The Petupatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

I HAVE been contemplating certain changes which have occurred in the American reader in our lifetime—changes which, as a guinca pig, I have felt since about 1910; changes which for us all have been so enormously accelerated by the two world wars. In approaching the subject, I must first try to identify the earliest and deepest impression I received from the printed word.

I remember the hero worship with which I read, or had read to me, Howard Pyle’s Rubin Hood; I remember being moved to tears by the animal tales of Ernest Thompson Seton; I remember a boy’s natural affiliation with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and the fun of George Ade’s Fables in Slang; I remember the awe and the cruelty of the Bible stories as they were read aloud, and later the beauty and mystication of New Testament and Old as, verse by verse, my godmother and I went through them both: I remember how my mother’s singing of the old ballads would suddenly pierce me with grief; I remember that it was Keats who first led me to the hilltop of poetry, and Rudyard Kipling who, step by step from Just Su Stories to the Jungle Book, from Stalky and Co. to Puck of Pook’s Hill to Soldiers Three, condtided my imagination through boarding school and the barracks and into the living room of maturity.

But you must not get the idea that I skipped toward this liberation with an eager mind. Boys are much more resistant to books than girls, and certainly I was no exception. Indeed, I remember how this resistance backed up. I remember my English teacher telling me that I ought to enjoy Spenser’s Faerie Queene. But I didn’t, I remember our snail and compulsory progress through The Deserted Village, and how we in the class resisted every paragraph of the way. And slipping back to an earlier year, I remember my mother telling me of her favorite books. The Scottish Chiefs, Darid Copperfield, and Iranhoe, and of what fun they would be. But at the time — and this I think is important—at the time they reached me, and in their dog-eared Victorian format, those books were just so much spinach.

I remember my first visit to withdraw a book from the Public Library in my home town in New Jersey. Did I have my parent’s card or that of my older cousin? That I can’t remember. What I do remember is entering the House of Books and sidling up to the efficient, intelligent queen who presided at the front desk. She looked down, our eyes met, and I said hesitantly that I wanted a book. What kind of book? Whatever she thought best. A messenger was dispatched and after a decent interval I was presented with a two-volume biography of George Washington in fine type. I carried it home with mingled feelings of pride and dismay. Twice I worked my way through the opening page and twice I drowned in that sober typo. Then I marched the books back, and it was not until I was sixteen, not until I had lost and found the open sesame of reading, that I re-enfered Mr. Carnegie’s treasury. For five of my most impressionable years, St. Nicholas Magazine meant more to me than any reading stimulus I received from English teacher or librarian.

In some ways the generations of adolescents who came after me have had a better break. Photographs which were a crudity in the magazines of my youth have become accurate, illuminating, and historical. The skillful use of half-tones and the ever improving beauty of color printing have done much to remove the curse on textbooks and compulsory classics. When Harcourt, Brace published their first live College Omnibus, including Strarhey’s Queen Victoria, a play by Eugene O’Neill, and short stories by Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, and when editors like Louis Untermeyer infused an anthology of poetry with taste, biography, and wit, the teaching and the reading of English took on a zest which had been hard to find in my day.

Slowly but steadily it was recognized that not all children can read with a common facility, and that there is a considerable minority who by reason of their “left control" have to work hard to acquire the knack of reading from left to right. They were bright in mind but bewildered and punishingly slow in early classwork, and for their benefit Remedial Reading as a special but not ignominious treatment was prescribed for school after school. This also took the curse off books for a group who in my time were labeled willy-nilly as candidates for science or for father’s business. Since they could not read, ergo they must be scientists or Babbitts.

Remedial Reading, even though it has the bitter sound of medicine, was one of a number of indications that our teaching was proving more sensitive and responsive. The librarians for their part discovered a new interest in rooms for children, rooms made comfortable with low chairs and tables, rooms brightened with reproductions by the great illustrators — Rackham, Remington, Howard Pyle, and Wyeth—rooms where, on Saturday morning or shopping days, youngsters could assemble to be read aloud to, perhaps to see a puppet show, but best of all to handle and enjoy books more inviting than a two-volume biography of Washington.

The most signal advantage for the adolescents who came after me was also the most costly. For a century our system of public education had been whittling down our illiteracy and producing from high school and state university hundreds of thousands of men and women who carried on a modicum of reading in their private lives. I doubt if any people in history ever developed in such complacent privacy as we did from 1787 to 1916, and some of that complacency shows in the list of untroubled best-sellers we were reading.

Then, in 1917, we were dislodged from our continental privacy. Men whose education was interrupted for two years’ service in France, as mine was, lost their insularity and their security and gained a new wonder about our place in the world. Men whose experience in the years 1940 1945 trebled mine in time, space, and hazard have come back sobered, anxious, and avid to know more. Today, with every college bursting at the seams, with some state universities numbering in excess of 20,000 students, and with two million veterans (and their wives) adding maturity to eagerness, our cornucopia of public education is full to running over. Thomas Jefferson could never have imagined so many readers at work on the nation’s tuition.

In what temper do they come to their books? I have found them mature in approach, hungry for books, many of them aspiring to write, and most of them hard workers. I note that they are much less credulous than I was when I returned to college in 1919, Twenty-five years of propaganda have shaken the faith we used to attach to print. “All I know is just what I read in the papers,”Will Rogers used to say, twirling his lariat, and the audience would laugh with him in skepticism. Today the public is reading more and more but believing less and less.

I note what seems to me a new form of complacency, the mental laziness induced by the picture books. Photographs can jolt, scar, titillate, amuse, and chronicle but they cannot teach a man to think.

And what is going on among the young levels, among the two to three million adolescents who will want to follow their GI brothers to college if only there is someone to foot the bill ? Think for a moment of the thirteen-year-olds. At the time of Pearl Harbor they were playing war with full soundeffects. I remember my own boy — then six-when I had urged him to tell me a story, beginning, “Once upon a time there was a lit little girl who had a nice machine gun ...” I should like to think that the abhorrence of war was deep in them. But I honestly don’t know.

Meantime we may wonder whether books will ever be as compelling a part of their lives as they are of yours and mine. In the comics, on the radio, and in the movies they are entertained by lively arts requiring a minimum of exertion; they are regaled by the great common denominators of comedy and fear. That Box on the bedside table and Those Programs are as much fun as my weekly visit to vaudeville used to be—but without the cost or smell. With such distraction blowing through the mind like an electric fan, what happens to thought, to the logical process? What happens to reading?

In The Wayward Bus,John Steinbeck is writing about a busload of assorted Americans who are marooned overnight at a California crossroads. The driver and his pimply mechanic patch up the rear end in the early dawn, but as day breaks and the rain comes down, the journey is further imperiled by a spring flood which deluges the San Juan valley, threatening the bridges and turning the old stagecoach road into a slithery morass.

This is Mr. Steinbeck’s first full-length novel since The Grapes of Wrath. In the intervening eight years he served as a war correspondent with the American troops in Europe, He has been decorated by the King of Norway for the writing of his war book and play, The Moon Is Down, and he has published a novelette loosely tied together with the title of Cannery Row. But The Wayward Has is a novel of much the same architecture as The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and to those of us who admire Mr. Steinbeck, it is refreshing to see the warm flow of vitality which surges up in his pages, and to mark such changes as have occurred in his style and in his philosophy since he wrote his great story of the Okies.

The bus, the vehicle of this story, is nicknamed “Sweetheart,” and its owner and driver Juan Chicoy, part Mexican, part Irish, a dark, handsome man of fifty, sets the keynote of the story. His wife is insanely in love with him and a little afraid of him too, “because he was a man, and there aren’t very many of thorn, as Alice Chicoy had found out"; and the novelist adds, “There aren’t very many of them in the world, as everyone finds out sooner or later.”

Juan controls the story as he controls the bus: he has the resourcefulness of a good mechanic, the magnetism and understanding of a man who gets on with other people. When the bus passengers vote as to whether or not they will risk the bridge, it is Juan’s common sense which draws the line and suggests the choice. He is of that tribe of paisano, truck driver, fruit picker, and mechanic which Mr. Steinbeck has discovered to us before; his sex is strong in him and he dominates every other man in the story, throwing into caricature Mr. Pritchard, the business executive, and Ernest, trick salesman and war hero.

Juan sets the keynote of sex, and to it Alice, his blowsy wife, and the passengers respond or recoil. The adventure, of these people as they intermingle and feel each other out is told with a close perspiring intimacy which may seem repellent to nice readers, but it is only fair to suggest that with such sharp anatomical details the novelist is cutting away the gloss, the hypocrisy, the over-advertised glamour of American daily life. He is indeed using the very details which advertising stresses, but with a sharp knife instead of soft soap. He is vulgarly intent on identifying human nature for what it is. To Mr. Steinbeck feminine beauty is no deeper than the make-up. His portraits of Mildred Pritchard and Camille are a repudiation of “those bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips,” those Hollywood visions of mediocrity.

There are five noticeable women in this book: Alice, Juan’s wife, with her rage (“the uncontrolled pleasure rising in her chest and throat”), her jealousy, and her alcoholic self-pity; Bernice Pritchard (“one of the sweetest, most unselfish people you will ever meet ”), as pretty and as untouchable as dry ice; Mildred, her myopic, man-hungry daughter; Norma, the pathetic infatuate of Hollywood; and, last of all, Camille, a wise, defiant tramp with her musky heritage. To Camille, as to Mrs. Pritchard, sex is repellent, though for quite opposite reasons. To the reader the intensification of this instinct among this jostled and confined company may seem forced and a little tedious. Are we all really so possessed? Would we too have caught the contagion of that bus? Is there no motive, no grat ideation, more compelling in a California spring? I sound like a rock-bound Puritan, but the question persists in my mind.

Very lovely, very sensuous the country is in Mr. Steinbeck’s rippling prose. “The San Juan road ran straight for a long way through level fields, and the fields were not fenced because cattle didn’t wander any more. The land was too valuable for grazing. The fields were open to the highway. They terminated in ditches beside the road. And in the ditches the wild mustard grew rankly and the wild turnip with its little purple flowers. The ditches wene lined with blue lupines. The poppies were tightly rolled, for the open flowers had been beaten off by the rain.”

Very natural and funny, and at times very candid, is the talk, as when, for instance, Camille turns down Mr. Pritchard with the remark that she “is not going to be nibbled to death by ducks,” or when Alice exclaims that Pimples “could eat pies standing on his head in a washtub of flat beer on Palm Sunday.”But, for all this animal magnetism and photographic reality, one ends by wondering if American life is actually so empty, so devoid of meaning, so lonely for the Juans, the Pritchards, and the Camilles of today. God help us if it is.

It was Wilson Harris, the editor of the Spectator, who took me to call on Sir Max Boorbohm in the summer of 1943. We walked beneath the giant, beeches of Abingdon, I with thanksgiving in my heart, until at last we came to the two-room gatehouse in which the essayist and his lady were onsconeed. Here lived one to whom I have been profoundly grateful ever since, in the 1920’s, I first read Zuleika Dobson and Seven Men — a writer who combines the beauty and precision of an artist with the wit and illumination of a ruminator. His prose, that, of a perfectionist, had set an example for my generation: poised, flexible, and unerring in its point, it obeyed his whim, his parody (as in A Christmas Garland), or his recollection with a skill which made a junior envious. And now here he was, dwelling with tranquillity in this tiny space and, as we took tea, modestly describing an essay he was writing for the BBC.

To his broadcasts Max Beerbohm brought the same fastidious touch we have seen in his caricatures and prose. To England, which was blitzed, blacked out, and depressed, he sang — yes, sang—the old songs of Music Halls now forty years forgotten; he would remind his listeners of how mankind has always loved speed, and then, by the deftest transition, draw them back to the England of his youth, when pedestrians could still walk for thought. “No doubt, we pedestrians are very trying,” he said to soothe his motorist friend. “But you must remember that, after all, we were on the roads for many, many centuries before you came along in your splendid car. And remember, it isn’t we that are threatening to kill you. It is you that are threatening to kill us. And if we are rather flustered, and occasionally do the wrong thing, you should make allowances —and, if the worst comes to the worst, lay some flowers on our graves.”

Or he would jibe his listeners about modern advertising or the changes that have overtaken London or the faded glories of the Edvardian (please observe that “v”) top hat. And in perhaps the best essay of them all, “Fenestralia.” he demonstrates again the incomparable teamwork of the artist’s eye and the ruminating mind. Mainly on the Air is a charming little book for any booklover, and not the least of its charms are the typography, paper, and binding which preserve so tastefully the spirit of its originator.