The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE hostility of inanimate objects is not to be taken lightly. Because I am an unhandy man, I am apt to credit such objects with malevolence, as if what they did, they did out of personal spite. So when a muffin jumps all over me at breakfast, leaving butter on the lapel, I damn the whole tribe of muffins as I wet my napkin and begin to scrub the cloth.

Such hostility breaks out when you least expect it. On my first visit to Houston, Texas, I traveled down on the sleeper from St. Louis, and since 1 was to give a series of lectures, I was accompanied by my biggest leather suitcase, complete with evening clothes and a tray of clean shirts. Early in the morning, having shaved and dressed, I returned to the berth to put away my toilet articles. The suitcase sat back sullenly far underneath the lower. “Out you come,”I said, as I pulled at the handle. It wouldn’t budge. “Oh, you won’t, won’t you?” I said, turning the thing into a tug of strength. “You’ll come, all right.” And I really put my back into it.

Well, it came — that is, the top half of it came, spilling the contents into the aisle. The bag had got itself jammed under the berth, and what I had done was to tug it clean in two. Luckily the porter had a length of old clothesline: we lashed the two halves together with only a little of the linen showing, and I stepped out to meet my Texas host.

The perversity of these attacks is infuriating. We spent one damp summer on Cape Cod in a coltage where every drawer and door stuck. Each week-end I would get into a new feud with my bureau. One Saturday morning I remember I was jerking irritably at the middle drawer when a younger member of the family appeared at the doorway and paused to watch. The drawer would open for a thin slice at one end and of course jam. Then when I hammered it back, it would go deep into another jam. Finally it yielded to my rage, and I staggered backwards, with the drawer strewing its contents on the floor. Muttering, I stooped to pick the stuff up. This took time.

Meanwhile the junior, still giggling, had inserted his head sideways in the opening and then turned and looked down. When he started to withdraw, his jaws and ears caught, and his howl of hurt surprise caused me to look up. There he stood with his head in the lion’s mouth, beating the enemy with both palms. I called my wife, lifted him horizontal, and with some smoothing of his ears, we drew him out. But it is amazing what a bureau will think up.

Take no chances with kindling wood, even with chunks as obedient as white pine. A year ago I had sawed up a binful in our wood lot, and on a rainy Saturday I was down cellar splitting those gleaming even lengths so satisfying to the eye. The pile mounted uneventfully until I got into some knots. Then the wood began to fly off the chopping block as if it wanted to escape the axe. I’d pursue and give it. the coup de gráce on the stone floor. One tough wedge escaped me twice, and tried to hide on the edge of my lovely pile. “No, you don’t,”

I grunted, and I really smote it. In a split second the air was full of flying timber, and one piece caught me square in the eye. I had hit into a chain reaction, and for a week it was ignominious to explain how I got that shiner.

Such assaults are always ignominious. No shoelace ever breaks until you’re already ten minutes late; when your shirt grows too tight and you try to ease the neckband with your thumb, off pops the button; when you most need your fountain pen, it is gummy with ink. I guess life was a good deal simpler in Eden.

I learned long ago that every household needs a tool kit which you can depend on finding when you want it. Our tool kit is housed in a square tin cracker box. The box is two inches deep in nails, brads, and tacks which have escaped from their manila envelopes. In it are loose coils of picture wire and our two chief tools: a monkey wrench large enough to hammer with, and a scarred but still formidable screwdriver. If these are inadequate, we reach for that master instrument, the telephone. When the plumber or carpenter appears, his skill is sometimes as humiliating as it is swift. “Well,” I say, “you can’t be both an editor and mechanic.” And we pay for the difference.

That was all very well in the days when help was easy to get. Today a household survives on selfhelp, and the best and clearest instruction that I have found for one of my amateur standing is The Complete Home Handyman’s Guide, edited by Hubbard Cobb (Wise, $3.95). This book has a solution for every household mystery which has plagued us, and the explanations are both lucid and economical. Profusely illustrated, comprehensive, and clearly detailed, this unpretentious volume embraces everything from burglar alarms to the intriguing operation of removing furniture dents with a warm iron. It has directions for the repair of all types of home equipment, and clear descriptions of the fundamental systems of heating, wiring, plumbing, and so forth. The book is simply written and well cross-referenced, and one can learn the secrets of house-owner’s liability or hermaphrodite calipers, why to wash clapboards from the bottom up, and — the greatest challenge to the patience of man — how to hang wallpaper on the ceiling without stealing the act from the Marx Brothers. Here is a family stand-by which belongs on the shelf with Fannie Farmer.

All this talk of Italy sends me back to a war novel which, despite the encomiums, I neglected to read at the time of its publication, — The Gallery by John Horne Burns (Harper, $3.00). Mr. Burns was a master at Loomis before the war. He had written experimentally both fiction and verse. Then he took part in the landing at Casablanca and saw action in North Africa and in Italy. The prose which emerged from this experience has power and authenticity.

The Galleria Umberto in Naples is the stage of this story. A cross between a railroad station and a museum, the bars and shops and pavement covered by a dome of glass which has now been shattered by the bombing, the Gallery was the unofficial heart of the city where men of the Allied armies mingled with Neapolitans — men, women, and children—to drink vermouth, to dicker on the black market, to make love or relieve other primary needs by day or night. “Most of the modern world,” writes Mr. Burns, “could be seen in ruins there in August, 1944.”

The novelist divides his book into nine vignettes, each dedicated to a character or set of characters who are brought within the activity of the Gallery.

The impact of these Americans upon the Italians is on the whole not a pretty sight. The concupiscence, the plundering, the insensibility of a conquering army, are starkly revealed. Like the young Dos Passos, Mr. Burns makes no compromise with degrading detail. The love-making is often sheer physical relief taken hurriedly and brutally by men on borrowed time. And yet Mr. Burns writes of these soldiers on leave, the men in the V.D. ward,

these young aviators and chaplains, and these Italians, with understanding, with passages of genuine tenderness, with integrity. “For though we Americans were a conquering army, when history is written it will show that the Neapolitans conquered many of us. They beat us down with love” — so reflects the author on one of those promenades which he takes before each chapter.

It is disconcerting, and to me a shortcoming of the book, to have to take up and then put down these characters in turn. Since the strands are not interlaced, what we have are nine episodes of unequal interest, with the book ending somewhat theatrically on the note of the strongest character. Strength, pity, disgust — these are the three keys to the book. “Hope” is also mentioned in the blurb. But I found little of it.

When Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot took up the cause of Conservation in the early years of this century, we had, as I remember, only two first-rate schools of forestry, Yale and Cornell. Over the past four decades the defenders of our forests, soils, and unpolluted streams have had a hard and at times a losing fight on their hands. Political interests and industrial selfishness have too often combined for quick profits, leaving (he taxpayer to foot the bill for the despoliation which follows. The fight still goes on: Jackson’s Hole and the Everglades are but two of our finest preserves which are now in jeopardy. And when a forest fire breaks out as devastating as that which swept through the Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor last autumn, we realize sadly that there is an incalculable element which at times can be even more ruthless than man.

George R. Stewart enjoys contending against the elements. His earlier novel, Storm, was the work of a man versed in meteorology, a writer with a gift for description and a bird’s-eye view. Mr. Stewart is now teaching English at the University of California, and there, in close coöperation with the U.S. Forest Service, he worked through two fire seasons as a lookout on the fire lines, and in the same plane with the parachutists who guard our great stands on the Western slopes. From such an experience comes his new book, Fire (Random House, $3.00), a novel about a forest fire, minutely observant, panoramic, and very human.

The story begins with a thunderstorm in the Ponderosa National Forest. As lightning strikes, the lookouts high up in their glass cages go to work with their fire-finders, and any smoke column is instantly reported to the ranger at headquarters. As the storm advanced, it was Judith Godoy, the lookout at Cerro Gordo, who spotted the blue-white flash which poured through a Jeffrey pine on a mountain slope twelve miles from her lower. At the base of the tree, that lightning stroke had heated a few dry needles to the kindling point. And that evening a column of smoke as from a cigarette grew faintly into the air. All this was hidden from Judith’s detection, and it was a colony of ants and then a pine squirrel who watched this fire smolder into life. Not until the sixth day was there enough evidence to bring lookout, forest ranger, and supervisor into action; and then, Onion Creek being isolated from road or trail, the fire had headway and, what was worse, a hot gusty north wind to make it fierce and unpredictable.

In the five days that followed, the fire devours 10,000 acres. An army to fight it is called into being, an army reaching back to Sacramento and Los Angeles for recruits. Lumbermen, rangers, soldiers, meteorologists, cat-skinners (a “cat,” is a bulldozer to the forest), parachutists, fishermen, and volunteers from the forest villages — for five days they fight a retreating battle under the direction of the fire boss, John Bartley. Three times they almost have it under control: once when Slugger O’Neill nearly has it cut off, again when Bart plays his lines too close in Reverse Flat, and again just before the panic on the ridge. Then Bart is broken, the supervisor takes over, the wind shifts — and you must see for yourself what happens.

The ceaseless vigilance of the foresters, their resourcefulness, and their love of the country are well delineated. The ants, the squirrel, the hawk, the deer, and the bear arc graphically picked out in their retreat before the ancient enemy. And the protagonist, the Fire itself, as it explodes a 200-foot pine, as it sends the blazing big cones rolling into the underbrush, and turns the manzanita brush into Hades, is a force whose terror and destruction rival what man can do at his worst.

For five months the fly-fisherman has had no more play of the wrist than the twitch of the new rod which he fitted together in the living room on Christmas Day. But as April 15 approaches, out come the fly box, the reel to be oiled, the leaders to be soaked and tested. Most pleasures feast on anticipation, and as this is most true of fishing,

I commend Angler’s Choice, “An Anthology of American Trout Fishing,” edited by Howard T. Walden II (Macmillan, $3.75). Each will take from this anthology the pleasure and guidance which best fit his needs. I, who am a novice in stream fishing, have enjoyed the cast and playing of a trout as told by Eugene E. Slocum in “A Typical Experience.”"The Willow Fly" by Eugene Wright, and “The Eye for an Eye” by Curtis Zahn. I wish I had printed Leonard Bacon’s poem, “Minch on a Dry Fly,” in the Atlantic; f was proud that we had done so with those two classics of our time, “Fishing With a Worm” by Bliss Perry and “Feller in the Creek” by Ferris Greenslet. These are but half a dozen helpings of an appetizing bedside book.