The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE sun dancing on the water with those spear points of light, and the wind ruffling dark paths with the westerly gusts, put me in mind of that June day thirty-five years ago when Beau, Buzz, Mario, and I stood in the sand beside Mort Johnson’s boatworks regarding the eatboat which he had just promised us for a week’s cruise. There she sat, out of water, and squat like a duck. But once we had put the cabin on and helped with the painting and the paint had dried, she would be ours. For one week. Gosh, you could certainly make Atlantic City in that time. Might even make Cape May.

When we had done our work, Mort was as good as his word and better. The Fat Cut was ours for a week, and with it a tender. This was to be the first long cruise for any of us, but we laid our plans like old-timers. Mario (he would be seventeen that September) was of course our skipper. Beau, Buzz, and I were two years his junior. I can remember the gravity, if not. the actual words, with which Mario addressed us.

“Listen, fellers. There’s going to be no monkey business about this. I figure it’ll take us two days to reach the City, two days for shore leave, and that gives us a margin even if we have head winds on the way home. We have got to turn the boat back to Mort just as we found ‘er.”

From the head of Barnegat Bay it was sixty miles to Atlantic City by the inland waterway, with only two short hauls in the open Ocean. Mario had the essential roll of charts; the provisions — canned goods mostly —were stowed in the stern close to the kerosene stove. The blankets and duffelbags were forward, and the ships purse amounted to $27.80 on Monday morning, the morning of our departure. I forgot to tell you that the Fat Cat measured twenty-two feet at the waterline.

It was a hazy June day with the wind blowing steadily from the north. We ran free, past Mantoloking, past Lavallette; and hunger smiting us, we put in at Seaside Park for a dollar’s worth of the famous Seaside Park buns, thick with brown sugar, currants, pecans, and stickiness. We ate as many as we could, stowed the remainder in the food locker, and headed into unknown waters. Seaside was the furthest we had ever been down the Bay.

We were stripped to the buff, and sun burning as all good mariners should; and I remember that toward the end of t he afternoon we made our scrawny appearance in the midst of a fishing fleet which was hauling in weakfish as fast as the hooks could be baited.

“Head her up in the wind,” commanded Mario, “and we’ll catch some chowder for supper.” It wasn’t the chowder’s fault that supper began for me an uninterrupted week of heart burn; it was the fault of the fried potatoes brown around the edges, cold as flint inside; it was the fault of the stewed tomatoes out. of a can and not quite hot; it was the fault of the kerosene stove which I tasted in every bite.

We spent the first night, off Beach Haven, which was quite a run; and we drifted to sleep listening to the slap of waves against the hull. At least some did. The cabin was big enough to shelter two sleepers, and the other two slept on the wooden seats in the open cockpit. We drew lots for this, and 1 lost. Unfortunately I drew that portion of the seat where someone’s heel had already broken one of the slats. I remember my hip in the jagged depression, I remember the stars, the damp gathering on my blankets, and my heartburn as regular as a cuckoo clock.

It seemed almost no time at all before Mario ordered us overboard for a dip before breakfast,— fried eggs and bacon, weak coffee with lots of condensed milk. And again we were on our way. The wind had shifted to the nor’east, and we still ran free now across the great expanse of Little Egg Harbor, now through the narrow connecting waterways. We sighted Atlantic City that afternoon, and after a long struggle against, the outgoing tide, made the inlet and drew abreast of the Yacht Club. It was getting on toward sundown. We had been tacking against the tide for three hours, and the bright lights overcame caution. Old-timers had told us to keep away from the Yacht Club. It was a. dangerous place to be caught in a nor’easter. Much better to go around the point and anchor inside. But we were tired, indigestible with our own cooking, and eager for the new world to conquer.

“All right if we tie up here for the night?” asked Mario as he made a perfect landing at the Yacht Club dock. The dock hand looked laconically at our club pennant, and thought it might be. “We’ll sleep aboard,” we said professionally, put on clean shirts, slicked down the cowlicks, and went ashore. Mario allowed us each five dollars. You could get a steak dinner for a dollar in those days, and for me with my cuckoo clock that meal was the high point of the cruise.

Then we went on to the Steel Pier, where we were completely fascinated by the miniature golf course. We played with a [Hitter, and we played for a nickel a hole, one-tie-all-tie and a carry-over. On t he fourth hole 1 sunk a long shot and the pot was mine unless Beau could tie it up. We all bent over to watch him putt, and when he missed, my elation was cut short by the head of his putter, which, swinging up in exasperation, caught me over t he right eye. In two minutes my eye was closed, and in five I had a poached egg.

So we started back to the boat. By now if was blowing, blowing great guns right out of the nor’east. Mario urged us to hurry. “Come on, gang,” he said. “This doesn’t look good.” They had four lines out on the Fat Cat when we reached the dock, and she was pitching like a bronco. The tender was a mass of kindling wood tied to the painter. There was no getting aboard that night. She rolled and pitched until I was sure the mast would come out. We slept on the club porch under borrowed blankets, cold and morose. My cuckoo clock had returned. Draw the curtain. Draw the curtain.

Somehow we lived through the next three days until t he wind blew itself out. Somehow we cleaned up the scrambled cockpit, somehow we tacked our way home three days late, noses peeling, out of sleep, hungry for home cooking.

Mort as always was a gentleman. 1 remember how he put his hand on Mario’s shoulder as we told him about the tender.

“Ma” Warner or “Missy” was what the Liberian natives called Esther Warner, an American sculptress who accompanied her husband Bob when, as a research botanist, he was assigned to the Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia. The plantation, the size of a large Midwestern county, lay t hirty crooked miles inland from Monrovia, a t iny island of transplanted America on the western coast of Africa. She calls the plantation a melting pot of tribesmen; three or four hundred natives of different tribes who would not have dared to cross each other’s territory in the interior lived side by side in peaceful colonies. Here then, accessible and in concentration, were the native life and the handicraft which she was later to pursue along the jungle paths into the interior: llie native philosophy and turn of speech, the market ways, the ritual masks, the plaintive beliefs.

New Song in a Strange Land (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) is the sensitive and artistic account of Mrs. Warner’s ever growing appreciation of the Liberian. In Liberian politics she has no interest ; Liberia as an air base docs not concern her. She writes as a woman, a sculptress, and an anthropologist. On her first visit to a Mandingo village, Mohammedan, a native boy, tells her of how in the days of Queen Elizabeth the quest for pepper first opened up the Coast to raiders and of how the slave traders followed: —

“So you see, Ma,” he said, bruising the wilted pepper blossom in his fingers, “this one bring plenty trouble. First it bring the white man, who carry the black man. Then black man with white-man-ways come here and take our land. I eat. this flower seed because it help when I thirsty. But it tell we something also. The something it talk is this: There is a thirsty that is not for the I telly. There is a thirsty for land that belong to we.”

Mrs. Warner writes with a true ear for lingo and with a sense of humor that made her easily at home. When she tells of the affection and authority of her houseboy Johnny (I treasure his comment “Too much fix can spoil fine thing”), and of the girl in the market place who spat in her face when Ma made the mistake of asking if she would sell the gold filigree ornament at her neck; when she describes Sahda, the beautiful Vai girl who posed for her and in quaint English told her of the “wind chime”; when she writes of t he magnificent work of Dr. Harley, philosopher and medico, or shows the portrait masks the lepers had given her, or describes her comic embarrassment as the natives watch her disrobe and then bathe in her bathing suit, she evokes that lively sense of participation which is so indispensable in a good book of travel. Her prose is graphic and objective, and although her emotions are seldom deeply involved, she leaves no doubt of “the intrinsic fineness and the amazing culture of the native tribesmen.” That, to her, is the real wealth of Liberia.

Willie Snow Ethridge is the wife of Mark Ethridge, the distinguished Kentucky publisher and one of our trouble shooters in Greece. Mrs. Ethridge is a gay, energetic, wiry woman with a quick eve for detail and a happy faculty of seeing the comedy in life. She does not wait for comedy to begin: she creates it. as she goes along, deadpan or in stitches. In 1947 after her husband had been appointed the American representative on the Balkan Commission of the UN, she sold a few of the family acres to pay her expenses, farmed out. her eight-year-old, and flew to Athens. Now that I have heard her speak, 1 read into her words that native Georgian accent which makes even her simplest statement irresistibly funny.

In the opening pages of her new book. It’s Greekto Me (Vanguard, $3.00), she makes that soberminded Commission look like the Hartmans dancing in the Starlight Roof. When she taunts Paul Porter into dancing with her, when she tries to make the Greek King, whose name she didn’t catch, feel at home in Athens, when she gives you her idea of Greek cooking, leaves her bedroom slippers behind her in the huge and very cold bed of the Exarch of Bulgaria, when she is told that “the guerrillas take what they want, but I think, Mrs. Ethridge, you will be safe,” and resents the insult, Willie Snow is the Innocent Abroad in the best American tradition.

Tucked in between the comedy are pages in which she can be eloquently appreciative of the Greek character; plain statements of fact in which she brings home the shocking poverty of the country (Greece, she reminds us, has a million and a half unemployed out of a population of seven million; it has the largest population for its area of arable land of any country in the world); and other pages, as when she describes a speech of Tito’s or the “spontaneous demonstration” of the Communists in the camp of Greek refugees, when her dander is up and her indignation contagious. By turns laughable and impulsive, sobered and sympathetic, her book is at all times fun to read.

It was his service in France during the First World War that made Louis Bromfield a lifelong friend of the French; and following the success of his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, he returned to France, where in his beautiful place at Senlis and in Paris he spent sixteen of his happiest and most productive years. Thoroughly aware of the European currents, he rightly saw the Civil War in Spain as a rehearsal of worse to come; and having done his utmost to liberate those Americans who volunteered against Franco, in 1939 he moved his own family back to his home country in Ohio, where he purchased a farm of five hundred acres, much of whose fields and pastures had been exhausted by more than a century of misuse. Mr. Bromfield comes of farming stock, his grandfather having been one of the best farmers in the state, and one of the founders of the Ohio Grange; and the change which came over the novelist as he turned first into a country gentleman and then into a fighting farmer is the story of an awakening, the record of a one-man crusade to revitalize the land, which Mr. Bromfield has told with skill and energy first in Pleasant Valley and now in a still more significant volume, Malabar Farm (Harper, $3.75).

Malabar Farm is the informal, gusty story of an American farm and of the men, women, children, and animals who run it. It. is a book driven forward by Mr. Bromfield’s dynamo, warmed by his enthusiasm, st rongly colored by his likes and dislikes. A. third of it is drawn from his personal diaries, a third tells of his struggle to bring the soil back to life, and a third is narrative such as the lively, endearing pages about Sylvester his bull, the four Boxers (who can ever forget Prince?), the guinea fowl, the hogs — “ham actors” he calls them — even the fish, the bass and the rainbow trout, with which he stocks his ponds. Malabar supports a steady population of fourteen people, and visitors beyond number, and the impression that one gets from this book is of happiness and the satisfaction of achievement.

The achievement is of bringing the farm back to life. On some of these fields which had been worked to death ever since the ancient forests were cut, Mr. Bromfield and his team have increased the yield by as much as 1600 per cent, reaping sixty bushels of wheat from an acre which formerly had produced four or five. Sure, every device of the modern agronomist has been brought to bear: here were the money to pay for it and the courage to experiment. But the point is that Malabar has prospered, the methods there have blazed the way for other farmers who necessarily would have to go slower. Malabar pays for itself: the profit from the dairy alone last year would equal the royalty on a popular book.

In addition to cultivating these five hundred acres, tending the hundred head of cattle and the two hundred sheep, the Boss has carried the word of Conservation straight across the country, making over a hundred speeches a year, fighting to reorganize all agencies having to do with the natural resources of Ohio — soil, water, forests, parks, mines, highways, fish, game — fighting for the cooperation so vital to the farmers, and on the farms fighting to eliminate the Okies by improving that fundamental trilogy — soil, diet, education. Today Malabar supports more people than ever before in its history, and thanks to modern methods, those Ohio acres are more productive than they ever were even as virgin soil.

A record and a book to be proud of.