The Peripatetic Reviewer

So writes Mr. George F. Wing of Melrose, Massachusetts, and to him and to other long-suffering readers we make this New Year’s pledge: that at the earliest opportunity in 1947, the Atlantic will again be printed on paper which is clean, firm, and while. It is our hope that the new stock will be available by early summer, and our expectation that the legibility of the Atlantic type page can then be restored to what it was before we went into battle dress.

Almost a century ago, a good-natured British lion and his secretary were inbound to Boston aboard the passenger ship Canada. It was his first trip to the New World and he was coming over to lecture, urged to do so by James T. Fields, and wisely advised during the passage by James Russell Lowell, who was soon to be the first, editor of the Atlantic. The lion stood six feet four, was broad-shouldered, with hair prematurely silver. He was Dickens’s only rival, and his latest novel, Henry Esmond, was to appear in London during his absence.

The crossing had been rough. The passengers had spent thirteen days “in that horrid little cabin below where we are tumbling and rolling and bumping and creaking in the roaring black midnight,”and Thackeray was a relieved and hungry man when at last he reached the Tremont House, where rooms had been engaged for him. Fields had already ordered the dinner and invited a few friends, and remembering Thackeray’s curiosity about American oysters, had taken care to procure the largest specimens available. Six bloated Falstaffian bivalves lay before him in t heir shells. “How shall I do it? “asked Thackeray with a look of anguish. He was told. “Opening his mouth very wide.”writes Fields, “he struggled for a moment, and ihen all was over. I shall never forget the comic look of despair he cast upon the other five over-occupied shells. I broke the perfect stillness by asking him how he fell.. ‘ Profoundly grateful,’he gasped, ’and as if I had swallowed a lit t le baby.’ ”

Although people did not turn out with flags and drums to receive him, as they had Dickens a few years earlier, they did come, and in droves, to hear Thackeray lecture. He had prepared a series of six talks on English Humorists of the Last Century, and when he needed a seventh, as he did before the tour closed, he dictated it in the course of a single day, lying in bed, chain-smoking and dictating to his secretary from breakfast until the dinner gong rang. His talks were amusing, his tenor voice carried well, and his accenl was fascinating. Although he might down canvasback ducks and no little claret before mounting the platform, he never forgot fora moment that he was here to entertain. He needed the dollars, for his daughters and for his wife, who had long since been in a sanatorium. His fee was about five times larger than the going rate of our native talent. He expected the tour to net him close to $20,000 (which Baring’s were to invest for him at 8 percent in America), but when Providence turned out only 500 strong, half filling the auditorium, he was quick to return half the promised amount. “Nobody must lose money by me in America,”he wrote, “where I have had such a welcome and hospitality.”

To judge from the comments, it was the charm of what he said, even more than the substance, which brought down the hall. William Cullen Bryant, covering the first lecture, on Swift, for the New York Evening East, was impressed by Thackeray’s gigantic size and by the fact that he looked so old; ho praised the enunciation and the " utter absence of affectation of any kind" and the lecture itself as a “work of art.”Yet he had little respect for Thackeray’s summing up of the Dean’s character, and other NewYorkers, notably Henry James the elder, were even more severe. “Thackeray,”James said, “could not see beyond his eyes, and has no ideas, and merely is a sounding-board against which his experiences I hump and resound: he is the merest boy.”I gather that he was at his best in what he calls the “very good fogyfied literary society" of Boston, where with congenial men like Dana, Fields, Longfellow, and Lowell he would fall into that easy chat of which he was master. As Prescott the historian wrote of him, “I do not think he made much impression as a critic. But the Thackeray vein is rich in what is better than criticism.”

And how did he find us? He came to us not as so many Englishmen have, with pride that only fortifies itself, but open and ready for new impressions. “Broadway,” he wrote, “is miles upon miles long a rush of life such as I never have seen . . . houses are always being torn down and built up again . . . the rush and restlessness please me, and I like (for a little) the dash of the stream.”“They begin without a dollar and make fortunes in 5 years . . . the pace is awful. No man lives in his fathers house —” “In 50 years the population will treble that of Britain— ” “Here is the future: here is the great English empire to be when the Gauls and Cossacks may have trampled out our old freedom . . . Lord Lord I am going away presently a thousand miles to give a few lectures: a thousand miles is as nothing here: there are thousands and thousands beyond Cincinnati; and plenty and liberty for every man for hundreds of years yet to come. I almost feel young again as I drink up this young air.”

I have been quoting copiously from The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, in four volumes, so skillfully edited by Gordon N. Ray. One enters and is absorbed by the intimacy, the many-pcopled activity of these pages in which the manly, pensive, bantering voice of Thackeray awakens the characteristic response from “Old Fitz,” from Fields, from his differing and adoring mother in Paris, from his two sprightly daughters, and from those women to whom he turned in his loneliness. “I can’t live without the tenderness of some woman,”he wrote to Mrs. Brookfield even as he knew that he was breaking with her; he felt that he was too old and spent, past his prime (at forty-two!), too old for the American Beatrix, Sally Baxter, whom he had found in New York and was falling in love with. What emerges from the reticence of these later letters, what identifies us so touchingly with the man, is Thackeray’s feeling of insecurity at the thought of oncoming death, his urgency to make money now, and quickly, for his children and demented wife, before he goes, and his realization that he is spending himself prodigiously. When vitality surges up in him, he feels an incentive for public life, for Parliament, perhaps, and when he is down, he confesses his fading interest in literature. "... but not novels, nor lectures, nor fun, any more. I don’t seem to care about these any more, or for praise, or for abuse, or for reputation of that kind. That literary play is played out, and the puppets going to be locked up for good and all.”

I feel that I have come to know Thackeray, and not only Thackeray but his inner circle here, in London, and in Paris. And I feel that we owe Mr. Ray immeasurable gratitude for the fair-mindedness, the enormous patience and sympathy, and the self-effacing scholarship which have made these four volumes as impeccable as they are alive.

History comes down to us in its most immediate form in the great journals and letters of an epoch. When Pepys talks to himself, when Horace Walpole records his day, when Thackeray shares his life with Mrs. Brookfield, we who come after are made participants in a century as plausible as our own, but more picturesque. The great autobiographers, Cellini, William Hickey, and Henry Adams, to name three, achieve the same immediacy; and so do the great historians Thucydides and Winston Churchill, who partake in what they write. But in biography, history comes to us at one remove, and in the historical novel, at two.

Novelists like Reade, Stendhal, and Tolstoy have genius enough to span the distance, feeding on source material and the partisan chronicles of biographers and historians; then blending and rearranging, they end by creating individuals in a pattern so true to life that no after age can question it. Charles Reade’s Middle Ages, the Waterloo of Stendhal, and the St. Petersburg of Tolstoy are facts fired by great imagination. But let us not be spendthrift in using that adjective “great.” When I turn into Lydia Bailey to be told by the blurb writer that the author, Kenneth Roberts, is “America’s greatest historical novelist,”my back goes up. I want to be shown that this book belongs in a great company.

As I see it, these are the obligations of your historical novelist: to tell a good story, to create one or more characters so true to their time and so credible that they radiate confidence, and to supply, through a network of detail and incident, the verisimilitude of a vanished age. In Lydia Bailey Mr. Roberts has linked together two scenes of spectacular violence and color, the uprising of the blacks in Haiti under Toussaint L’Ouverture and the guerrilla leader Dessalines, and the fierce hijacking of American ships by the Barbary pirates. In a chain of events stretching from the State of Maine to the Caribbean and thence to the Mediterranean, Mr. Roberts’s hero, young, likable Albion Hamlin, is enticed into both of these lurid episodes. Albion falls in love with a miniature painted by Gilbert Stuart. The original of the little picture, the lovely Lydia, has disappeared in San Domingo, and with an ingenuousness that makes me suspicious, Albion sets out to find her. The clues lead him into a hypocritical courtship, then to French émigrés in Philadelphia and William Bartram’s Garden, and thence by some sleight of hand to Haiti. Here he pops out of the frying pan into the fire, picks up Lydia, who is never surprised by unexpected events, and with her pops back into the frying pan, coming home to Portland by way of the Barbary pirates.

It is unfair to skeletonize a long story, and I give these few ironic clues because I want to suggest that Mr. Huberts has disappointed me in his lirst two obligations. The ingredients of a good story - or to be precise, the ingredients of two good stories — are here, the lirst centering in the Caribbean and ending after the escape, and the second cycle, which begins in France and w hich runs its own quite independent course. I wish the novelist had concentrated on cither, for the two halves of the book are not firmly integrated or fully developed.

I wish Mr. Roberts had a clearer sense of what to eliminate from his first drafts. His novels, even the best of them, have a tendency to sprawl, and in this ease, as in Northwest Passage, there are a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then without pause for breath, another beginning and middle and end. It adds up to too much, and in the protraction, in the constant shift from one background to the next, the main characters lose their orientation, they become flat rather than forceful, the victims of romance rather than of a reality.

But in the heat and the lighting at Haiti, in his description of the manor houses now in black hands, in his account of the burning of Cap Francois and the storming of Crête à Pierrot, in his caricature of Dessalines, in his vignettes of rapine and slaughter, Mr. Roberts achieves verisinuhtude. The com pulsion here comes from the clash and color of the incidents, rather than from any character.

I know few observers of social and economic conditions who are at once as shrewd and as humane as David L. Cohn. A Southerner born in the Delta and early cognizant of the roots of poverty, a Mississippian who has compared the brutality of “white supremacy” with the humanism taught him by William Alexander Percy (author of Lanterns on the, Levee), a business executive who made his stake cleanly in the New Orleans of Huey Long, an economist who knows from the inside the ramifications of a company like Scars, Roebuck, the author of a sound book on the American tariff, and of short stories which Sinclair Lewis has rated among the best about the American Negro, Mr. Cohn has grown to be an American free lance of diverse knowledge and fair judgment.

In 1944 and 1945, with the approval of General Somervell, he flew abroad to watch our Army Service Forces in the field, traveling some forty thousand miles to observe our technicians, our free-speaking GI’s, as they performed their prodigies in Europe, Corsica, the Near East, India, Burma, China. He kept notes all the way; and these, on his return, he has expanded into a swift, colorful, highly personalized chronicle, this Is the Story, an enormous and active mosaic not of combat but of how American Innocents Abroad were reshaping, however temporarily, an alien and laggard world.

Mr. Cohn, who is a good linguist, had traveled widely in Europe before the war, and as he studies Britain, Florence, or the Paris of Liberation, it is with remembrance of the days of appeasement, the reckless conversations he heard in the Warsaw of 1936, and of Vienna’s plight before Hitler marched into Austria.

But when he comes to Palestine and Iran his new measurements begin. He is quick to note the GI ingenuity with which we operated the Persian Gulf ports such as that hellhole Khorramshahr, and the ingenuity with which our Transportation Officers ran the Iranian Railway from Teheran to Ahwaz. His strictures on the disease and illiteracy of Iraq and on what has happened to the 100 million dollars of oil royalties, his sane and comprehensive scrutiny of India, his interest in Yank’s poll of what the girls in Cairo think of American soldiers, his pen portraits of leaders like Chaim Weizmann, Lord Wavell, and General Pick, the engineer who built the incredible Ledo Road - these are but a few of the high lights in a book that is copious, farsighted, and at its best, prophetic.

It is not often that a statistic gets away from the editorial department, but when it does, it is apt to be a whopper. Such was the case in the January Atlantic when I referred to the “20 billion tons of newsprint” which came out of our forests last year. It should, of course, have been 40 million tons, the figure including not only newsprint but all kinds of paper produced in the United States. In a friendly note Mr. Charles S. Proctor of the Proctor Paper Company writes: —

“To keep in stride with your 20 billions I tbink I should address you, not as Mr. Weeks, but as Mr, Millenniums.

“In truth our forests are being depleted very fast. About seventy-five years ago, when wood pulp was lirst used in the manufacture of paper. ‘Wood Pulp’ (Senator Warner) Miller of Herkimer, Now York, said: ‘We have here, in these great forests of Maine and New Hampshire, stock enough for hundreds and thousands of years.’ His vision was cockeyed, to use the vernacular. So we have to go fart her afield for our pulp; Alaska, perhaps, bye and bye. With the introduction of wood pulp, Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, began to lose its prestige as the largest papermaking cenler of the United States, that locality producing about six tons per diem, which, if all neivsprint, would not supply even one of our small suburban dailies.

“Nota Bene: The twenty million tons of all kinds of paper produced in the United States this year equals about two carloads every minute, day and night, of each working day.”