The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

IN THE early days of a war, when victory lies far ahead, men and women submit to whatever physical changes and sacrifices are necessary to win. We take rationing without a grumble, our only resentment being aroused by those who play the black market. Families double up with unfailing good temper; wages are frozen: taxes have increased to five times what they were in 1938 — yet they are paid. Middle-aged couples, used to comfort, cook and clean up for themselves, now that maids have gone into the factories. Young army wives take the burden of children and housekeeping as they would never have imagined in the 1930’s. The bridal photograph and the mother and child on a hot, crowded train are two aspects of one loyalty. And everywhere, young and old live without the men who are their brightest hopes.

We can accommodate ourselves to so much change because we have to. But in our minds and often unconsciously a reaction begins to back up.

We begin to fear that the changes will never stop.

Vaguely the apprehension grows that the American life we have known

and loved is becoming misshapen and insecure. Physical change and mental sacrifice are deeply exhausting: instead of making us more resilient , more generous, they provoke first a suspicion and then a resistance towards further change. It is as if the mind said, “So far, but no farther.”

This reaction hit us hard in 1919. Needing a scapegoat, our suspicions then lashed out at anything “un-American.” The Red hunts which flourished under Attorney General Palmer, the revival of the Klan in the South and even in such spots as Pendleton, Oregon, were outbursts of this determination to “clean the place up” — and in the cleaning to throw out any ideas that were new or foreign. Opponents of the League enlisted both this suspicion and this resistance in their defeat of Wilson.

At the same time a repressive force began to make itself felt in literature. In Boston the Watch and Ward Society, in New York the Society for the Suppression of Vice, were in full cry. The banning of Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius (and the suppression of September Morn), the shock and disillusion with which parents witnessed Laurence Stallings’s play, What Price Glory?, the fire tongs with which Jurgen and The Well of Loneliness were lifted into the flames, the under-cover intimidation which placed some sixty-eight volumes on the list of books “Banned in Boston” (a list which was advertised

with glee in the other forty-seven states), the arrest of Henry L. Mencken on Boston Common for selling a copy of the American Mercury containing Herbert Asbury’s “Hatrack,” and the trial and condemnation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, only a few select

pages of which were allowed to be read to the juryhere were the signs of middle-aged resistance to any change in ideas or morals. When books were too outspoken they were suppressed, sometimes because of the four-letter words, sometimes because of the ideas behind them.

Reviewed by Langdon Warner

Reviewed by Robert Hillyer

Reviewed by Frances Woodward

IN THIS ISSUE

PEOPLE ON OUR SIDE BY EDGAR SNow..

DAY OF DELIVERANCE WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT.

TRUMPET VOLUNTARY By G. B. STERN.....

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: A LIFE BY ELEANOR HVOCLES Reviewed by Clifton Joseph Furness

THE HISTORY OF ROME HANKS, AND KINDRED MATTERS BY JOSEPH STANLEY PENNELI. ...

Reviewed by Richard Ely Danielson

But what middle-aged stay-at-homes forget is that war is both profane and unmoral. The veterans who come home are realists in the toughest sense of that word. They are conditioned to hard facts and vermin, to brutality and the utmost of discomfort. They are not afraid of change, and to them the fourletter words are simply the cheap currency of a common misery. Writers from the ranks in 1919, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Stallings, T. E. Lawrence, and Remarque, to name five, never hesitated to shock their readers. For what was hard truth to them was shocking to middle age.

Here we go again Here in America the struggle has again flared up between liberty — those who disapprove call it license — and the repressive force. In Washington the Postmaster General cracked down on Esquire, a magazine which the GI Joes are certainly old enough to laugh at. Here, too, the antagonism took a political turn. When Senator Taft attached a rider, Title V, to the Soldier Vote Act, his legislation was inspired by the wish to keep the Administration from handing out political propaganda to the troops. It was spurred on by the wildest kind of Washington gossip. The Democrats were said to have millions of leaflets already printed and ready to send abroad, skits for the camp shows had been politically indoctrinated, etc., etc.

In his haste Senator Taft had written with ridiculous severity. He made it a criminal offense for any Army or Navy officer to distribute political argument “of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of a [Federal] election”—a criminal offense carrying a thousand-dollar fine and a year’s imprisonment. The Army rightly interpreted the amendment according to the strict letter of the law and with a dead-pan expression proceeded to make the Senator ridiculous. Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen’s biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was one of the first contaminating documents which the Army refused to circulate to its men — you certainly could not have that old reprobate around in an election year. Then the list began to grow. The Republic by Charles Beard, The Time for Decision by Sumner Welles, America Unlimited by Eric Johnston, Ten Years in Japan by Ambassador Grew, and even a work of the Senate itself, Tell the Folks Back Home by Senator James Mead —each came under the ban because of its potential political dynamite. One Man’s Meat was added — possibly because, in his delightful essay on lime, E. B. White acknowledged that the government distributed that necessity free of charge to himself and other farmers.

The height of ridiculousness was reached when the. Army held up an edition of 525,000 copies of the Official Guide to the Army Air Forces, a wellwritten, well-illustrated booklet which had a pencil sketch of President Roosevelt as its frontispiece, with the simple caption, “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy.” There was no tainted biographical matter about the President elsewhere in the book, but the Army, reasoning that the Republicans might construe this caption to mean that F.D.R. was a good Commander-in-Chief, firmly put the whole edition under lock and key.

Senator Taft was at last assisted to see the light. His amendment was revised so as to apply to “anything which considered in its entirety constitutes political propaganda obviously designed to affect the election,” and instead of being written on the books for an indefinite time, his prohibition will extend only until six months after the war’s end.

The repressive forces that made Boston’s “Banned Books” a national joke in the 1920’s are on the rise. The Roman Catholics in political office and the oldline Puritans, the Watch and Ward Society in their self-elected guidance of public morals, by bringing pressure on the Boston booksellers, have it in their power to suppress by intimidation any book which they suspect of being infectious. The bookseller has no wish to risk his neck for a book he did not publish; and the New York publishers, most of them, shun the notoriety of a book trial. When in the 1920’s the works of H. G. Wells, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and some threescore other writers were driven off the counters, it was for the same reason that has been urged against the novels Strange Fruit and Rome Hanks today: that they contained words and scenes which shocked a righteous parent.

This battle of minds between war-conditioned authors and home-bred conservatives is not easy to arbitrate. Your novelist explains honestly enough that, unless he uses the blunt Anglo-Saxon terms which men use in battle or under stress, he cannot make the scene “convincing.” The reader replies that such details are “needlessly offensive.” Which brings us to the borderline of taste.

Americans read with mental decency. When they see an author with the truculence of a small boy writing dirty words on alley fences, they wonder how much they must take before they arrive at the truth he has in mind. The hard-bitten Army talk in A Bell for Adano fits so naturally into its context that one reads it without protest; the same Anglo-Saxon terms when used to describe the lust, lechery, and perversion in Rome Hanks carry many a reader beyond the point of acceptance, Now who is to decide when a book has gone too far? Why, first and last, the reader, who, by ceasing to read or by returning the book to the lending library, registers his individual protest.

The trouble comes when some zealot thrusts a new book into the law courts. And the trouble will increase in Boston as writers who have been conditioned by the war have their work scrutinized by the conservatives at home. Given the Boston juries and the rising temper of the community, I fear that we may have more rather than less suppression. But for that court which I most respect, the individual conscience, let me quote from the verdict with which Judge Woolsey cleared the reputation of James Joyce’s Ulysses:-

In her first book, With Malice Toward Some, Margaret Halsey smilingly described the domestic adventures of a young American wife whose husband was teaching as an exchange professor in a provincial English college. Her account of English life, food, and manners tickled Americans — and Londoners slightly less. Her new book, with its selfconscious title, Some of My Best Friends Are Soldiers, is again speaking for an American wife — this time a grass widow of twenty-six, whose husband took to drink, and who now finds solace from the hard work and exasperation of the home front by writing every second or third day to her brother in his training camp. Gretchen’s letters are all about the little apartment in New York which she struggles so hard to keep going; about her father, who, when asked to balance his checkbook, says, “Character is dostiny,”and goes to bed; about Tom Garnett, an aviator wolf who rents the brother’s bedroom and has most definite designs on Gretchen; and pages on pages about the Negro problem as Gretchen encounters it as a hostess in a Columbus Circle canteen.

This chronicle is too rambling and garrulous for much tension. “As a correspondent,” writes the heroine, “I seem to have contracted middle-age spread.” Much easier to read the pages for their mischievous and feline observation, and best of all for their peppery comment on a small segment of uptown Manhattan. Not many Americans could be capable of such Halseyisms as these: “Rayon stockings feel as if you had painted molasses on your legs and it was slowly running down”; “A sergeant is only a man who accepts cash money for behaving just like father”; and “Fighting for democracy isn’t the exclusive privilege of tail-gunners.”

Howard Spring is a modern novelist who has capitalized to the full his Victorian heritage. He writes a spacious story, a story alive with many characters, a story in which the worldly success of one group of characters is contrasted with the ascetic poverty of another. Poverty both mean and ascetic Mr. Spring knows from his many years as a journalist in Manchester. The glamour of publicity in high place he witnessed in the London of the Long Armistice. Violence has come home to him from two wars and in the Irish Rebellion, which he reported at first hand. Here are the elements and the exposure from which he has drawn the substance of his novels.

For Mr. Spring, Manchester will always stand as the capital of the Industrial Revolution — Manchester with its immense, fog-ridden vitality, its close-packed streets, its coal grates, tea caddies, and small creature comforts such as the Midlanders, however poor, devise against the drudgery. Mr. Spring both loves and hates his City of Dreadful Night. He loves t he buoyancy it breathes, and he hates the power and poverty which close in on its men of promise. In Fame Is the Spur he singled out for his hero a rising Labor leader and politician (was Ramsay MacDonald the prototype?) who rose to fame but lost himself in the struggle. In Hard Facts Mr. Spring bus written another success story (success and its contamination). This time it is the story of a young printer turned publisher whose penny sheet makes him one of the great powers of his day. You think of Northcliffe, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Birkenhead, for any one of them might personify the power of the press. But you note that the author carefully did not choose as his model the fighting editor of Manchester’s most famous paper, C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian.

The rise of young Daniel Dunkerley is to me a matter of steadily increasing fascination. I respect his industry; I admire his tight-lipped purposefulness which permits him to confide in no man until his plans are in effect. I see the shrewdness with which he lays out the tentative first editions of Hard Facts. I accept with some incredulity his capture of a million readers within the first year, and then I begin to enjoy the effects of his new-found acquisitiveness and power. This is the story of what the power of print does to Daniel, of what it does to Agnes his wife, to Alec the poetic young editor he dragooned into his employ, to Theodore Crystal, the sycophantic vicar who is one of his charter investors; and in less personal terms it is the story of what the popular press has done to Manchester and to England.

It is a leisurely book, a book which is lit with lovely descriptions and warmed by the conflict and ambitions of vigorous people. Here, as in his earlier stories, Mr. Spring resolves his more difficult situations with a Rossetti-hued melodrama. But we can certainly forgive him this in exchange for so capacious and absorbing a narrative.