The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

A REVIEWER of twenty years, I should by this time be calloused enough not to mind it when an American publisher goes overboard for a mediocre novel. The announcement that The Lady of the Iron Corset, a Great Historical Romance of the Crusades, is to be backed by an initial advertising appropriation of $40,000, the full-page reviews which celebrate its debut, and the whipped cream ejaculations which make up the ensuing copy should not irk me. But they do. Last August, in a reference to the New York Times Book Review, I made the mistake of confusing the publisher’s ballyhoo with the function of a critic.

The Times has been the Bible of the book trade for as long as I have been in publishing. Its integrity in the handling of the new books does not deserve reproach. If I intended to censure anyone, it should have been those publishers who oversell the mediocre. But even here, in the face of rising costs, I find myself forgiving. For if a publisher cannot make a profit, he must cease to publish even the best books which come his way.

The planting and encouraging of the manuscripts for our Anniversary began early last spring, and the harvest, so bountiful that we shall need not one but several issues to hold it, kept me in New England until the leaves had turned. Then, with November in press, I took to the airways and headed west.

Detroit’s airport is wholly in character, a converted airplane plant at Willow Run, one of those vast but identifiable buildings which Detroit’s great architect, the late Albert Kahn, invented to house the assembly line. It was Kahn’s responsibility to provide acres of unimpeded floor space; with his genius he developed a wall strength as dependable as the flying buttress, and swept the floor clean of pillars, struts, and partitions.

As the plane comes down for its landing, the big Kaiser-Frazer operation flashes by your window and behind, rising out of the smoke and sunlight, the almost limitless vista of the Rouge plant of Ford. Detroit lives with a single-minded competitive spiril I do not find in any other town: it lives, breathes, and talks motors, and today the atmosphere is tense as the city makes ready for what one man called “the biggest World Series in American industry ” - the oncoming battle between Ford and Chevrolet.

Most airports wear an improvised look, as if they had been set down in the nearest deserted field and expected to move next year. The exception to this is the National Airport in Washington. Its curved glass walls and its long runways built on the bank of the Potomac make it the loveliest air terminal in North America. Compared with Washington the Chicago Airport is just a whistle stop, a half-built station in the midst of cinders, with fifty minutes of red lights between you and the nearest comfortable hotel. (The first Chicagoan who builds an overnight hostel at the airfield, with comfortable beds and good food, will earn our thanks and make his fortune.)

Chicago’s hotels are the most crowded in the land, and the new habit of tipping the room clerk for a room before you are given your reservation is a form of Middle West inflation which I hope will not spread. Curious how every town in the country continues to be crowded. “Where do they ever come from?” asks the native, but in asking he forgets how much Americans love to convene. Conventions were ruled out during the war; now they are making up for lost time everywhere. When at last I reached my corner room and stood listening to the wind and looking out over the Lake, I realized again how well Chicago has enhanced the shore line and those water rights which so many of our other cities have defiled.

We flew from Chicago to Dallas in three hours and forty minutes. The flight was far steadier than many of our Eastern roadbeds; the intelligent courtesy of the airlines is in marked distinction to the indifference of so many train crews, and the tray of food which the hostess places on your lap without charge or tip sets a standard which the diner would do well to follow. The selection of food is inviting and the portions just enough to subdue but not to overstuff the appetite. The trays are empty when they go back: there is none of the gluttonous waste which one sees in so many American restaurants and trains. I wonder how many American railway executives are aware of this invidious comparison.

After flying above the clouds at 350 m.p.h. was pleasant to stand idly in the soft Texas sunlight watching a group of pilots change the tire of their old jalopy. Texans, like Detroiters, think nothing of space; they think nothing of driving eighty miles to see a movie in the next town and home again before midnight, and so many private planes flew in to see the big game at Austin that the traffic problem at the airport took three hours to unravel. Dallas, Fort Worth, Tyler these big ever growing cities whose homes with their long low lines and broad windows reach out to the prairies, and whose city blocks have a brightness untouched by soot, are as new, exuberant, and hospitable as any place in America. And more than most.

At Tyler, Texas, where they had just crowned their Rose Queen, I saw the thousand of acres that make this the rose capital of the world, met the man who had bred the thorns out of the American Beauties, and marveled at the huge trailers which convoy thousands of buds each week to the department stores in New Orleans, Omaha, or Chicago. At Oklahoma City, as the harvest moon rose against the lemon sky, I saw the oil wells which to an incredible number have risen out of Negro shacks, beside the State Capitol, and which poise over the wealthiest residences. There was no smell of oil, as there is of chocolate in Hershey, Pennsylvania; but as I heard the stories of the law courts and of how the royalties had been prorated throughout the neighborhood, as I saw the evidence of new wealth that had come to white and Negro, I wondered who would write the novel that cries out to be written about Oklahoma.

At Bartlesville I tipped my hat to the first well to be drilled in the Territory. The well, which now has a plaque to mark it, is five years younger than I am and still working. And at Bartlesville I shook hands with Frank Phillips, one of the earliest and most colorful of the Oklahoma oilmen, and was taken to visit his great ranch, Woolaroc, which lies outside of town. In the large native-stone museum, he has assembled, with the assistance of his friends, the Indian tribes, and the University of Oklahoma, a collection which breathes the story, the archaeology, and in the paintings of Charles Russell, Remington and Leigh, the visible beauty of the Plains. For three hours I was lost in another time, emerging with the thought that here is one way, and a fine way, for local wealth to repay itself to the people.

Six thousand miles in twenty-nine days, with twenty-two lectures and many a question period before and after. The finest plane that I flew in was the DC-6; the most comfortable and best-fed train was the Pere Marquette, No. 5, out of Detroit for Lansing and Grand Rapids; the best restaurant, the Dolores in Oklahoma City. Wherever I went I found a friendliness and anxiety, a rising sense of responsibility for what is going on abroad, a rising feeling of resentment towards the interference of Russia, and an outspoken apprehension as to whether we are resourceful enough to do the job the world expects.

A measure of the deep anxiety of this country is indicated by the insatiable demand for Speaking Frankly by James F. Byrnes. The book cannot he kept in print: there are not as yet — enough copies for those Americans who remember the enormous deposit of good will toward Soviet Russia which existed in the country two years ago, and who want to know how and why Stalin, Molotov, and Vishinsky have drawn on it almost to the point of bankruptcy.

When Mr. Byrnes became Secretary of State in July, 1945, Russia had already begun to voice her suspicions of us. At the Yalta Conference in February of that year, Mr. Byrnes had first witnessed the negotiations between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. He observed the President’s mediation in the disagreement which arose over the Polish border, and the President’s acceptance, “as a basis for discussion,” of the Soviet’s enormous demand of twenty billion dollars for reparations. Later, as Secretary of State, he was to be baffled by the Soviet’s determination to interpret in its favor anything that was tentative; he was to conclude that the Soviet leaders overestimated the ultimate extent of the President’s - and therefore of our — walling ness to compromise on matters of principle.

Mr. Byrnes was good-natured; he was skilled and experienced in reaching agreement by the American way; he was patient, yet when aroused could put it on the line. But he was untried as a diplomat, and although he had the able team of Ben Cohen, Doc Matthews, and Chip Bohlen to help him, he was not used to the accusing and stubborn resourcefulness of Molotov. It shocked him to discover that Stalin, despile the previous agreements, remained contemptuous of the smaller states and almost implacable in his belief that “the three [great] powers would represent the interests of all.” Mr. Byrnes began to realize at Potsdam Stalin’s determination to regain those territories that had been lost by the Czar and during the Revolution, and he was progressively angered by the Soviet habit in Eastern Europe of acting first and arguing afterwards. In this accounting to the American people the red, the negative, figures bulk large. It is disillusioning to see what has happened in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania despite the supposed agreements on “free elections.”

Yet the record is not without its reasonable hope. Mr. Byrnes may have broken the rules of secret diplomacy in taking the people so much into his confidence, but I am glad that he did, for there is a prairie fire of fearful thinking now sweeping the country which can only be checked by the patience, the firm reasonableness, and the human nature which come through these pages. It is important that Americans should realize that the foreign policy of the Politburo is no new thing. It is, as Mr. Byrnes points out, the same policy practiced by the Czars and defined by Marx in his articles for the New York Tribune in 1853.

In the face of this policy, it is reassuring to know that when the American point of view was candidly explained to Stalin, he did not hesitate to overrule Molotov publicly. It is reassuring to be reminded that the Soviet’s move in Iran was stopped by the first decisive test of the UN. It is reassuring to have Mr. Byrnes tell us how, after the interminable, exhausting wrangle at Paris, Mr. Molotov suddenly reversed the Russian position on the Dodecanese and gave in to our side, and how he later sidestepped the issue of Trieste. It is fascinating to be given these pen portraits of the Russian leaders and to be told that Stalin “is a very likeable person.”And it is encouraging to read in his Introduction “that if it were possible to give the people of this world an actual, rather than a figurative, seat at the peace conference table, the fears and worries that now grip our hearts would fade away.”

Ever since the Blitz the meaning of treason has been drummed into the ears of the British. Night after night the penetrating voice of William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) underscored their suffering with mockery and the prophecy of doom. Among many others, this stirred the indignation of Rebecca West, whose prose hits harder than that of any other living Englishwoman. At the war’s end we learned in the pages of the New Yorker that she had turned her thoughts toward the traitors, the British complacency which had encouraged them before the war, the motives which finally took them abroad, and the trials which were to bring them to their end. The Meaning of Treason is a dramatic book, a book of deep and ugly probing, a book in which conscience, anger, and the lancet’s edge are employed to lay bare the motives and the madness of the turncoats, and the reasons why Law in the last resort sent them to the gallows.

In the reading, an American cannot help being impressed by the colorful tradition and the magnificent vitality of English Law in action.

To understand a traitor we must begin with the frustration, the bitterness, the revolution, which made him turn against his own. To her characterization of William Joyce, Miss West brings the full power of her coruscating analysis. She shows us this little man, born in Brooklyn of Irish parents, who, until his neck was in the British noose, denied his American allegiance; she shows this, bright, slippery adolescent at sixteen spying for the Black and Tan in Ireland, and on the strength of this espionage applying for admission to the Officers’ Training Corps; she shows us his failure as a student of science but his quickening facility in literature and history; she tells of how he loved to speak in public and of how he was drawn irresistibly to the British Fascists in 1923; she reminds us of his rise to be the Deputy of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Director of Propaganda, and of how, when he finally fought with his chief, his only outlet was to turn to Hitler for the recognition which Britain continually denied him.

In her picture of the little English Hitlers and the lunatic fringe, Miss West is writing with the diamond edge. The British Fascists she terms “a charade representing the word ‘barricade.’” She speaks of William Joyce “in his curious, scrubby, spirited, ugly way.” She refers to the “long, sterile orgasm of the Nuremberg Rally”; she speaks of John Amery and “his inhabiting devil”; she calls Norman Baillie-Stewart the “ideal Guardee of Ouida’s dreams,” and says, “He was one of the oddest of these odd fish, though very dull, and in his sentence the legal wheel turned full circle and, making an innovation, arrived at the archaic.”

But this is much more than a record of personalities, the eccentric and treacherous. It is a study of the due process of law and of how that due process failed to convict the Nazi agents before the war, in part because of the complacency of the British magistrates and in part because people resisted the Jew-baiting and the Fascist taunts. The Jews and the Communists hit out, and in most cases were locked up for assault, whereas the little mobsters, the provocators like Joyce, went scotfree. Miss West leaves no doubt of the provocation of the Fascist meetings, and only a little as to the identity of the English industrialists who backed them. Her reports of the early trials, as of those later ones which ended in execution, are observant, intuitive, and best of all, grounded in knowledge. “The law,” she sternly reminds us, “like art, is always vainly racing to catch up with experience. Life is always unpredictable. . . . It is the task of judges and legislators to alter the law that it may cope with these capers of time.”