The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

THERE never was any doubt what we were in for when a northeaster hit our little seaside village. This was totally unlike the rain in a city; this was wind, fog, and spindrift which closed us in for three days. The rain as you looked out through the mosquito netting was driven slantwise like a million arrows, and the dampness invaded the cottage: every door, drawer, and window swelled and stuck. Things were laid out to dry before the open fire, and even indoors you were always aware of the rising roar of the breakers. The red flag had gone up at the bathhouses but you needed no storm warning to tell you what the ocean was doing: the great combers were pounding and ripping and sucking away at the beach, and as high tide piled them inshore, the surge swept underneath the boardwalk and swirled angrily against the jetties. You knew how strong the sea was when the Lifesavers roped off sections of the boardwalk as unsafe!

We never called them Coast Guards. They were Lifesavers and their Lifesaving Stations were landmarks straight down the coast. They were big men to us, and their taciturn air of competence won our respect. In a storm we always congregated for fun at the Nimicks’, where there would be ping-pong, Up Jenkins, or maybe fudge, cooking. But a northeaster made you restless, and as the afternoon thickened, there was an urgency in us to see what was going on at the Station. Reports might be coming in of a wreck somewhere.

The big doors were open, and as you stepped in out of the wet wind you were met by that blend no boy will ever forget, the odor of tar and cordage, oilskins and varnished wood. On this side was the New Boat (the self-bailer) mounted on its wheels and ready to be run out at a word from the Captain: over there was the Old Boat; you looked for the breeches buoy and that little brass cannon you’d have given a year’s allowance to own; rockets had been taken out of the locker — the whole place had a quiet tension. Never touching a thing, you walked to the stairs and began to climb — up to the second landing, up to the third, and then up a ship’s ladder, steadying yourself by the hand rope, up to the lookout tower, where a man and a telescope were scanning seaward. (This was before the days of radio.) Windows gave to the four quarters, and a little wooden bench ran all the way around the lookout. You sat down taking care to draw your feet in from the open hatch.

Any trouble?" you asked after a decent silence.

1 he answer was always slow in coming and parsimonious. Generally, a flat negative. Rarely, a lumber schooner or a fisherman might be making heavy weather of it. Once an oil tanker — with a tug standing by — was forced to open its petcocks (the oil slick made bathing impossible for a month afterwards, and the stink of those dead fish!). Once we went down the coast to see a yawl, mahogany and white hull, caught in the surf and being pounded to death. Owner and a woman (some said it wasn’t his wife) had been pulled in by the breeches buoy — they were shot with luck. But the little yacht looked so helpless battering there, her soggy furnishings strewn up the beach. We were disgusted. Lifesavers weren’t for darnfools like that.

We never did sec our Crew pull off a big rescue. But they would have been equal to it: we knew — we’d trained with them. When the storm blew itself out and duty steadied down to the usual nightly patrols, then would come a day for the drills. Breeches buoy drill came first. It was held on a sandy lot back of the dunes. Here stood a stunted mast at a crazy angle (as if the ship were already half foundered and reeling); it had a yardarm, an abbreviated crow’s-nest, and a rope ladder. The Captain picked out one of the bigger boys and up he went. The adorable cannon was aimed and fired, the cord shot over the yardarm, and after it came the stout rope which Bud made fast. The Crew meantime implanted the receiving end firmly in the sand, and as the buoy swept across the raging water (you must use your imagination in this) the rest of us, like Israelites scampering through the Red Sea, piled up at the base of the mast, awaiting our turn to be rescued. Two of us weighed about as much as a sailor; and two at a time, clutching each other and trying not to fall through those voluminous pant legs, we crossed the sand in dead earnest.

After that we escorted the Lifeboat on its carriage to the beach. A wooden ramp was lowered from the shore road and down its rollers went the New Boat, the boat which would bail herself. The bow was eased into the gentle surf, men clambered aboard, and as she bucked the first wave the Captain stood up in the stern. They rowed out a couple of hundred yards in deep water well over their heads, then they stowed the oars, and Captain and Crew fully clothed and in life belts rolled the boat over and swamped her. To us there was something incongruous in all this, — these strong silent men ducking each other, — perfection bottom side up. We lost interest in the slower job of righting her and getting the survivors aboard. We began looking for shingles or flat driftwood, and when we found them we waxed the smoother side with a bit of candle. Seated on that square of waxed wood you could go down the boat ramp like a bat out of Coney Island. Well, Jiminy, a volunteer had to do something!

It was inevitable in the aftermath of the Second World War that the time would come when conscientious Americans the country over would want to take stock of our national resources. What is our bank deposit for the future of iron and oil, timber and arable soil? If we are in for a long period of armed truce in which our system will be tested against the system emanating from Moscow, this question of national assets is of vigilant concern.

That is why the campaign for Conservation has become nation-wide almost overnight; that is why small, valiant groups working to control the pollution of our streams, working to preserve our great rain forests, our national monuments and our public lands, are now banding together into larger groups of Vigilantes. That is why we have had in the first half of this year two books of transcending interest in this field: Our Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osborn, and now Road to Survival by William Vogt (Sloane Associates, $4.00), the August selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Road to Survival is the case history of how fast man has worked on this continent, in Latin America, in Russia, and in Asia to consume his rich heritage. It is the indignant record of a trained scientist who has traveled the globe. Mr. Vogt scans a wide horizon. He writes with color and with statistics that tell a devastating story. When he describes the cause of drought in the Santa Clara Valley; when he tells of what the Mexicans have done in the despoliation of their once magnificent forests, and of what the introduction of rabbits meant to the fertility of Australia; when he describes the shrinkage of the water table in Baltimore, or the costly mistakes of TVA, or why the Russians are alarmed by the drying up of their great rivers, he rouses the layman to the action point. He reminds us, in some of the most powerful prose I have read this year, that the destruction of the earth’s surface and the waste of its products, as Bernard Baruch says in the Introduction, “have a cogent meaning that touches the life, today and tomorrow, of every human being.”

By a strange coincidence, as Mr. Osborn and Mr. Vogt point out, the United States and Russia have in relation to their populations almost identically the same amount of land suitable for agriculture. Both countries are facing the future on approximately equal terms as far as the basic assets are concerned. Which will be the more successful in using and conserving those assets?

Dr. A. J. Cronin turned novelist in mid-career. His medical education at the University of Glasgow was accelerated by the First World War. For two years, he served as a surgeon in the British Navy. Then came four years of practice in the colliery district of South Wales and a special year of study of the pulmonary disabilities resulting from the mines. After which he moved to London to build up a successful practice in the West End. Not until 1930 —in his thirty-fifth year — did he begin his first novel. When Dr. Cronin writes about doctoring as he did in The Citadel and as he does still more trenchantly in his new novel, Shannon’s Way (Little, Brown, $3.00), he blends the knowledge’ of a practitioner and the skill of a dramatist. I rate Shannon’s Way as the best book of his career because in it those forces which have formed his writing— his church, his dedication to medicine, and his humble Scotch upbringing — combine to give deep feeling and authenticity to his story of a struggling young biologist.

The odds are against Robert Shannon (as perhaps they were against young Cronin too). An orphan with just enough patrimony to squeak through Medical School, Robert won an honors degree, the Lister Gold Medal, and the sometimes jealous respect of his seniors. As the story begins, we find him chafing as an assistant to Hugo Usher, the leading pathologist at the University. Usher keeps Robert’s nose to the grindstone and forbids him the opportunity to research for the cause of the virulent flu which is then sweeping through the neighboring villages. Robert is a poor compromiser and when he deliberately shelves his work for Usher in order to carry on his own experiment out of hours he is detected and, in the flare-up of tempers, dismissed.

Robert’s temper is one of the most likable things about him — the quick, candid explosion of real integrity. It ruins his chances again and again in his efforts to support himself as a medico and still pursue his original inquiry in biology. His temper also gets him into hot water with one of his pupils, Miss Jean Law, who is training as a medical missionary and who in her evangelism is as dedicated as he to his biology. It takes Robert some time, in his callow self-absorption, to realize that Miss Law is of more than classroom interest to him; and his poverty, his pride, his temper (and the fact that he was born a Catholic) are fences which have to be broken down before they can come together.

Shannon’s Way is full of scenes as Scotch and as warm as a buttered scone. Robert’s visit to the stricken village of Dreem, where he used to go as a boy on trout fishing trips and where he is now collecting specimens; Robert’s feud with the hospital matron, Miss Trudgeon; Robert’s and Jean’s motorcycle ride to Loch Lomond; Robert’s emergency operation on young Sim and his touching reconciliation with Alex Duthie; the ruthless system which wears him down at Eastershaws, the asylumthese are but a handful of the episodes which I marked in my mind as I read. Dr. Cronin writes with the sure touch of sympathy. Injustice and intolerance, man-made and enforced by profession or church — these are the themes which find such human expression in his story.

For his adventure novel, The Flames of Time (Scribners, $3.00), Baynard Kendrick has chosen an untamed and exotic Florida in the early 1800’s when Spain, Britain, and the United States were striving for possession. His hero is the goldenhaired and wonderfully physical Artillery Armes, the only son of Tory settlers murdered by ihe Indians. Artillery Annex takes his name from the metal emblem, bearing the arms of His Majesty’s Field Artillery, which was found beside his father’s body. The boy is brought up by Dan MeKetch and Dr. Buckhart, border desperadoes who have carved out a little principality by stealing cattle, slaves, women — in fact anything that can be moved. Considering the violence and temptation which surround him. Artillery is peculiarly chaste. At the first sight of a naked woman he runs off to live with the Seminoles; and when fate restores him to his tough guardians, the groping hand of authority is at last closing in on them.

Artillery’s love story is the exact opposite of Amber’s; for, thanks to Dr. Burkhart’s teaching, he will not succumb to the ever recurring attempts of seduction. In other respects he is equally Galahad— “a man,” says the U.S. Marshal, “who holds his head, and tongue, and liquor, and can play at cards with unchanging face; who fights only when provoked to fight, and who then can kill, but doesn’t.”I might add that his favorite weapon is a tomahawk he hurls with hair-splitting accuracy.

No one can question that the historian has helped to trace the doings of some of these desperadoes. Mr. Kendrick has a gusty appetite for Florida past and present; he catches the violence in the extremes of that almost tropical country, and heaps the page with swift episode and braggadocio. His dialogue is apt to be melodramatic, but so fast does he keep the story moving that I found myself reading with quite as much curiosity as incredulity.