Reader's Choice

SINCE the war, no foreign correspondent has made the splash that was made by a Walter Duranty, a Vincent Sheean, a William Shirer, or an Ernie Pyle: the generals, admirals, and statesmen have been stealing the show. It was to be expected that the war leaders’ memoirs would do this; it might also have been expected that, when the wartime secrets had been bared, the initiative would return to the journalist-historians. But the latter are still confronted with stiff competition. The men who have been making current history have gone on writing it — just as soon as it was made.

Two such volumes have just been published (a third, General Clay’s, is due this month): My Three Years in Moscow (Lippincott, $3.75) by Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, Ambassador to Russia from 1946 to 1949, and Berlin Command (Putnam’s, $3.50) by Brigadier General Frank Howley, who during the past four years was deputy commandant and later commandant of the American sector in Berlin. General Smith, a professional soldier, agrees with the British journalist who said, “There are no experts on the Soviet Union; there are only varying degrees of ignorance.” Frank Howley, an advertising man before the war, would have you know that there certainly is one expert — possibly one only — on dealing with the Russians, and that his name is Howley.

General Smith “briefed” himself for his Russian assignment with extensive reading, and his judgments show a keen awareness of the influence of history and geography on Russian policy. His tone is self-effacing, levelheaded, and undogmatic. The result is a very illuminating, readable, and uniquely reliable report, which clarifies and amplifies our knowledge on a wide variety of matters.

Russian treatment of the Western diplomats in Moscow now amounts, almost, to a severance of relations. In three years. Ambassador Smith was able to see Stalin only four times; he entered the Kremlin, on an average, only once every two months. The U.S. position, however, was made abundantly clear to the Politburo: the Ambassador did not allow diplomatic gentilities to cloud the language used in top-level exchanges.

There really was, General Smith believes, a dicided difference of opinion in the Politburo concerning relations with the West: the aggressive policy which won out was the policy of Stalin himself. General Smith does not expect that Stalin’s death will precipitate a titanic struggle such as followed Lenin’s. He foresees a division of power between Stalin’s closest associates: Molotov, Malenkov, and Beria. The topics covered by the former Ambassador range from slave labor (his estimate is 15 million) to the formidable difficulty of buying a chicken in Moscow (he had to go in person to the Ministry of Agriculture); from anti-Semitism to the art purge and the Lysenko controversy; from the Voice of America broadcasts (their effect was “very great” until jamming started) to the ramifications of the struggle with Tito; from the acute housekeeping problems of the Embassy to the acute class consciousness of the Communist hierarchy — at official Soviet entertainments the guests are conducted to different rooms, according to their rank, and the quantity and quality of the refreshments served them are graduated correspondingly.

The former Ambassador’s main conclusions are: (1) Though the Soviet’s unchanging objective is world domination, its present policy “seems to be based on the expectation of peace for several years.”(2) The Kremlin has fomented the fear of imminent war to justify continuance of the police state, to impede the economic recovery of the West, and to cover up present Soviet weakness. (3) We must be prepared for an increase of aggressive pressure with the advance of the series of five-year plans, and for a contest “of indefinite duration.” (4) The U.S.S.R. is not likely to gamble on war unless the odds look favorable.

General Howley fervently agrees with General Smith that the only chance of averting war is to mobilize to the utmost the united strength of the West; to “pour out aid to all of Russia’s neighbors.” He recommends, further, a more intensive propaganda offensive, withdrawal of diplomatic recognition from the Soviet, and an economic blockade.

Berlin Command is a blow-by-blow account of Howley’s slugging match with the Russians — he spent two thousand hours face to face with them at the conference table. His tone, unfortunately, is disagreeably boastful and cocksure, and patronizingly critical of any colleague or superior who did not see eye to eye with him. In spite of this, I found myself admiring his toughness with the Russians, and frequently cheered him as he came back with a surprise punch when the opposition was congratulating itself on a knockout.

The most dramatic aspect of the cold war is covered in these pages: the beginning of the Berlin occupation; the first elections and the crises leading up to the Russian blockade; the whole of the airlift operation (which cost seventy lives and more than half a billion dollars); and its immediate consequences. The book’s most important contribution is its close-up — the fullest and most intimate we have had—of the day-today enormities of Russian policy in action. We get a sickeningly clear picture of a new kind of war of nerves, which seeks to force surrender not so much through panic as by inducing total frustration and nervous collapse. Its tactics are a compound of studied rudeness and systematic evasion and stalling; of the invariable “ Nyet! Nyet!” and the never ceasing filibuster. The Russians in Berlin even made a Marxist issue of the control of potato bugs!

General Howley is sometimes unimpressive when discussing German politics. He seems to consider baseball the ideal means of indoctrinating German youth with democratic principles (the Nazis, too, were strong on athletics); and he naïvely takes German hatred of the Russians as proof of a conversion to democracy. “We have guided Berlin Germans to a concept of democracy similar to our own,” he writes, a claim flatly contradicted by the stream of dispatches from Germany highlighting the resurgence of authoritarianism.

Berlin Command tells an important and exciting story. Like its author, it packs a vigorous punch. But Howley’s self-esteem alone makes one wonder just how much of the book is out of focus.

Exactly ten years ago, a novel that is still well remembered, How Green Was My Valley, won high praise and an admiring following for Richard Llewellyn. Three years later, he scored another success with None But the Lonely Heart. A good many readers, I imagine, are awaiting his latest novel, A Few Flowers for Shiner (Macmillan, $3.00), a story centered on a British soldier in Italy during the last war. I must regret - fully report that it seemed to me a dismal performance.

The novelist who writes about the British soldier is confronted with a formidable challenge: how to steer clear of the sentimental, cliché-ridden tradition of the indomitable Tommy with the rude exterior and the heart of gold. Mr. Llewellyn, to my dismay, has lovingly embraced that tradition, and treats us to all of its clichés and sentimentalities. What is more, the narrative which he has fashioned to reveal to us the heart and mind of his hero, a cockney truck-driver, is beset with confusion and improbabilities.

The plot summary on the dust jacket is so apposite that I can’t refrain from drawing on it. “When Snowy set out [on leave] to put a few flowers on the grave of his mate, he wanted no company except Rosie, his faithful old truck. But he had to take along Bill . . . whose tough talk . . . was only the armor for an unusually tender heart. Soon they picked up Max, an American deserter; and then a Princess, who carried with her all the glamor of castles and high life, in spite of her aching feet and her American background. As the four drove along . . . they met many adventures. But the real excitement began when Rosie, the truck, was abducted by a ruthless gang of deserters terrorizing the countryside.” At this point the action becomes so preposterous and so involved that two readings failed to make sense of it.

Mr. Llewellyn’s characterization of Snowy and Bill is sometimes rather touching. It takes more than noble hearts, though, to make a good novel.

Two novels stood out of the year’s first arrivals by virtue of fine prose and striking individuality, a quality I’ve come to rate increasingly highly: so much current fiction turns out to be the mixture as before. Neither A Long Day’s Dying (Knopf, $3.00) nor The Four-Chambered Heart (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, $2.75) can safely be recommended to anyone whose sympathies lie with the conventional craftsman; both are warmly recommended to the reader who takes special pleasure in sensitive writing and original vision.

A Long Day’s Dying introduces a 23-year-old author, FrederickBuechner. Over the novel presides a sympathetic and most unusual figure: a fat man, immensely fat and immensely dignified; a wealthy bachelor who as a foil to his solemnity keeps a performing monkey. This Tristram Bone is at once majestic and pathetic, for his Olympian poise is founded on the recognition — not untinged with humor — that many things permissible to slighter men would be for him grotesque. Bone is silently in love with Elizabeth Poor, a beautiful widow nearing forty, whose great physical charm and complex triviality Mr. Buechner has projected with admirable skill. This triumph over the cliché is matched in his treatment of Bone’s German housekeeper and in his amusing portrait of another of the principals, a well-known novelist: clever, effeminate, and dislikable. The novelist contributes the crucial development in the story: he betrays to Bone Elizabeth’s week-end affair with a young college professor.

Mr. Buechner has written a perceptive and often astringently witty study of subtle human relationships and delicate tensions; a book which continually reaches for the emotional meanings of the moment. It left me, I must confess, with a sense of exceptional promise not fully realized. The parts never quite coalesce into a meaningful whole; the concluding chapters fail to mold the story into a dramatic unity. A Long Day’s Dying remains, essentially, a succession of brilliantly sketched scenes and sensitively handled situations; a tapestry of marvelously rich texture but one that seems unfinished. This was more than enough, as far as I was concerned, to make the novel a welcome discovery.

With The Four-Chambered Heart, we move into the very special world of Anais Nin, a writer whose previous work has won the highest praise from Edmund Wilson, Rebecca West (“real genius”), and other connoisseurs. Miss Nin, the daughter of a Spanish musician, grew up in Paris and later settled in the United States. She has been a fashion model and a professional dancer, and has been writing since her teens. Her biography contains a further item worth reporting, a fine instance of “man bites dog”: plenty of psychoanalysts have turned writer in their spare time, but Miss Nin is the only professional novelist I’ve heard of who has been a practicing psychoanalyst.

Anais Nin’s is, as Edmund Wilson has said, “a world of feminine perception and feminine fancy”; a world, too, in which the iron curtain between the ego and the unconscious is continually pierced. Her work, I should add, is as far removed as possible from the clinical atmosphere of the fictional “case history.” The climate of The Four-Chambered Heart is one of pure feeling; the book’s voice is that of the heart and the instincts.

The effects achieved by Miss Nin’s writing — poetic prose of singular vitality and beauty — reminded me, rather strongly, of the dance. The Four-Chambered Heart evokes the grace-in-motion and the elegant patterns, the emotional directness and the dreamlike aura, of a classical ballet. In fact, the story of Djuna and Rango (for some reason, I deplore the choice of names) could be described, fairly accurately, as a ballet on the life of the heart, with choreography “ inspired ” by Freud.

In the music of Rango’s guitar, Djuna hears the answer to a youthful longing. This Rango with the “burnt sienna skin” has come to Paris from the mountains of Guatemala and now earns his living in night clubs. Djuna asks him to play for her dancing, and they fall in love. There follows an ecstatic interlude; then Rango, obeying a deep unconscious impulse, starts to destroy their love by his jealousy, his childishness, the chaos and violence of his Bohemian ways. Djuna sees that the music she responded to was a mirage, that she has stepped into an Indian volcano. Still loving Rango deeply, she comes to see that it was the volcano she was drawn to: Rango is all of the things she stifled in her childhood. With this knowledge she struggles to save their love from its own poisons.

“The world today is rootless,” Djuna says to Rango. “The only remedy is to begin in a world of two; in two there is hope of perfection, and that in turn may spread. . . . But it must begin at the base, in the relationship of man and woman.” The Four-Chambered Heart explores that relationship on a level to which very few contemporary novels penetrate. It confronts us with the truth that nothing is harder to achieve than the fusion of two human beings; and it celebrates the answering truth — the importance and the beauty of that fusion.