The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

SUMMER began with the odor of cinders, sunlight on the red plush seats and the dusty varnish of the day coach which took you to Point Pleasant. Summer burst into view with the first sight of the ocean seen between the cleft of the dunes, the sunlight dancing on the water with a million spear-points and the sand a dazzling white. You had to shut your eyes it was so blinding.

Then the days ran together into those blissful variations on the Ocean and the Hay: tennis in the early morning with the clay court still damp, swimming before lunch, sailing, racing, tennis again, the enormous thirst when ice water from the cooler gave you a pain between the eyes, cherry jiggers or a marshmallow whip at Priest’s, the cruises down the Hay, beach parties with the roasting corn, and the Hops on Saturday nights, when the college hatbands— Cottage, Ivy, St. Anthony, Psi L, and Zete — walked off with the older girls who had a smile for you during the week.

Suddenly it was time for the Water Sports. They came on the Saturday before Labor Day, and jingo, where had the summer gone! On Friday, floats were towed up the Metedeconk River and anchored three hundred yards apart, and by Saturday noon the lane of open water between was lined by the entire output from the Yacht Club: the big cabin cat boats, the Romp and Pastime; the Brewsters’ fat sloop, the San, and Ruford Franklin’s beauty; the sneak boxes and the Gloucester one-designs; the motorboats, the Sutphens’ cabin cruiser and the Hydes’ with its roomy cockpit — fifty or sixty assorted boats on each side, anchored deck to deck, and at the midpoint the Commodore’s big black yawl, all rigged out in flags.

The small fry came first and the Tub Race was their climax. It took all the skill of the Committee to ease the contestants into those round wooden wash tubs, to line them up with toes touching the float — and make sure that no one sank before the start. At the crack of the pistol sixteen pairs of hands began thrashing the water. The overeager forged into the lead, filled up and submerged. You needed nice balance and a steady rhythm to cover those fifty yards at a winning pace and not sink. A skinny guy with nervous energy had the edge.

Then came the swimming races with no one ever able to “crawl” as fast as Al Norris of La wren reville. Then the boats — the dinghies first, each cockleshell spurting along, oarlocks groaning, with the inevitable collision, and if Fortune laughed some contestant, in his haste, missing the water entirely and rowing himself right over backwards. The canoes were more graceful, especially in the Singles when the boy from North Hatley who had been taught by the Indians came through standing up. In the Doubles of course you always cheered for the most popular of the newlyweds, but somehow they could newer steer a straight course. It was always a dogged middle-aged couple who wore them down and crossed the line.

So the afternoon ran its course with plenty of refreshments — the basket lunch, the Shandygaff, and a special box of Huyler’s Butterscotch Kisses for those too young to smoke. When each event was decided the winner swam, rowed, or paddled over to the Commodore’s yawl to receive the tiny silver cups while people applauded with “Attaboy, Sam!”

As the shadows lengthened, the wind fell and now the lane of water was glassy and still. Now we were coming to the big event —the really tough one — the one that brought out the real fight in the contestants and the yelling partisanship of the spectators,— the Tilting. From each end of the lane a canoe would appear; the paddler deep down in the stern showing only shoulders and head above the gunwale, the tilter standing feet wide apart and braced midships with his nine-foot bamboo pole, on the end of which was a fat swabber, canvas-covered. Warily they approached, each jockeying for the broadside, and then one paddler seeing his opening dug fast while his tilter thrust and lunged at the opponent, who was already beginning to teeter. You had to take it standing, and once those swabbers had soaked up enough water they really hit you. Every canoe had its cheering section and advice was free and loud, as the paddlers backed and feinted and dug for the quick turn that would catch a man vulnerable and off balance. These guys were our heroes, college juniors some of them; and when a swab slipped and the bamboo made a bloody gash along the arm, you could feel the shudder run through the boats. The semifinals got the blood up, and when the big boys came together in the face of the setting sun, it was something to see and never forgot ten.

And then suddenly, the year before the war, surprisingly it was my turn, or rather Ed’s. I was a little guy weighing ninety-four pounds in a wet bathing suit, and good only for the paddling. But Ed had a sunny courage (too good for the bullet which stopped him at Chateau-Thierry) with solid legs and a tine pair of arms. We entered just for the fun of it and in the preliminaries bowled over two boats, one of our own weight and one of the big shots who laid grown just a little sluggish. My memory of the semifinals is dazed by the bedlam of shouts when Ed, who had stood up under a real pounding, suddenly caught our opponent in the chest, knocked him off his feet, and, while their canoe was tipping from the fall, we closed in and rolled it over.

There was nothing uncertain about the Finals. We were the underdog and we had the crowd with us. But the pole was a weary weight by this time, and my paddling was not as crisp as it had been. We circled our older opponents, made a pass, drew apart, and while 1 was backing to get a fairer position, they suddenly came piling in. “Turn!"’ Ed yelled. I tried, but too late. The swab caught Ed on the flank, then the seat, and lifted him, pole and all, into the Bay. It was so sudden the disappointment still rankles. I keep trying to do it over again hot nights before J drift to sleep.

Rumer Godden is conspicuous among contemporary British novelists for the grace and intensitv of her style. She breathes into her novels that fervent, magnetic quality which drew us to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield; and like Miss Mansfield, she writes exquisitely and intuitively of women and children, I Candle for St. Jude (Viking, $2.7.5) is the vivacious, temperamental story of a ballet school — a ballet school on the outskirts of London over which Madame Holbein of the Imperial Ballet has presided with such drawing power and stimulus that now on the fiftieth anniversary of her debut at the Maryinsky, there must be a great ovation and a very special performance indeed for the affectionate but exacting audience which would come out to the little theater in Hampstead. It will be my jubilee, ” Madame explained to the school, “Only I do not like that worrd. And you will give me a very special performance, not? It will he my diamond jubilee, if you must sav jubilee, of that. I was seven.” And she added with a twinkle, “Now at last you knowhow old I am.”

The school is a little company in itself with the rivalries, the jealousy and dedication, which one expects backstage. Their theater was miniature but it was real. Their auditorium was an old coach house with cream-colored walls, old gilt sconces, and thirty rows of seats, red plush with red arms (bought at an auction). There was an orchestra pit and a stage built out into the garden, with a sloping floor of soft pine. Here, as the choreography is planned in the final week, a civil war breaks out between Madame Holbein, strong-willed and more conventional than she will ever know, and Hilda, the most creative of her pupils.

So here is the dress rehearsal, feverish and shorttempered; here are the last-minute changes in the program, which almost break Hilda’s heart; here is the unsuspected jealousy of Caroline, Madame Holbein’s darling who has come hack from the opera.to lend her beauty to the class; here is the sudden daring improvisation as Hilda and Lion bring to light their passionate Leda and the Swan; here is Lollie in her pathetic audition; here is the sleepless, horrible night before, the drained hopeless fatigue; and then as the day dawns and things fall unexpectedly into place, as the orchestra tunes up, as the red and white carnations, the jasmine, t he baskets of roses, and the candles in the crystal chandelier light up the theater, so at last to Anna Holbein comes her spirited and sentimental jubilee.

In its color and liveliness, this book has the endearing theatricality of The Constant Nymph; and in its understanding of the relationship between age and youth, between Madame Holbein and the brilliant youngsters she was sending out into the world of ballet, the novel has a depth and a wisdom as feminine as it is charming.

To write the believable story of a primitive man be he African chief, Zuñi, or Eskimo — has seemed to me a feat of fiction almost beyond the reach of the modern novelist. To hark back so far in time, to re-create a character of instinct, resourcefulness, and ignorance, is to tax the imagination of writer and reader to the utmost, and i began mv reading of The Shy and the Forest (Little, Brown, $2.75) with the apprehension that this novel of C. S. Forester’s about an African tribe in the nineteenth century would leave me cold and unconvinced. To mv surprise I did not look up (except to answer the telephone) until I had finished it.

Loa, the protagonist of the story, is an African chief and tribal god in his early manhood, six-foot-four and of prodigious strength as the book begins. He holds a village of some seven hundred in fear and adoration; he has his bevy of wives, his adored and adoring older son, Lanu, the pick of the food and the virgins, and no reason to believe that his sister, the moon, or his brother, the sky, will ever treat him with loss beneficence than he has known for twenty-five years. His only irritant other than the insects and dripping heat is his sharp-tongued first wife, Musini, who resents his younger women. In his irritation he plays with the idea of fattening her up as a change in his monotonous diet of manioc and plantain.

But marauding Arabs, lured across Zanzibar and the Nile by the ivory tusks and the slave trade, surprise his people by night . Loa and his iron sword are overpowered, and in the cruel morning light he loses his divinity as he sees the elders and children slain and the village in flames, and as he is yoked stark naked to one of the widows and prodded forward into the long trek toward captivity. It is a swift, stunning reversal, and under the yoke and the kurbash, the stinging whip of hippopotamus hide, the cannibal god becomes a man fighting for his life, every instinct up in arms against the Arabs, every sense aware of the dangerous new country.

How Loa is rescued by Lanu and Musini, and what the little party encounter in the fierce and foreign jungle, is an escape story as ingenious, as carefully reasoned, and as courageously carried out as any exploit of Captain Hornblower’s.

Strength and conceit are the heritage of this huge black leader, and to them he adds tin’ humility and the knowledge acquired in captivity. In humiliation he learns the means of revenge. We can never feel for him the sympathy which we felt for the British sea captain, Horn blower, because, as I have implied, any story of the primeval is like a translation, literature at one remove. But we can be fascinated and persuaded by each new move in Loa’s odyssey, and I certainly was.

In the dog days of July or the raw cold of February, every city dweller must sometime have dreamt of a livelihood such as George Woodbury has described in his book John Gaffe’s Mill (Norton, $3.00), in which nature not only provides the materials but does all the work as well. Thai is the comfortable idea which I draw from these pleasant pages about a water mill: the wheat turns to flour, the corn to meal, and logs become useful boards while the miller takes his ease leaning on the brink, pipe in hand and jug at his elbow.

George Woodbury writes from experience. He gave up a promising career in archaeology to go back to his ancestral home in New Hampshire and there rebuild an ancient saw and grist mill. Last year I had the satisfaction of printing in the Atlantic his account of the reconstruction and the first turn of the new water wheel when the ice on the millpond went out. Since then I have sampled his water-ground corn meal and whole-wheat flour and found them both as pleasurable as his prose. There is a simple, natural quality in his miller’s career which every hard-driven pavement-thumper will envy. He works hard and his prose shows it, but the point is he’s happy.