Reader's Choice

“WHAT the world needs above all,”says Professor Toynbee, “ is to get the issue of free enterprise versus socialism off its ideological pedestal and to treat it, not as a matter of semi-religious faith . . . but as a common sense question of . . . circumstance and adaptation.” This month’s nonfiction is a reminder that Toynbee’s point is an insistent challenge to U.S. thinking, which is reverting to zealotism on the subject of free enterprise.

In The West at Bay (Norton, $3.50), Barbara Ward, one of England’s outstanding economists, argues pretty convincingly that the Marshall Plan’s success hinges in part on U.S. noninterference with practices contrary to the Hoyle of U.S. capitalism. Here is a potential source of friction and recrimination, and the platitude about better understanding takes on a new urgency, whose measure is our immense stake in the regeneration of Western Europe. It is that understanding which F. O. Matthiessen, Professor of Literature at Harvard, continually reaches for in his journal of a half year in Central Europe. Sam Welles, on the other hand, has a tendency in Profile of Europe (Harper, $3.50) to evaluate the Old World from the Weltanschauung of Rockefeller Center, Mr. Welles’s home base as an associate editor of Time.

Welles is a practiced hand at whipping fact, anecdote, and comment into readable shape, and his book has a great deal of interesting information to offer. Finland, Welles reports, retains a surprising measure of freedom. Sweden impresses him as the most materialistic country in Europe — and the most jittery. A Polish Socialist sums up trade relations with Russia: “Russia gets our coal and in return we give them our textiles.” The American Mission in Greece “have an awesome ignorance of the political side of the job. And so forth — a newsy Baedeker to all of post-war Europe. The editorial contribution is slighter.

Welles’s commentary on Russia — where he spent ten weeks and to which he devotes half of the book — runs to the standard strictures on inefficiency and tyranny and the standard comparisons with U.S. practice, a motif which much repetition has made somewhat pointless. As against this, his actual data are often fresh and arresting. Those showing Russia’s astonishing industrial weakness, if accurate, amply justify Welles’s conclusion that Stalin cannot afford to wage war for at least fifteen years. What U.S. foreign policy desperately needs, Welles stresses, is consistency. At present it is a far greater enigma to Europeans than Russian policy.

The space devoted to the other countries is rather skimpy. This, plus overpreoccupation with “free enterprise versus socialism,” leads to occasional superficiality and snap judgments. Holland, Welles remarks, “chose [my italics] the austerity way of recovery,” whence the Dutch aren’t working as hard as the Belgians, who preferred “a practical business approach.” Holland, Miss Ward shows, had no choice whatsoever, flooding having caused immense dislocations, whereas the Belgian economy was relatively undamaged. Low productivity in Western Germany is due to its being “caught between British socialism and U.S. free enterprise”; judging from Miss Ward’s thoroughgoing survey of the German economy, this is glib oversimplification. A looksee at the Arabian oil fields seems to have convinced Welles that the “ ism ” the Arabs want is Americanism; when I was in the Middle East, they called it Arabism. Such complaints notwithstanding, the book is a journalistic tour de force: only John Gunther has gathered so much about so many places in so little time.

The vogue for the foreign correspondent’s up-to-the-minute report, the eagerness of statesmen and exdiplomats to tell all, have crowded out the reflective type of travel book by the intellectual, which has been the preferred brand of foreign reportage in European publishing. (Gide on Russia, Maurois on America, Graham Greene on Mexico, Huxley on the world at large.) F. O. Matthiessen’s From the Heart of Europe (Oxford, $3.50) shows, as Edmund Wilson’s Europe Without Baedeker did a year ago, that the intellectual can be a more stimulating commentator than most of the ace newsmen hell-bent on fact-finding and record-breaking mileage.

Matthiessen spent the summer of 1947 teaching at the Salzburg American Seminar, attended by students from sixteen countries, and the winter at Charles University in Prague. Explicitly not a formal report on these and other places visited — Bratislava, Budapest, Copenhagen — it covers matters literary and artistic and contains a keen analysis of political currents. Matthiessen’s primary purpose, though, in writing this “journal of opinions” was “to think about . . . some of the things it means to be an American today.” This leads him to do a good deal of thinking about the things it means to be a European.

From the personal histories, the behavior, doubts, and ambitions of his students, Matthiessenmanages to convey a sharp sense of the moral temper and climate of ideas among Central European intellectuals. Also a warm and discerning picture of the everyday conditions of their lives. His American commentary, energized by the stimulus of contrast, re-examines our literary masters; subjects various facets of a materialist culture to a pointed critique; tests and sharpens his own credo — that of a Christian and a socialist who does not put the economics of socialism on an “ideological pedestal.” What From the Heart of Europe offers is, essentially, the companionship of a rich, humane, truly civilized intellect — a traveler of insight and integrity.

“Why do the British get all these deficits — they never used to?” Congressman Taber has fretfully asked. He will find the answer to this and a host of other billion-dollar questions in The West at Bay. Miss Ward’s prose, unlike that of some economists, is agreeably free from complexity and she puts no strain on the layman with a slight grasp of economics. Hers is a superlative analysis of the world economic crisis, one of the most valuable books published this year.

The crisis reflected in the European dollar shortage, Miss Ward argues, is not simply the result of wartime dislocations — in several dollar-starved European countries productivity is back to pre-war level. It represents, rather, the passing of the nineteenthcentury economic system founded on (1) division of labor between industrialized Europe and an unindustrialized outside world supplying it with cheap food and raw materials; (2) the “sterling standard” as the lubricant of international trade. World-wide industrialization and the wartime sale of Britain’s foreign assets — the interest on which went far toward preventing the deficits which puzzle Taber—are two of the elements in the story of basic economic change headlined by Europe’s loss of supremacy to the United States, a quasirevolution in the status of the Far East, and the isolation of Eastern Europe under Communism.

In U.S. post-war policy toward Europe, Miss Ward finds no trace of “imperialism” but signs of an “escapist nostalgia” to restore a world economic order “with a remarkably nineteenth century look.” The changes mentioned, however, have written the epitaph of this vanished world. Western Europe must create something new in order to achieve stability: a unified economy. That, indeed, is the goal encouraged by the Marshall Plan. But between the Plan’s goal and the means of achieving it lies a harsh paradox which Miss Ward brings into relief: “To create the kind of unity which the Americans hoped for and to secure the balance in Europe’s dollar account (which was the fundamental aim) the Sixteen Nations might be obliged to pursue policies which the United States, theoretically at least, would find inacceptable.” While U.S. imports remain so slight, the dollar shortage can only be dealt with by regulation, planning, even “discrimination” designed to encourage purchases outside the dollar area.

A happier but remote solution, of course, would be a U.S. policy of massive purchases and investment abroad, which would enable the dollar to fill the sterling’s former role as lubricant of international trade.

Miss Ward goes on to discuss the prospects of an American slump; the several steps already taken in the direction of European integration and the steps projected; the intricate politics of Western Federation. The West at Bay conveys the encouraging impression that, despite huge difficulties, Western Europe has begun to inch its way toward some form of unity.

“Behold Europe!” exclaims John T. Flynn, and what he beholds can’t be the place the last three authors have talked about. Democracy in Flynn’s Europe is altogether kaputt, as a result of our liberating it from Hitler. Even England is “on its way to Fascism.” And now behold Flynn’s America! It can’t be the place where there’s a boom on, and Republicans are of good cheer. For what Flynn beholds is a state rotted by a “fatal deformity of [the] political and economic system,” also thanks to quarreling with the Nazis and the Japanese. Well, whatever the trouble is and wherever it is, Mr. Flynn would have you know that a small man called Roosevelt was to blame. Small? If you think he was medium-large, just read The Roosevelt Myth (Devin-Adair, $3.50), which presents him “reduced in size to agree with reality.” Unfortunately Flynn has done so much reducing that you wind up with precious little reality.

To be sure, the Roosevelt mythmakers greatly inflated and bowdlerized reality. But at this juncture, the diplomatic disclosures made since the war, the many post-mortems of the New Deal era, have substantially corrected the perspective. When Flynn proclaims that Roosevelt preached economy then practiced spending, that his treatment of top associates was less than commendable, that his Teheran-Yalta diplomacy was at fault, it is hardly a myth in good standing that he’s debunking.

However, the book contains a fair amount of material bearing on the myth as currently extant. Some of the factual details are persuasive and cause the reality to shrink. Some of them are a blot on the reality, if true; for instance, the account of White House influence on the Roosevelt sons’ financial affairs. But the over-all picture simply transmogrifies “pro” myth into “anti” myth.

Flynn’s portrait of Roosevelt “reduced in size” stacks up as follows: He was a man of no distinction whatsoever— a bad student at Harvard, a failure in law practice — who got elected President. He was “without political or economic philosophy,” and he led the nation toward an idea which “Mussolini had adopted” and later Hitler. His program was a total failure. He asked of the people “nothing but that they vote for him,” and paid them to do so. Then he betrayed them into war so that he might enjoy the role of world savior. He could not write a speech; he was woefully ignorant of economics and finance and conditions abroad. lie had neither social consciousness nor ideals nor a scrap of integrity.

This indictment is confected by a gifted pamphleteer, skilled at making facts serve his hates, a virtuoso of the sneer and the smear. Flynn’s hyperthyroid prose is never dull. But his reasoning is palsied with malice, fanaticism, and embittered isolationism. The identification of England’s “social democracy” with fascism is typical of Flynn’s turn of mind, which runs to incessant abuse of “intellectuals,”to crackpot homilies on European history and a delight in juggling with the stereotypes of the HearstMeCormick press. His judgment of men hardly inspires confidence— his preferred authority on high statesmanship is John Garner. He implies it was perverse of the Chinese not to accede to Japan’s modest war aims. He charges that Roosevelt’s war strategy put victory second to his itch for world leadership, arguing, in a total non sequitur, that this made him substitute the North African landings for a projected cross-Channel invasion in '43, thus giving Stalin time to overrun Europe. The possibility of failure, the cost in blood, the fact that the Russians were hollering for a second front and isolationists like Flynn for no front at all—all this is omitted.

Joseph Conrad’s indictment of the tsarist autocracy — “the ruthless destruction of innumerable minds . . . of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature” — sums up the ravages of modern fascism which Flynn ignores when he cries “fascism" at the drop of an economic plan. Those ravages — that destruction of minds and human ties and the accompanying climate of “darkness at noon” —are dramatized in Man Is Strong (Knopf, $3.00), a novel by Corrado Alvaro. The book was published in Italy in 1939, after Alvaro had added a foreword stating that the police state described was Russia.

Scourges as immense as fascism and war present the novelist with a knotty problem of ways and means. A Frenchman has aptly remarked that “a single man killed is a misfortune, a million is a statistic.” How to encompass the emotional reality of that aggregate of horrors which so easily becomes “a statistic” or a remote abstraction — “war dead,” “purge,” “pogrom”? Camus’s answer in The Plaque was vividly realistic allegory. Alvaro’s is the symbolism and superrealism of Kafka, with its dreamlike intensity. Many of his devices have their exact parallel in The Trial — the mysterious circumstance left unexplained, the sinister coincidence, the felt presence of unseen, omnipotent powers, and so on.

The story opens with the return of Dirck, an expatriate, to his native country, recently emerged from civil war. Instantly, the atmosphere is that of waking nightmare. People stare “with hate” at Dirck’s good clothes. Strange officials know his name and face. His room is searched. Barbara, with whom he renews an old love affair (years earlier she had been abroad), is terrified that to be seen with him will “incriminate” her. Danger and senseless prohibition hang over everything, and Dirck is rapidly infected with the cringing anxiety which is the norm — the obsessive consciousness that “they" are watching, listening, condemning. He feels guilty of a nameless crime, which he has not committed — and is certain to commit. “My dear,” says his superior, “often the mere appearance of guilt is a crime.”

Dirck’s initiation into this “mysticism of crime” comes from a chance meeting with “the investigator, who takes him to an office decorated with pictures of hanged men. “We must destroy everything private, personal, intimate; there lies the cause of all evils,” says the investigator. “To have a secret is a crime.” Execution of the guilty makes crime “as beneficial an example to society as that set by the most loyal citizen.” The prospective criminal “interests us enormously. . . . We need him.” Corrupters, too, are needed to keep society well supplied with the spectacle of educative punishment, and the man from abroad is ideal for this form of “ public service.” Every thing about him incites the guilty. “To borrow a term from religion, he is the devil.”Dirck now sees clearly that his love for Barbara is a criminal conspiracy against the state. And when eventually, crazed by fear, he commits a real crime, he feels that some monstrous plan which “they" conceived has been accomplished.

Since I’ve seen the book criticized for the very thing it aims at, its surrealistic quality, I should perhaps say that if you insist on lifelike characterization and the other qualities of conventional realism, then Alvaro is decidedly not your man. What he is so successful in achieving is the anguished climate of nightmare and baleful unreason. His book has, too, something of that tension of ideas which distinguished Darkness at Noon. It is a thoroughly unusual novel, and, to my mind, a remarkable one. The quality of its telling has been expertly rendered in Frances Frenaye’s translation.

Edita Morris turns to another form of surrealism, designed to bypass the defenses of the mind and strike directly at the heart and what survives of childhood sensibility. It is a gothic fairy tale, set in a nightmarish woodland, which she uses to project the nightmare essence of war and persecution, and to depict the two kinds of innocence in the face of calamity: purity of spirit and criminal frivolity.

Charade (Viking, $2.50) is a story of babes who have, literally, fled into the woods to escape ogres; it is told by a fourteen-year-old girl. A famous anti-Nazi German poet, his wife, the actress who is his mistress, his daughter (the narrator), and his son have taken refuge in a hunting lodge in Poland. The surrounding forest has its traditional denizens: the good fairy — a cow which gives them milk — and her mad attendant; the tragic, gnome-like Jewish children hiding in a cellar; the kindly dwarf; the donkeyheaded aristocrat, nostalgic for “the good old days,” complacent they will be restored and crassly selfish. These and the poet’s ménage — he obsessed with classical antiquity, the actress with her illusion of talent, the son (prototype of the budding Nazi) with his virility — enact in the dark forest a charade which represents, in fantasticated microcosm, the world at war.

War makes one of its appearances as the dreadful apparition which turns out to be the remnants of a man; antiSemitism as the one-legged boy, screeching and flapping, whom Nazi sadism has converted into a human rooster. And through the narrator, the wisdom of childhood expresses its bewildered comment on the madness of adults.

Mrs. Morris has chosen the most urgent of all themes and has clothed it in a boldly original form. Her sort of symbolic tale is capable of strongly emotional effects, of reconverting the anonymous “statistic” into a living horror. It also runs the constant risk of naivete, mawkishness, “cuteness.” Edita Morris reaps high dividends from her method and sometimes succumbs to its dangers. The balance is in her favor.

Alvaro’s Man Is Strong is a sample of the literature of thinly veiled protest which survived under Fascism, a mild tyranny (by comparison with Hitlerism or Stalinism) in so far as the arts were concerned. Mussolini seems to have realized that drastic regimentation would throttle Italian culture. His censorship was lackadaisical. His Ministry of Education even granted subsidies to high-brow publications, most of whose contributors were non-Fascists or anti-Fascists — a policy which in effect created what a Roman editor described to me as “a subsidized, quasi-official underground.” As a result, the arts were not only saved from the eclipse they suffered in Germany: they actually retained a measure of vitality which, under the impetus of the liberation, expressed itself in a burst of creative activity.

This literary risorgimento, I discovered last year in Italy, rapidly produced a number of first-rate novels, which are now beginning to reach us. Their special qualities, broadly speaking, are similar to those which have won such high praise for the post-war Italian films shown here: Open City, Shoe Shine, To Live in Peace, and Paisan. In books such as Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily and Moravia’s The Roman Woman, both due here this winter, you will find a concern with the basic human needs, a direct confrontation of the elemental problems — man’s fate; Good and Evil — in short a deep seriousness of purpose, but allied with extreme simplicity of manner and other gifts that make for readability. Alongside of these novels, the topics which preoccupy some of our serious writers — the antics of the ultra-rich or the neuroses of the overcompetitive ego — seem strangely trivial and artificial.

The qualities just mentioned are also evidenced in a somewhat lesser novel, Giuseppe Berio’s The Sky Is Red (New Directions, $3.25), now published in an excellent translation by Angus Davidson. The book is centered on four adolescents left homeless and destitute by a catastrophic air raid on an unnamed city which resembles Florence. It was written, paradoxically, while Berto was a prisoner of war in Texas, and turned out to be a runaway best-seller.

Though Berto’s story depicts the impact of war on his young protagonists, its underlying theme is the shocking plight of the Italian poor. Daniele, the sixteen-year-old son of a prosperous official, loses his parents in the big raid and finds himself sharing, with a boy and two girls from the slums, an abandoned house in an area declared “infected” because of unrecovered corpses. The squalid pre-war background of Daniele’s companions has been etched in the opening pages. “We were poor and wretched even before the war,”one of them says to him. “The war . . . hasn’t changed things much for us. . . . We don’t bother much whether the things we do are good or bad. All that matters is that they should serve their purpose.” The primary purpose has never been any different — survival. But conditions are more desperate and the authorities are callously indifferent.

Tullio, aged seventeen, has become head of a. gang of youthful Robin Hoods. “I’m a Communist,” he confides to Daniele, and when asked what that means he says, “It means that things are not going right, as they are now. There is too much misery everywhere. There are still too many people who live well and who don’t care a damn about the rest.” (That answer, incidentally, accounts for a high percentage of Italy’s several million Communist votes.) Tullio’s fifteen-year-old mistress, Carla, sells herself to the liberators for canned food and cigarettes. The younger girl, Giulia, keeps house. Daniele, who refuses to steal, hunts desperately for any sort of work. Together they look after a dim-witted little waif orphaned by the raid.

Three emotional strands are interwoven in the direly tragic sequence of events: the brutalizing effects of the struggle to keep alive; the contrasting kindness, the sense of solidarity of the young delinquents; the wonderfully tender love between Daniele and Giulia. The Sky Is Red is thoroughly sentimental but never cloying. Written with unflinching realism and a deeply tragic sense of life, it has a heartbreaking sadness, an intensely human appeal.

“One of the best of our [English] novelists,” Elizabeth Bowen says of Joyce Cary, and when The Moonlight was published here last year several reviewers agreed. Its successor, Herself Surprised (Harper, $3.00), is the life story, in the first person singular, of one of the most engaging and subtly realized heroines of recent fiction. Here is a saga of the downward path which has robust reality and intense feeling, and which is richly humorous in the telling.

Sara is a creature of immaculate respectability; her frailty is rooted in too generous a heart. She cannot understand it when the judge, who sentences her to eighteen months, says she has behaved like a woman without any moral sense. As a girl she was a young “sobersides,” brought up in a religious home and happy to be a cook in good service. She knew what was right, but men, poor things, had a hard time with “their nature” — and Nature had fashioned her, in ample outline, for their solace.

You may think she was flighty to have married Mr. Matt, who was a gentleman, but she couldn’t stand to see a grown man so hampered and hagged by his mother. When Matt was gone, it was old Jimson’s pestering, for he was an abashless mannie, which made her Mrs. Jimson. (To tell the truth they never did get married — Jimson had a wife.) Jimson was an artist and like all of them a bit in the freakish way. He couldn’t earn a penny and he beat her and eventually ran off with a young slummock. But she was happy with him and grew soft to her sins. And when she was housekeeper to old Mr. Wilcher and he asked for “an addition to his comforts,” she accepted just to save him from trouble with the Law, for he was forever pinching minors in the park. To all these men she was a real helpmeet, and her cheese soufflés were a fair treat.