The Peripatetic Reviewer

OVERHEAD the oak leaves stir against the cloudless blue, and the shadow in which I am reading ripples like running water. At my feet on the borderline between the sunny and the cool grass lies Mickey dozing, gray muzzle pointed toward the driveway up which the family will return from their expedition. Periodically he rouses himself, shakes the catkins from his black curls, and moves closer to the sun. His movement renews the scolding of the mother robin in the bittersweet and interrupts my intake of print. I watch him, and through the forming impressions of the book in my lap, memory thrusts its feeling.

This is probably our last summer together. Mickey is sixteen and that is a great age for a cocker spaniel given to eating any old thing; indeed a great age for any dog. Implicit in every friendship is the trust that it will never break. Mick has no reason to doubt us, but we who note his fading hearing and his inability to spot us at any distance on the beach live with the warning to make these months good.

I remember William Morton Wheeler’s remarking on the silent communication between dogs, and how, when he had taken one of his for a walk through the Arboretum, the others would gather about the traveler instantly on his return and by scent and emanation have all the news in a matter of seconds. On the Common with other dogs Mick is eager, quivering, and gregarious when I am along, and hair-on-end belligerent when accompanying his mistress. In canine years he is now well past the century mark, so it is small wonder that dogs in their prime have only a passing curiosity in what he has to say. They pause, there is the usual tailwagging introduction. Then, while he is still standing on his dignity, they suddenly lope off. Mick will start after and then resign himself to his own grass, which he scratches up with a “What the hell.” For ladies he has, I gather, the charm of an aging colonel. There is a honey-colored spaniel who, after the nosing, will describe mad circles about him as he stands immovable on the moonlit Common. But if she pushes him too roughly he loses his balance and shows his lip, and so they part.

At home his expressions are stressed for our benefit. His humor, as when with jaws open and tongue half a yard out he stands there grinning; his sneeze of expectation; his mutter—a kind of controlled yip—of annoyance; his jumping recognition of those most important words in a city dog’s vocabulary, “going out” and “down country” (is it the special note that colors our voices as we say them?); his sharp demanding bark when his water dish is empty or when brownies, his passion, are cooking — these are a language no one could miss. So too his boredom when, after a decent interval in our friend’s house, he fetches his leash and stands obdurate with it in his jaws. And His play: in his youth he would mouth a grape, Concord or Malaga, and then lie staring at us until suddenly it would be popped over his shoulder and retrieved in a scramble. This he did untaught, and the mystery of how the grape emerged uncrushed again and again was his own invention. Now the car is his pleasure: head out the window and ears streaming, he challenges every passing dog with horrid words.

I remember other times when he spoke my language, once when in his puppyhood he was sick from the distemper injection. He began vomiting at midnight and at four I got the car and drove him to the vet’s. He was so weak that he leaned limply against the corner of seal and door, but in answer to my hand his eyes said, “I’m sorry to he such a mess. But I am sick.” And again, years later when he had to apologize for his hunting. It was summer and our little cottage adjoined the orchard and vegetable garden of our big neighbor. At sundown rabbits would make free with the tender lettuce and carrots, and their scent — when Mickey got it — drove him wild. One evening from our screened porch I spotted a cottontail in the green. Mick was asleep, but quietly opening the door I pointed him at the quarry and he got the idea. Rabbit and spaniel disappeared over the horizon with yips marking every second bound. Two hours went by, and then in darkness there was Mick scratching at the screen. “No luck,” he said, and in his mouth was the half-eaten carrot the rabbit had dropped in his haste. “No luck.”

Mickey is by his nature a hunter and a retriever. But now, with his teeth gone, his retrieving is limited to fishermen’s corks as t hey curve ahead of him on the beach, and to apples in the orchard. As a hunter he fancied himself and for years he nourished a grudge against squirrels. I used to tease him about this. Walking close to one of our oaks I would peer up into the leaves and touch the bark significantly; whereupon Mick would leave the ground jumping and scrabbling as high as my arm.

The squirrels, for their part, enjoyed the feud: they knew he could never catch them. I remember one summer day when Mickey was lying on the open porch soaking up the sun which radiated from the warm boards, Close to the house stood an old apple tree, one of whose branches reached over the porch. Along this bridge, as Mickey slept, stole one of his bushy-tailed enemies. With mathematical precision the squirrel nipped clean a hard green apple, which hit the porch with a thump an inch from Mickey’s nose. It was as nice a piece of natural comedy as I have ever witnessed; and the aftermath was noisy.

That dogs remember, we know from their habits and from their twitching dreams when they are so palpably reliving some activity. But how far back does their memory reach, and do those little halfuttered cries indicate that, like man, they are long haunted by old fears? II so, then Mick may still feel the most painful terror of domesticated animals— the fear of desertion. The autumn of his second year my wife and I had to answer a sudden call to New York. We closed the cottage, packed up the daughter, and to save time left the pup with the maid. She took him to her home in Watertown, and from it he naturally escaped in search of us. That was on Friday afternoon. They saw him for an instant at the garbage pail Saturday morning, and then he was gone for good.

By our return on Monday there wasn’t a clue. We drove the unfamiliar streets and we put our appeal in the newspapers and on the air. In twentyfour hours we had heard from seventeen spaniel owners, fifteen of whom had lost their own dogs. But one of them gave us a tip. In their search they had seen a small black dog in the vast reaches of the Watertown Arsenal. So with the Governor’s permission we drove through the gates— this was long before the war — to explore the cement strips which led between the huge closed buildings. A sergeant’s son gave us hope. “Sure,” he said, “a little black dog. He’s here all right, only you can’t get close to him.” “Don’t scare him,” I said. “Find him if you can.” Whistling and calling, we went to point after point, and once on the knoll above a huge oil tank I thought I heard the short familiar bark, but nothing moved. Three hours later we came back to the same spot, and there was the boy lying full-length on the cement wall aiming an imaginary gun. “The buffalo is down here,” he called. Ten yards farther and I saw Mick’s nest and his unmistakable head. “Mickey!” I shouted. Then up the slope he came on the dead run, his ears brown pancakes of burr.

Is it the fear of our leaving him that so troubles him when he can now no longer hear us as we move about the house? The sight of an open suitcase makes him more doleful than does a thunderstorm. When we pack for the country, there is no way to tell him that he will surely come too. In his heart of hearts Mick knows that he is dependent upon four people, and no comfort of maid or sitter can distract his vigil when we are gone for the evening. Our woods are his woods. The squirrels who used to scold him he no longer hears. But we shall hear him long after he is gone.

As I look back from my middle distance I can see that there were four literary editors who kept the standard of American criticism as high and as honest as it was in that decade of extraordinary production which followed the First World War. The level of American literature was higher then than it is now, and these four critics rose to sustain and appraise it: Henry L. Mencken, so impatient with the pompous, so alert for fresh vitality; Stuart Sherman, whose leading reviews in the Sunday Tribune were an amber blend of scholarship and enthusiasm; J. Donald Adams, who ruled the back-scratching notice and the cream-puff blurb out of the Times (are they out today?); and Henry Seidel Canby, in whom the editor, teacher, and biographer are so nicely balanced.

Dr. Canby made his mark as a friendly, talkative, eager-minded young teacher at New Haven; he got his first whiff of printer’s ink as the assistant in baptism of the Yale Review; he made the Saturday Review of Literature the most versatile and outspoken of the literary weeklies (I remember Leonard Bacon’s devastating analysis of Alexander Woollcott entitled “The Voice of the Tenderized Prune,” Dr. Canby’s scoop when he reviewed The Mint, the unpublished novel by T. E. Lawrence, and C. K. Ogden’s massacre of an interim edition of the Encyclopಧdia Britannica). Dr. Canby has been Chairman of the Board of Judges and explorer for the Book-of-the-Month Club since its beginning, and he has produced three thoughtful volumes of biography—his life of Thoreau, his life of Whitman, and, best of all, his own, American Memoir.

Dr. Canby’s Memoir is woven together of three parts: the first, in which he recounts his halfSouthern, half-Quaker boyhood in the serenity of Wilmington, Delaware; the second, in which he relives the strenuosity of the 1899 undergraduate and the pre-war vintage of the scholarship at Yale; the third, in which he projects himself into New York as editor, friend of the literary, and judge. The teacher in him is probably responsible for his occasional tendency to overelaborate (few teachers know when to stop),and as a judge of today he is guarded, for the natural reason that he is still handing down decisions. I enjoy him most as he sees himself in the sunlight of the 1910’s and 1920’s, in what he rightfully terms the Age of Confidence.

No editor of our times has written so acutely and so vivaciously of those who have worked with him in the literary field. His prose shots of Elinor Wylie in her anger, Vachel Lindsay in his chant, and Lord Dunsany after his lecture are memorable. He speaks of his editorial associates with fidelity informed with affection. His longer portraits of Clarence Day, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, and Robert Frost add insight to our understanding. His chapter on the Death of the Iron Virgin, in which he describes the breaking of the Victorian taboo on sex, and that in which he traces the March of the Ideologies are us accurate as they are vivid. The values, like the humor which glints through these pages, are those of a sane and likable American editor, still candid and unafraid.

The Story of Mrs. Murphy is not so Irish a novel as the title implies, chiefly, I suspect, because the author, Natalie Anderson Scott, a Russianborn American, has not had the time or propinquity to acquire the lilt, the humor, and the expressive temperament of the Irish character. Forget the Irish, accept Mrs. Murphy as the symbol of any tender-hearted American mother who spoils her children, and then what you have is the story of Mrs. Murphy’s son Rags, the booze hound and protagonist of the book, who has begun to drink before the story opens and who drinks himself to death on the last page.

Because of his physical beauty — when sober — and because he so clearly lacks the ability to save himself. Rags appeals to his family, as he appeals to the reader at the outset. Through many pages we watch what his mercurial character can do to those who love him: his sweet smile, his glad hand, his love of display, his attraction for women, his impulsive gifts, his violent temper, his foul tongue, and his fits of almost blind cruelty. The impact of Rags on Ins brothers and sisters and on Sue, whom he seduces but will not marry, is closely if somewhat flatly observed. The bums with whom Rags takes refuge when on his sprees, Dolores, his wealthy mistress, are people as flat and anonymous as the city in which this all takes place. The interplay, the sparks, the conflict and affection of this case history are best displayed in the relations between Rags and his Mom, but even here the feeling is dimmed by the author’s flat prose and by the long tedium of Rags’s deterioration. What alcoholism costs the American home is a story we should take to heart. But it must be better written than this.

For years Christopher Morley has been in spiritual rapport with his alter ego, a Chinese poet, “a master of diminutive in an expansive generation,” and the several volumes of verse which have resulted are a blend of Oriental detachment and Morley’s puckish wit. The Old Mandarin runs strictly true to form, which is to say that it is delightful in a light, frothy way; that its comments on the contemporary theme range from zippers to the atomic bomb; that some of the pieces depend on a twist of meaning (“Class Dismissed ‘), some of them on an unexpected parallel (“Don’t Fence Them In”), and some of them on the vivid statement of an idea which is so plain to behold that most of us have overlooked it (“The Very Temple”). The wit is kindly, gentle, exasperated, and pessimistic. The detachment is strictly phony, for behind it one can see that Mr. Morley is much too deeply attached to the world and to people ever to be the remote mandarin who is his front.