and political inequalities exist I would be the last to deny, but books like this one will not help in their correction. DR. THOMAS HARROLD, Macon, Georgia.