The Peripatetic Reviewer

“THE time and the place, and the girl” — so ran the refrain in that old song which always reminds me of Eritzi Scheff. The inference being that when those three elements were brought into proper conjunction, as in a canoe or a hammock or before an open fire, spontaneous combustion took place and the couple were on a more familiar footing thereafter. This at least is the working hypothesis of most short-story writers.

But there is another sequence which has been almost equally productive of literature. I mean “the time and the place and the diarist.” We all feel the impulse to record the more singular moments of life, and in every large family there is at least one member with a Boswell conscience, who keeps the log of the cruise, the daybook of the camp, the fishing journal, the diary which retains, more or less vividly, endearing flashes of our mortality which, as we con them over on an autumn night, illuminate for us both the past and the future. For such times may come again — so, at least, we hope.

This habit of family recording was more openly encouraged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the days when there were no snapshots and family movies to take the place of prose. Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker who led the penal reforms in England, was one of seven sisters, every one of whom kept diaries — and so did three of her brothers. The Forty-niners did more than carve their initials on Independence Rock. Whether they came round the Horn or crossed overland in the whitetops, they had the habit of recording their daily struggle, and their diaries tell better than any novel the hardship, heartbreak, and courage which went into that long haul.

It takes discipline and honesty to keep a good journal alive, and the art still survives in America today. I think of the Fishing Journal kept by Leslie P. Thompson, the Boston artist, which with its water colors of the hatching flies, and with its observations of the streams, the birds, and the angler, is so much more than a record of this fish that was netted and that bigger one that got away. I think of the Journal of Nauset Marsh and the Farm House which Dr. Wyman Richardson, his father, and his sons have kept to increase their knowledge and remembrance of a beloved and unique spot. Or the Island Books of Naushon, seven of them, leather bound, which record in prose and verse and drawings the visits of celebrities and the adventures of the Forbes family on that beechshaded island which has been theirs for more than a century. Such are private books, but now and then they provide a printed volume of wide general interest.

To the writer the notebook habit is essential. The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, the Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of Henry James, the Journal of Katherine Mansfield — these, together with The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, are revealing examples of how an author probes his own mind, of how he accumulates, sorts out, and secretes his source material. They were all published posthumously. A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham (Doubleday, $4.00) is an exception in that it has been edited and annotated by the author himself in his maturity. He began keeping his notebooks in 1892 when, at eighteen, he entered the Medical School of St. Thomas’s Hospital, where he was to spend the next five years; and the last entry in this volume is in 1944 when, on the day after his seventieth birthday, he sat down to write one of the most remarkable essays in self-evaluation I have ever read — an essay which touches us closely because of his conclusion: “Now that I am ten years nearer to death I look forward to it with no more apprehension than I did then.”

The early notebooks (for of course his collection runs to many volumes) are dated and explicit with all the uncertainty of a writer in the formative stage; the later notes were scribbled, he tells us, on scraps of paper or the back of an envelope. Taken together — the youth, the middle life, and the maturity — they constitute a fascinating mosaic, at once a self-portrait and the source book of a versatile artist.

The young Maugham of the 1890’s is much given to precepts, some of which you can skip and a few of which the author laughs at. “ The autumn too has its flowers, but they are little loved and little praised.” And he adds as of today: “This is such nonsense that I cannot believe it was meant literally, and I have wondered whether this conceit occurred to me because a woman somewhat advanced in years had made a pass on the shy young man I was then.”

The young Maugham liked to turn off epigrams. He was rather hard on women. “There are no feminine characteristics more marked than a passion for detail and an unerring memory. Women can give you an exact and circumstantial account of some quite insignificant conversation with a friend years before; and what is worse, they do.” And again as a side light from his hospital experiences: “If women exhibit less emotion at pain it does not prove that they bear it better, but rather that they feel it less.” He had no use for the Wesleyan notion that pain ennobles and that pleasure is almost certainly hurtful. He is very intent in his search for “the reason, the aim, the object of life,” and very uncertain.

Then, as his writing begins to take hold, we come across some lovely descriptive passages: the Green Park in winter, the fat Kentish fields, the pine wood (“a waking dream of half-voluptuous emotion”), the Cornish coast in storm, and the “vague low song of London.” In his longer critical passages on Jeremy Taylor’s prose, on rereading Oscar Wilde, on Matthew Arnold, and on the poverty of Russian literature, we see what his mind is feeding on and rejecting as he forms his style. We see him acquiring the habit of making thumbnail portraits of “C.G.,” of “B” or “K” — people whom he knows closely and of whom he is rather acidly contemptuous. We see these profiles enlarge into episodes, the cocoons perhaps of a short story or a play; and then as success comes to him we follow his voyages through his extended, often acute, travel notes made in the South Seas, in India, and, at a later phase, when he took refuge in America as the Nazis overran Europe. We see him build up his solitariness. We see his lifelong admiration for the French. We see his unforgettable autopsy of Haddon Chambers and the affectionate admiration with which he writes of Charlie Chaplin. We see him in his sardonic humor as when he writes of the unctuous Edmund Gosse. We see him as he passes the milestones and keeps his face resolutely toward the sunset. It is a big book in which to seek and find, and for me a rich one.

George Howe is an architect who likes to write. Before the war he had translated a number of articles by André Maurois for the Atlantic and had written and published his first novel. During the war he was with an OSS detachment of G-2, Seventh Army; and in Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France leading up to the bastions of the Rhine, he found and imagined the details of his war-detective story, Call It Treason (Viking, $3.00). The book was actually written during the author’s five months in a Washington hospital with his leg in traction and his jaw wired; it has won for him the Christophers Award of $15,000, living up to the stipulation that the prize wanner be “in accord with Christian principles and not against them.”

Call It Treason is the story of those German prisoners of war who volunteered for service behind their own lines as spies for the American Army. The mission which is the mainspring of the book involves three men who are to be dropped by parachute on the approach to Mannheim and ahead of our advancing forces. They are Paluka, the radio operator, an amorous, good-natured Russian who lives for adventure; the Tiger, a Communist spreading his cells and eager for the chance for power after the Armistice; and thirdly, Happy, the son of a Berlin doctor, an idealist who risks his life for Freiheit. Of the three, Happy is our dream boy: we want him to win and we fear he won’t.

The operation of spying has never been told in more credible fighting detail, but I must record two impressions which checked my headlong pursuit of this story: first, the essential goodness of all the participants on our side. Mr. Howe wants us to realize that these Joes are dedicated men and I think he overstresses this. There is a kind of Galahad purity in the men of this outfit which runs counter to my experience of the meanness, the selfishness, and the embusqué-tendoney — qualities which the war brought out along with the bravery. Secondly, I wonder if the hue and cry does not run too long for its best effect.

The village of Aspen in the Tyrol, Ludwig Bemelmans tells us in the opening paragraph of his new novel, The Eye of God (Viking, $3.00), resembles its namesake — Aspen, Colorado; and its people in their way of life “are a kind of well-to-do Kentucky mountaineers.” With t his invitation he takes us into the intimacy and comedy of the uplands which he knew as a boy. He builds his story on the antagonism between two innkeepers. Arbogast Tannegg of the Alpenrose is a quiet mountaineer who spends most of his time hunting the chamois on the mountain, or with pipe in front of a fire, leaving the running of the simple old-fashioned inn to his rather cantankerous wife. The other taverner is the objectionable Haberdietzl, who puts up a pseudo-swank skier lodge across the street and brings to town the whole crazy comedy of winter “sportlers.” Haberdietzl is the energetic type, becoming in due course a local leader of the Nazi Party, a harborer of the military on leave, a passionate admirer of the French occupation force, and — when his luck turns against him — a prisoner charged with attempting to deceive the French about the amount of provisions he had on lap. His inn falls into the hands of his general manager, a much pleasanter scoundrel.

Innkeeper Tannegg, who is once threatened with arrest by an overzealous Nazi and who later is obliged to rescue his only son from the Italian front, shooting several SS men in the process — Tannegg on the whole suffers very little from the war. He remains exactly as he was before — a silent, shrewd, honest, unadaptable aboriginal.

What gives the comedy its substance is Bemelmans’s account of how people survived in an unmilitary backwater of German territory. This he tells in a series of interlocking character sketches; the minor characters who appear once and then vanish are apt to be more interesting than the natives. There is, for instance, the SS officer who when well washed in champagne describes the agonies of boredom he endured when Hitler invited him to tea as a reward for rescuing Mussolini. It was a strictly non-alcoholic tea too, with bonbons and talk about restoring bombed cities, and no smoking. “It was awful,” moaned the SS man, and thereafter the navy officers who had taken over the hotel talked to him like a human being. They even let him hear their homemade recordings of American and English songs picked up by radio on submarine patrol.

There is a good deal of authentic-sounding absurdity following the end of the war, as the town recovers from the German invasion and adjusts itself to the French occupation. Perhaps the most entertaining scene in the book is that in which the whole countryside turns out by moonlight to loot a group of German quartermaster trains jammed in the tunnel, and miles of stalled German trucks. Tannegg lays in a lifetime supply of canned meat and furry flying uniforms for hunting in the high snow. Haberdietzl appropriates literally tons of soap, food, wines, linens — and a large interesting bale which turns out to contain 1860 Italian flags. It is the concealment of this loot in his subcellar which finally lands him in the jug.

Bemelmans maintains a tolerant attitude toward all of his characters. He is sorry for the rich Jew who has contrived to get on with the Nazis (and lost all self-respect in doing it); he is sorry for Haberdietzl worrying over his hidden brandy, and for the Haberdietzl women, fat and foolish in their unbecoming peasant costumes; he is sorry for the local doctor because he is a good man but a wretched surgeon; and sorry for the young men on leave from the German Army who would rather break their necks skiing than go back to the front. There are no horrors in the book and no heroics, and the token love story means very little, but the author knows the Austrian character, and his feeling for Aspen rings true.