The Peripatetic Reviewer

MOST of us have forgotten the origin of Labor Day, but its meaning is clear to all ages: it marks the end of summer, the putting away of summer things, the separation of calf lovers, the closing up of cottages, the beaching of boats, and the renewed labor in that enclosed existence which is city life. Has any civilization prior to ours, I wonder, known as sharp a differentiation between summer’s freedom and winter’s tension? Perhaps that is why we feel so keenly the perennial rebellion when the leaves turn, why we hug to our minds those golden days only a few weeks back, why men say to themselves, as a famous writer once said to me, “Then one September morning I woke up. I asked myself why I should slave away as a lawyer eleven months each year in order to live one month the way I wanted. When as a writer I could . . .”

Because of the long denial of the war, our appetite this summer has been insatiable. Each of us gathers experience to his taste and I shall match you some of mine. The open season begins for me with the reidentity of the oaks and beech in my wood lot north of Boston. Americans always take trees for granted, but this wet spring their foliage and strength were something to watch. The orioles that have paused with us before were in the light-green branches for a fortnight, a stubborn robin risked her nest in the swaying sweetbrier over the guesthouse door, and one morning, bright after rain, my daughter and I fished a trout pool.

We were casting into the shadow of an alder, the banks were waist-high in white and blue iris, and the roots below were an apartment house of native trout, of which we netted eight, the largest exactly twelve inches. Brook trout are the gold in our brooks, the prettiest, supplest fish that swims; and tying on a fly (with one of those animated nylon leaders), a man is suddenly all thumbs and beside himself at the thought of what is underwater.

The bronze-back small-mouth bass is a different kettleful. He is a coarser, more smashing opponent, but so full of jump and courage and so swift in action that I have never understood why your State-ofMainer will stomp on him, then toss him in the bushes, but keep the pickerel. In water like that of South Branch Lake, which empties into the Penobscot (and which guests fish with the unwritten rule of one bass a rod a day), the fish grow strong and wise in their survival. At sunset I was into a big one. He came out of water for the fly and then sank to sulk. Time went by, the rod bowed, the reel creaking to his deep sports, and after nine minutes George Glover, the guide, said, “Sure would like a look at that fish. If you’ve hooked him in the tail, we’re here for all night.”So idiot I began forcing in the line. He grudged it but came, slowly; I saw the leader, and as I exclaimed, “Here he comes!” he made his rush for the canoe, found the slack, came out of water, danced on his tail, showing us his white belly and thick four-pound girth, spat the fly in our faces, and disappeared. “Humph,” said the guide. “If I had a bottle of liquor, I’d give him half and you the other! ”

It’s the unseen as well as the seen that catches the eye —the print of moose and bear in the mucky trail; the thrashing heard across the water as two male loons fight with their wings for the lady within reach; the mating eagles rarely glimpsed but unmistakable with their slow beat and the tail feathers of white. And then, one late afternoon as we were tracing an ancient trout brook that tunneled under the fallen trunks of a pine forest (“You’ve got to crouch down and then pull their cheeks out,” said George), we stepped into a shaft of sunlight, and there, not four feet away, head down on its delicately folded legs, was a fawn, soft brown with mottled white spots. The doe (she must have been watching us) had told it not to move; the eyes never lifted, but how alert it was to danger you could tell from the thumping heart and the nose never still.

The salmon, of course, is king of white water, and in water as low, clear, and warm as we found in the Northwest Miramichi, he is a king who has little or no use for city slickers. We were fishing eighty miles up, the stream no wider (but much more beautiful) than the Lincoln Highway — fishing from the rocky ledges, often with that backhand cast that either drops so lightly or clings so firmly to the spruce behind you. It is amazing and infuriating to see how high you can tree your fly.

I did not know that the Maritimes could be as hot as New Jersey in July, but for a time they were and then it was the dawn that counted. You went to sleep eager; and once, having roused myself at 3.30 by mistake, I watched the slow, gray beautiful show, mist rising from the falls, the unvarying rush of water, stars paling, and at last a little shadow cast by the shoes on the floor. Then it was 5.00 and time to go to the pools.

It takes experience and patience to overcome the disdain or regal fury of the salmon. Seen from above, there they lay, like long, wavy cordwood having no truck with flies, wet or dry, intent only on cold water and their destiny upstream. Under such circumstances the grilse were more my meat: they would fool around with an amateur and occasionally come into the net. After supper at Dam Camp we sat on the rocky promontory just above the falls. The water was coming over fast, say thirty miles an hour, with the rush and sound of a giant fire hose. From the deep pool below with its floating cakes of foam the salmon would rise in a leap that took him halfway up the column of water. You saw him suspended for an instant, silhouetted against the white; then with the tail propellent he worked his way up the crest, and fin and tail disappeared into the deep black. At nightfall the sight of a twenty-pounder jumping the falls is a picture no photograph can reproduce.

In the woods the unseen always awaits you. At Mountain Brook, a bald eagle, so close he seemed like a man-eater, rose suddenly from the crag above us and went wham, wham, wham, down the gorge. On the tote-road, coming out, we heard, a long way off, the anger of an owl tormented by crows. And here I saw for the first time a hen partridge decoy for the sake of her brood. We surprised them in the center of the path; they scattered into the brush but thereafter for fifty yards along the trail the mother exposed herself again and again to divert us from her young.

I have said we Americans take our woods for granted. Why are we that way? I noticed as I coasted through Maine that the signboards, from which we were mercifully delivered during the war, are going up and that the trees are coming down — down of course for pulpwood (sure, we’re all to blame), down with a carelessness which proclaims, “Why worry about reforestation?” Up in New Brunswick the white birch are dying, wiped out by blight. When their white skeletons fall, the woods will be the poorer, as they were in 1925 when the black spruce disappeared. Here at home the chestnuts are extinct and the Dutch elm disease continues its menace in New York and Connecticut. Can anyone picture New England denuded of its elms? If not, when do we begin to take care?

Few Americans spend their lives in the house or in the place where they were born, and the experience is familiar to us all of returning to the home town after a long absence and of standing aghasl at what time has done. This experience has taken on an additional poignancy for Continental émigrés of this generation who have revisited Europe since its liberation.

Joseph Wechsberg, now a citizen of California, was born in Czechoslovakia thirty-nine years ago, and in the course of his odyssey has been a lawyer, ship’s musician (from which experience came his delightful first book. Looking for a Blue Bird), croupier, cameraman, novelist, and a technical sergeant on special assignments for the OSS in Europe. So it was in uniform, with a blue barracks bag on his shoulder, that he passed into the Russian zone, bound for his birthplace, Moravská-Ostrava, in search of his relatives. In Homecoming he has written quietly, directly, and with a fine undertone of feeling, the account of what he found.

Wechsberg had first to buck the Russians. The Russian troop trains and convoys were heading home, the men sleeping on the top of the freight cars, the trucks “piled up high with furniture, rugs, a toilel seat, a piano, mattresses”; and coming the other way were the troops of occupation. The sergeant thumbs his way along, meeting rough good nature, spasmodic hospitality, and little obstruction until he conies at last to the family town. In the hazy readjustment which follows, what he sees, of course, is two towns: the darling of his memory and the bleak, gray, underfed survivor of today.

Though he speaks the language like a native, he is now American, and so are his measuring stick and his generosity. When tracing through “the pitiless crazy geography” of the bombed town, he runs to earth his wife’s parents, and when their voices are again under control, his mother-in-law uncovers a few coffee beans at the bottom of a jar. “‘Wait a minute,’ ” said the sergeant. “I went out into the hall where I had left my blue barracks bag. I carried it into the kitchen and dumped all the stuff on the spotless, white-tiled floor. Three pounds of coffee, corned beef and spam, canned milk, dried fruit, cheese, three cakes of G.I. soap, five bars of toilet, soap, Hershey bars, two cartons of cigarettes.

“Some of the things were from packages that my wife had sent me from America. There was fine chocolate bearing a Fifth Avenue label, a new kind of cheese I had never seen before; a small jar of Nescafé, cautiously packed in fine tissue so it wouldn’t break; a pound of tea.

“I said: ‘She buys most of the stuff at a large drive-in market not far from our house.’

“‘What’s a drive-in market?' my mother-in-law asked.”

Such touches as these are the open sesame to a deft and sympathetic book.

John Bully of Vermont has worn for thirty years a now somewhat soiled red string tied loosely around his throat to protect him from nosebleeds. Or if a thunderstorm comes over, John is quick to lift the stove lid and pour in the salt, and then clap the lid back on quick. “There she goes,” he says, “straight up the chimney to break up that lightnin’.” And if the flash should then strike close, he will add, with dry conviction, “See, it missed us.”

We all cherish our pet conceits, and taken in the aggregate they compose a body of existing folklore which extends today into medicine and healing, natural science, genetics, anthropology, and, of course, gambling. In The Natural History of Nonsense, Bergen Evans, Professor of English at Northwestern University, steps forward as a connoisseur of human error, a doctor of gullibility. His inquiries range from such cures as John Bully swears by, to the legend so persuasively presented by Harper’s that human foundlings are nurtured and reared by affectionate wolves. A point that fascinates me in this connection is Mr. Evans’s comment that “wolf children” do not behave as wolves actually do behave, but rather as the uninformed suppose wolves to behave. Atlantic readers will, I hope, recall the “rains” of worms, frogs, fish, and even of boiled catfish, which Mr. Evans dried up with such exquisite logic in our April issue.

The trouble is that we all litter up this beach of common sense. “As you know,” said a professor’s wife to me recently, “honey is a good cure for asthma.” I did not know and said I thought it was nonsense. “Well, a great many people believe in it,”was her firm rebuke. Human nature being what it is, the beach is loo big for Dr. Evans.

We are told of George Orwell that he is “a scoffer and arguer,” and judging from his latest and most satirical book, Animal Farm, the words fit. We are told more: that he was born in India in 1903, the son of a Civil Servant, sent to Eton and, after graduation, sent back to spend five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Shortly thereafter he rebelled against many things sacredly British, took his way to Paris, where he lived in poverty, and by 1935 was struggling precariously into view as a free lance with his early books, Burmese Days and Down and Out in Paris and London, when the Spanish War called him as a volunteer. He fought against Franco and, an arguer still, came to detest tyranny, whether of Communist or Fascist origin.

Animal Farm is a neat little book. The writing is neat, too, as lucid as glass and quite as sharp. It appears that the animals of Manor Farm, the cart-horses Boxer and Clover, Benjamin the donkey, the wily pigs, the hens and geese, have long been underfed and mistreated by Mr. Jones, their owner. So when Old Major, the prize boar, now in his twelfth year, feels the approach of death, he calls the comrades to him, lectures them on their stupidity, fires them with the thought of the rebellion that is coming, and then, clearing his throat, begins to sing a stirring song, “Beasts of England.” Thanks to Mr. Jones’s addiction to the bottle, the Rebellion breaks out sooner than expected, and how far it is successful the reader must judge for himself. Mr. Jones is driven from his property, the animals operate the farm, bossed at the outset by the two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, who, being cleverer than the rest, trade on the regimental slogan “Four legs good, two legs bad,” and quietly sequester for their own use the apples and milk of the community. How the outside world, led by Mr. Jones, attempts to suppress the rebels in the Battle of the Cowshed; how Trotsky — excuse me — how Snowball is thrown out by Napoleon; and how the secret police of young dogs are brought in to keep order — these are three episodes of a fantasy which seems to have a reminiscent bearing on life. For some people this book will be a chapter from Gulliver’s Travels brought up to date. It has the double meaning, the sharp edge, and the lucidity of Swift; it also has a clever hostility if one applies the analogy to Soviet Russia.

George Orwell gives me the impression of a man who was powerfully attracted to the concept of socialism, but who, on first-hand acquaintance, found his liberal traditions jeopardized by the party line, and in self-defense veered back to a more free and central position.

Mr. Orwell is a scrutinizer where Howard Fast is a zealot. Mr. Fast is by nature a pamphleteer, and a good one. But by strenuous application he has come to be regarded as a historical novelist. He reaches back into our past to find the soldier, the visionary, or the politician who can be bent to his purpose and whom he now animates with the zeal and preachment of today. His most successful blend of the past and present is in his Citizen Tom Paine, but his other figures, his Washington and his Patrick Henry, are men of more bias than consistency.

In his new novel, The American, he has turned to the Middle West for his hero, a self-made American of German blood, John Peter Altgeld. A stolid, powerful boy for his age, Pete Altgeld quit his father’s farm to join an Ohio regiment at the close of the Civil War. He saw little action, but he got his legs under him, and on his return he was no longer intimidated by his father. He began the self-schooling which was to carry him to such success as a lawyer. And as an itinerant worker on the railroads, in the factories, and on the farms of the Middle West, he developed his tenacity as fighter and boss which was eventually to land him the governorship of Illinois.

Mr. Fast is in great haste to get us to that governorship, so he glosses over Peter’s marriage and his acquisition of a cool million (how did he make that much and so fast?) in order to bring us to the Haymarket Trials, which were to be a thorn in Altgeld’s political career. In this portrayal Altgeld strikes me as cold, unapproachable, irresolute, and not very clear in his motives. But his state papers, which the novelist quotes, are so clear and forceful that I wonder at the discrepancy. In his effort to pose Altgeld as a latter-day Lincoln of the Labor Movement, the author has become too distracted by his thesis, with the result that the figure on the pedestal has neither the magnetism nor the plausibility which the reader expects.