Readn's Choice

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CHARLES J.ROLO

ON the heels of The Naked and the Dead, which disproved the adage “War books don’t sell,” there now come two more outsize war novels. The Young Lions (Random House, $3.95), by the playwright and war correspondent Irwin Shaw, is a powerful piece of writing.The Crusaders (Little, Brown, $3.50) is high-grade fictional journalism which succeeds in holding one’s interest and arousing sympathy and wrath. Its author is Stefan Heym, an anti-Nazi refugee, who served in the U.S. Army as an enlisted man and as an officer.

Quality aside, there are striking points of ideality between the two books and between them and The Naked and the Dead, a common ground which shows up some of the differences between the present and past generation of war writers. Today’s novelists hate the enemy and everything he stands for; they do not question the war’s necessity. What angers them—and they are every bit as angrv as their predecessors — is the evils they see on their own side: a broad streak of the fascist spirit; the injustices of the Army hierarchy; lack of integrity and ideals among “the crusaders.”Assemble all the characters in the novels mentioned and you have some choice anti-Semites, sadists, and bullies; you have officers, ciphers in civilian life, blown up with self-importance, abusing privilege, unequal to their responsibilities; coarse, ignorant enlisted men without a notion of what they are fighting for; hypocrites, toadies, and racketeers. Heym provides a leaven of righteous men, Shaw throws in a few, and brave men are not lacking. Still, as a whole the cast is the reverse of admirable.

There have been many complaints (in reference to Mailer, but they have a wider application) that the novelists’ overriding interest in the seamy side results in a distorted picture of American life; contributes nothing to a stronger sense of values. The argument smacks of the rebuke administered to Shostakovitch and company, and the Thomas Committee’s complaint that, in the movies, bankers and tycoons are too often unlovable. It is not the novelist’s job to cut his characters from the social statistician’s cloth. That what stirs the war writers should be almost synonymous with what disgusts them is quite in keeping with American literary tradition. Its dominant strain — from Mark Twain through Dreiser to the early Dos Passos and the contemporary Southerners — has been one of protest and condemnation. As to the hankering for uplift —the bitterness of the war books contains, without preachment or example, its antidote to moral anarchy. It awakens a healthy sense of outrage and — in some readers perhaps — a sense of responsibility.

These novelists of World War II are more politically-minded than the previous generation. They are also closer to the realities of war, more determined to show civilians its full frightfulness. They tell you, with scientific exactitude, how war is fought, and what wounds look like, and how men die, and how their corpses decompose. There is probably more charnel house prose in, say, The Young Lions, than in any half-dozen novels of the First World War.

A writer less prodigal than Irwin Shaw would have forged at least a trilogy out of the characters and incidents crammed into The Young Lions. His story straddles peace and war — and both sides of the war. It swirls from the Austrian mountains to New York and California, then to a New Jersey training camp; from occupied Paris to the saturnalia of wartime Berlin; across North Africa and up the Italian peninsula; from Normandy to the Rhine.

Shaw’s camera — there is a cinematic quality in the sweep and tempo of his novel— is focused on three soldiers, two Americans and a German. It catches them, first, as civilians. Christian Diestl is a skiing instructor; a superbly handsome and seemingly decent young man, though he calls himself a Nazi. Michael Whitacre belongs to Broadway and Hollywood: success, divorce, a lovely mistress, a Japanese servant, and a gnawing sense of futility make up the portrait. Noah Ackerman, a Jew, is sky, inexperienced, and physically a bit of a weakling when he enters the army. Each man’s background shapes the soldier, but according to the special logic of war.

Whitacre cannot leave the stage behind him, and is denied a chance to dissolve his self-disgust in combat. Ackerman is half killed, in training, by a. gang of maniacal anti-Semites who have his Captain’s blessing: his fight as a Jew turns him into a tough, fearless, and resourceful soldier. Diestl becomes a cold, supremely effective killer, a one-man military machine. He even kills his own compatriots, when “the war" demands it, though he knows that Germany has lost the war.

The Young Lions has not the depth, the original and complex vision of The Naked and the Dead. Mr. Shaw portrays his characters from the outside, and his brush, though lively enough, paints in bold outline and often in conventional colors. His talent is more dramatic than analytic, but it is a considerable one. He handles the whirling changes of scene and atmosphere with amazing skill. He writes with passion and tremendous punch, and drives the action forward with unfailing inventiveness. The literature of World War II contains few combat episodes more memorable than four or five in this book. Shaw’s picture of the war from the German side — whether correct or not, which I cannot gauge—is utterly engrossing. The Young Lions is the sort of book you want to read at a sitting— and it is 689 pages long.

The Crusaders is also extremely readable and has its stretchcs of high tension. Starting in Normandy,

the story is an exhaustive documentary of the war’s last phase and frustrating aftermath — the capture of Paris (liberation scenes, rape, black-marketeering, true love); the Battle of the Bulge (panic, the roar of battle, massacre of U.S. prisoners); the push into Germany (concentration camp horrors, hero’s grim homecoming, meeting with tovarich, idealized version); Military Government (Nazis slyly running things, despair of anti-Nazis, American cynicism, Fraäulein conquers conquerors).

Mr. Heym’s leading actors — members of a Propaganda Intelligence Unit—divide into crooks and crusaders, with rank weighted on the side of evil. Lieutenant Yates and Sergeant Bing, an anti-Nazi refugee, cherish the reasonable belief they are fighting to stamp out Nazism. Their zeal threatens certain profitable arrangements made by Captain Loomis, a former radio salesman, and by Lieutenant Colonel Willoughby, who is out to save a German cartel and grab a piece of it for Coster, Bruille, Reagan and Willoughby. The cast includes a lady correspondent, whom you’ve seen around too often; a show-off tank general, whom you used to read about in the newspapers; and an SS Colonel, who is the diabolus ex machina in the plot. All this comes close to being formula stuff. But Mr. Heym has told an ambitious story with affecting sincerity and notable competence.

Few American novelists have a higher standing among their fellow authors than William Faulkner. But he has always had a restricted audience. When Malcolm Cowley was compiling The Portable Faulkner in 1945, he found that all of Faulkner’s seventeen books were out of print. His most popular novel, Sanctuary, is the one that he himself thinks least of (“a cheap idea . . . deliberately conceived to make money”). His later books, Mr. Cowley wrote, “attracted so little attention that they seem to have gone unread.” I must confess that I find this understandable.

Reams of criticism have been written about the poetic texture of Faulkner’s prose; his genius for bringing scenery and climate to life; his frontier humor, his rich imagination, and that brooding love and hatred for the South which charges his work with such intensity. His qualities add up to an extraordinary talent. But it is one which, to my mind, has been misused.

Faulkner’s regionalism seems to me. an obsessive parochialism. In most of his work everything has been frantically enlarged; 1 he mood has been of unwavering despair and darkness. He constantly executes wildly rhetorical flourishes on a surface of indifferent interest. And his syntax comes close to being a perversion of language — sentences that turn and twist, pause to roll up a parenthesis, pause a little further on to roll up a parenthesis within the parenthesis, then press forward again (closing the parentheses and opening others), writhing from semicolon to semicolon for three full pages.

Intruder in the Dust (Random House, $3.00) — Faulkner’s first novel in eight years — is another episode in the saga of his mythical world, Yoknapatawpha County. Lucas Beauchamp, a proud intractable Negro — the grandson of a white landowner — is found with a pistol in his hand beside the dead body of Vinson Gowrie. No attempt is made to lynch him because, the townsfolk figure, it will be Sunday in three hours and the Gowries won’t want “to bolt through the business, in order to finish it by midnight and not violate the Sabbath.” Lucas tells young Charles Mallison that Gowrie was not killed by a bullet from his pistol, and asks him to go to the cemetery Sunday night and dig up Vinson’s body to prove it. Charles, aided by old Miss Habersham and a Negro boy, opens up the grave, but the body he finds there is not Vinson’s. While a mob, with nothing better to do, is idly waiting for the lynching, Charles leads his uncle and the Sheriff back to the cemetery in an eerie search for Justice. Intruder in the Dust is more dramatically constructed than its predecessors and the mood is an unusual one for Faulkner. Hate, violence, and degradation are in the background. The Negro is an eloquent characterization, a figure of immense dignity. The whites on whom the story centers are people of good will.

This may sound like a promising subject, touched with nobility, mystery, and suspense. Unfortunately, Faulkner is altogether too mysterious in his treatment of it. He seems to aim, as Conrad Aiken once said of him, at “a persistent offering of obstacles, a calculated system of screens and obtusions, of confusions and ambiguous interpolations and delays.”And behind those “obtusions, confusions, and interpolations’ are concealed crucial developments in the story.

Somerset Maugham confessed, in The Sum mint/ Up, that as a very young man “a natural sense of tidiness” engaged him to design a pattern for his life. He has lived according to that pattern with astounding single-mindedness, always planning ahead, always budgeting his resources of time and health and talent. Now in his middle seventies, Mr. Maugham has apparently decided that the ending to his career as novelist will be written according to plan and not by the accident of mortality. Catalina (Doubleday, $3.00), he announces, is his last novel.

The book has a peculiar significance in relation to Maugham s life. The setting is Spain, the country to which he went when, at twenty-three, he abandoned medicine to become a writer. “I grew a moustache,”he has related, “learnt the guitar, bought a broad-brimmed hat, in which I swaggered. ... I fell in love with Seville and the life one led there and incidentally with a young thing with green eyes and a gay smile.” The scene of Catalina (though projected into the sixteenth century) represents Maugham’s youth revisited. He describes that scene and things Spanish with affection and authenticity.

Catalina’s theme, too, has its special interest in relation to Maugham’s work. He told in The Summing Up of a religious friend who deleted from the Prayer Book all passages that sang God’s praises — he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it. Maugham approved, adding: “I for my part cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humor nor common sense.” So, wishing in Catalina to pay his respects to God, Maugham — urbane to the last

—celebrates with tactful irony the tolerunee, humor, and good sense of a God who is the perfect gentleman; contrasts His generous wisdom with the cruel folly, the morose pride of bigoted humanity.

In so far as setting and theme are concerned, Catalina has its pleasing aspects. But it is a disappointing novel. There is little evidence here of that famed Maugham craftsmanship. The writing is out rageous in its use of the cliché. Time and again episodes are contrived with the patness of slick magazine fiction. And Maugham has violated his oft-repeated canon about the clear-cut beginning, middle, and end. The middle is both an end and a new beginning.

Catalina, a crippled girl, is told in an encounter with the Blessed Virgin that “the son of Juan Suarez de Valero who has best served God has it in his power to heal you.” Of Don Juan’s three sons, one is a Bishop revered for his piety and zeal as Inquisitor. A second is a Captain renowned for butchering heretics. The youngest, Martin, is a baker who has besmirched the family honor by turning tradesman to support his penniless parents. What follows is in the best fairy tale tradition. Then, halfway through the book, the hero makes his appearance, and we plunge into a conflict between love’s young dream and the designs of a powerful Prioress, who wishes to make a nun of Catalina. Catalina, instead, makes a monk of the Bishop. But that is many years later and — thereby hangs another miracle à la Maugham.

One of the memorials to Mr. Maugham’s fame is a two-story boardinghouse in Pago Pago, named after the heroine of Rain — The Saddie (Sadie) Thompson Hotel. And thereto also hangs a tale which recalls the ways of Providence in Catalina. A Pago Pago missionary once protested against the hotel’s public display of a prostitute’s name, even fictional, and the landlady was made to change it to Samoa House. Immediately afterward, a storm blew off the roof and stove in a wall. The hotel was hastily renamed The Saddie Thompson.

This item is pari of the encyclopedic fund of information about the South Seas contained in Anatomy of Paradise (Sloane, $5.00) by J. C. Furnas, whose previous venture into anatomizing was How America Lives. Judging from the bibliography, Mr. Furnas has read a source book for almost every one of the 500 pages he has written. He neglected, however, to make up his mind precisely what sort of book to write himself, and the reader is slowed up by lack of direction or central idea.

Parts of Anatomy of Paradise are only worth plowing through by way of education, which makes the author’s remark, “This is not a work of professional scholarship,”rather disturbing. Some of Mr. Furnas’s material, however, is lively and extremely interesting. Let’s say, then, that the book is a thorough job of island-hopping, which tells most of what there is to know about the South Seas. Mr. Furnas is alertly jealous of the native’s dignity; but having clarified his terms and attitude, he can afford to be forthright and humorous about the facts. Here is a sampling of the lore assembled.

Cannibalism used to be most fashionable in the islands lying north of Australia and New Guinea, especially among the Fijis. It has been claimed that the Fijis cannibalized for sociological reasons, principally population restriction. Mr. Furnas believes the prime reason was gastronomic: the Fijians plain liked man-meat. If the plat du jour happened to be a fallen enemy, it was all the tastier. Chieftains would hang in their houses the smoked livers and hands of a detested foe — to be nibbled on when they fell to brooding on a wrong not erased by death. After battle, slain enemies were often sent to friendly villages, just as, in the fishing season, a fine salmon from Scotland is sent to hungry friends in London. Human flesh — bokolo — was eaten with a fork, the fork’s sole recorded use in the islands until the white man’s appearance. Women were not allowed to eat bokolo. They could, however, become bokolo.

No less startling were the islands’ sexual mores. They ranged from the innocence of one society which had no idea that mating was related to childbirth, to the sophistication of another in which, as a parlor game, people played “a kind of post-office — only more serious.” Tongan mothers sold their virgin daughters to white seamen for “an old razor, a pair of scissors or a nail.” Incidentally, Hollywood to the contrary, the famous hula-hula was not the warmup for a bacchanale, but the ritual dance of “a sombre religion”; and, according to Stevenson, “surely the most dull of man’s inventions.”

After the introductory sections, Anatomy of Paradise tends to become a saga of the white man in the South Seas. Explorers of all nationalities, missionaries of all sects (Furnas takes a rather dim view of them), fabulous characters such as “Bully" Hayes, who would have made a fine subject for Maugham and did make one for Daudet — the white men invade the island paradise. But the reader never quite sees, with the intimacy he has come to expect from the earlier chapters, how their impact affected the natives.

The legend of “noble savagery,” “blue lagoons” and beige Lamours, was pretty tattered by the time U.S. fighting men were through with their island-hopping. Mr. Furnas shows us where the legend improved on nature and chronicles its literary history, which began with Rousseau and received its next considerable lift from Byron (The Island), who had never been within 10,000 miles of the South Seas. Melville became the legend’s “Apostle” when he created Fayaway, prototype of the South Seas enchantress (and “dismally unconvincing”).

Then the literary pilgrims became numerous, though not all were guilty of myth-making: Pierre Loti, Jack London, R. L. Stevenson, Henry Adams, Rupert Brooke, and Somerset Maugham. The high-paying vein was first tapped in 1910, by H. de Vere Stacpoole, with The Blue Lagoon; then, more spectacularly, by Frederick O’Brien, at the opening of the twenties, with White Shadows in the South Seas.

Mr. Furnas concludes with a brief report on the changes caused by the war, along with a discussion of the islands’ contemporary problems and of our strategic interests in the South Seas. There are thirty pages of excellent photographs.

The Mediterranean area, too, has had its romantic legends torn to shreds, but. only for the realities to become obscured by political controversy. There have been few parts of the world from which we have received such wildly conflicting reports or so much noisy propaganda. The two most recent books about the Near and Middle East have the exceptional merit of objectivity. In Hate, Hope and High Explosives (Bobbs-Merrill,$2.75),Major George Fielding Eliot writes from the standpoint of “a trained military observer [who] went there to make what military people call ‘an estimate of the situation’ with wishful thinking and emotion rigidly excluded.” Report on the Greeks (Twentieth Century Fund, $2.75) appears under the imprint of a foundation which is devoted “to scientific research and public education.”

Major Eliot visited Palestine and the neighboring countries during April and half of May (before the Mandate ended and heavy fighting began); then he divided two weeks between Turkey, Greece, and Trieste. There is little in his report that will be news to anyone well acquainted with the area. It is valuable, though, for what it corroborates, and because the testimony is that of a reporter free from partisanship and skilled at making generals and rulers come out from behind the safe clichés.

Special interest attaches to Major Eliot’s estimate of the Arab armies. He looked them over carefully and concluded they were too weak to put an effective force into Palestine, apart from Abdullah’s Arab Legion. Each country, he reports, has to keep the bulk of its army at home to hold domestic unrest in check. The British commanding general in Jerusalem said to him bluntly: “These Arabs are just no good as soldiers. No discipline, no leadership, no idea of coördination. The Jews will tear them to pieces when we go.” Surprisingly, the legendary Arabist, Glubb Pasha, irascibly declared that his own Arab Legion was “too weak” to fight— “not enough supplies.”(Count Bernadotte’s final report stated that the Truce saved the Arabs from Jewish domination of Palestine.)

In the neighboring countries, Arab belligerence was an inflated bubble. Eliot saw the Ministry of the Interior in Bagdad threatened by a mob demanding “Help for Palestine”: when the Minister announced he had sent for a recruiting officer, the mob promptly dispersed. Behind the facade of the Arab League, Eliot discovered bitter rivalries. King Abdullah spoke apathetically of Palestine but warmed to Eliot when questioned about his (“Greater Syria”) plan for uniting Trans-Jordan, Iraq, and Syria under his rule. Syrian suspicion of Abdullah is so acute that no Trans-Jordan legation exists in Damascus. The Lebanese Christians, fearful of Moslem zealotism, favor a Jewish state.

Americans with Middle East interests were violently pro-Arab. An American officer stationed in Teheran, hearing Eliot speak of the strength of the Haganah, inquired if he were a Zionist agent. The President of the American University in Beirut could see no further than the worsening ol relations n il It his Arab students—“all because of this wretched business in Palestine.”

Major Eliot concludes that Britain’s pro-Arab policy, “with which some people in our State Department have associated themselves, is based on an illusion.” The weakness of the Arab states makes them not a potential “buffer” but “an open road for the invader.” They can play no significant role, Eliot is convinced, in Anglo-American strategic planning. Turkish power is a different matter. With American aid, it can become “a real deterrent.” The decisive deterrent, however, remains “the long arm” of America and Britain, most effectively evidenced at present by the strong U.S. naval force in the Mediterranean.

Major Eliot’s brief stay in Greece amounted to an officially conducted tour which left him with the impression that the guerrillas were virtually “finished,” and the people of Greece would soon “have a chance to rebuild their shattered lives.” Report on the Greeks shows that a great deal of the shattiering has been and is being done bv the Greek government itself. The book is the joint product of three authors “whose views of Greek politics were far from the same” — Frank Smothers, veteran foreign correspondent; William McNeill, Assistant Military Attaché to Greece during the war; and his wife Elizabeth McNeill, who has also worked for the U. S. government in Greece. The team’s directive from the Twentieth Century Fund was “to write as unbiased a report as humanly possible which would give the reader a personal feeling of acquaintance with the Greeks — their conditions of life . . . and, most especially, their attitudes and opinions.”The authors have done exactly that and they have done it well, but not fast enough. It is now nearly eighteen months since their fact-finding visit to Greece.

The authors’ over-all impression was of “a complex pattern of fear.”A guerrilla terror was real. The “Rightist terror” was more widespread and “played into the hands of the most violent element in Left Leadership.” The pro-guerrilla party, EAM, was tightly controlled by Communists but it had a mass basis— “poor, desperate people . . . with little political dogma.” The government was weak and indescribably corrupt, honeycombed with Axis collaborators who lavished “protection [and] patronage” on other collaborators.

Two hundred and twenty-eight former members of the Security Battalions who served the Germans held commissions in the Greek Army. Recruits for the gendarmerie were “screened to make them reliable instruments of reaction.” Throughout the country “security committees” inflicted death sentences “on very flimsy evidence.” Political prisoners totaled 26,000; in one night the police in Athens arrested 600 persons who were sent off to exile, without trial, before dawn. In many localities, to be seen with even a non-EAM Leftist paper “would have been a most reckless invitation to violence.”Governmental strong-arm bands patrolled the smaller towns and villages, beating, and sometimes murdering, those suspected of Leftist sympathies. The opposition press suffered “extreme harassment and violence.” The interference with trade-unions and with teaching was “typical of Fascist control.”

The government had not “even begun to grapple purposefully with its economic problems.” Relying as it did on the support of rich industrialists and profiteers, it allowed them to escape taxation and flout the law. Greek businessmen boasted they would not invest in any enterprise promising less than 40 per cent. They could earn more by exchange manipulations. The fashionable parts of Athens presented a spectacle of luxury greater than in Paris. The real economic picture was one of “bankruptcy and virtual collapse” — dire poverty, a 145-fold increase in prices, appalling backwardness in agriculture and industry. U.S. financial aid was being spent almost entirely on the army and police force. It was producing “little if any basic economic improvement.”

Two conclusions are implicit in the book. Greece will not emerge from chaos until the internal Communist threat is eliminated. On the other hand, more and more Greeks will be driven toward Communism so long as a rule of blind reaction and systematic terror continues.

Since the report was written, the Greek Army has won decisive victories against the guerrillas (though they still continue to hamper recovery). There has also been a change for the better in the composition of the government — a very slight one.