The Peripatetic Reviewer

MARCH was the fag end and there was nothing much a twelve-year-old could do about it; this was the glum month in which we and our teachers began to despair of each other, the weary toil through Ivanhoe became a long grind in a foreign tongue; March was the month for dentistry, an ordeal in which the only kind words were “Now rinse, please"; it was a month in which, if you were a good Episcopalian, you gave up candy for Lent; it was a time when in my part of New Jersey the rain and the mud made indoor sport a boy’s only hope.

School with its homework kept us in drudgery for the first five days of the week, but on Friday the servitude began to let up. On Friday afternoon came dancing school. You couldn’t exactly call this sport, but it was different from what we had been doing and to that extent better. We met in Arcanum Hall, a vast shiny lodge room with a number of big plush chairs on the dais where the mothers of the girls sat — the mothers of the boys knew enough to stay away.

We — the Little Gentlemen, as we were called entered in our twinkling pumps from our separate dressing room; one by one we bowed to Miss Florence, who stood graciously in the center of that vast slippery floor, and then took our seats side by side in the stag row. The young ladies made their entrance each dropping a curtsy, while we looked on with what might be described as mild interest.

There were no crushes in this business. But once you got going it wasn’t too bad. The two Miss Florences in their mauve sateens had a party air and perfume about them; and what is more, they knew how to teach. Boys on one side, girls on the other, we went through the simple exercises, warming up as we got into “Heel-toe-and-a-onetwo-three”; and then, when Miss Florence said, “The Young Gentlemen will please take partners for the schottische,”there was a scramble for the girls’ camp. No love whatever was involved: we chose our partners for their speed, and Marjorie, who was just as skinny as I, I could trust to hold me up as we took the corners.

The waltz and the polka were the best because they worked up so easily into a race. The piano tinkled and round we twirled faster and faster, tongues out, curls flying, elbows all set, impervious to dizziness and the freshly waxed floor, past Bud, past Hump, faster and faster until with a click of the castanets Miss Florence silenced the piano and we all lurched to a stop with a look of elation as we heard her say, “The Young Gentlemen are going too fast.”

For Saturday afternoons Keith’s Vaudeville was one of those objectives which we didn’t discuss at home. Just said we were going out. The trouble with our particular Keith’s was that it had such a strong smell of disinfectants. I would overlook this between visits, but I couldn’t overlook it when I was in my seat. Because of the smell and the possibility of a lemon or two in the acts, we very seldom sat through the entire show twice — besides, we had to have time for a Hot Dusty on the way home. A Hot Dusty as served at our favorite soda counter consisted of vanilla ice cream coated with a thick dusting of malted milk; over the pyramid was then poured hot melted fudge in which were walnuts and pecans, with a dab of marshmallow whip on the top — total cost, 15 cents. Supper after a Hot Dusty was tasteless.

John Mason Brown’s boys were four and eight when, on his return from the Navy, he was, as he says, “privileged to rediscover what being a father really meant.” The habit of command which he had acquired in uniform helped a little but not much; the exposure to bombing and shellfire which he had experienced in the landings in Sicily and at Omaha Beach may have prepared him for the ack-ack and “the atomic bombing’ which had become a daily occurrence in his home, as in mine.

Children always seem soluble until you try to bring them up, and this is the theme of his beguiling, informal book, Morning Faces (Whittlesey House, $2.50), which I have been reading belatedly but with delight. John is one of the wittiest men of his time, and in his prose the business of being a parent is convulsive and touching. Whether he is describing the visit to the circus, where the last of many trips to the men’s room concludes with his youngest, after a deep inhale, remarking, “Oh, Daddy, smell the bulls!”; whether he is writing of a boy’s first trip on the Twentieth Century, where father and son consumed a steak of “redwood-tree dimensions,” or exploring that no man s land between parent and teacher, or reporting a veteran’s gooseflesh as the small boys repeat, the oath of allegiance in assembly, this book is as discerning as it is amusing.

Just as In Dubious Bailie and Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck reflect the contending forces and sympathies in this country during the Depression, so the books of John Hersey, Into the Valley, his story of Guadalcanal, and A Bell for Adano, his morality of our occupation of Italy, together with his incomparable Report on Hiroshima, arc the best exemplifications in fiction and fact of documentary writing, the blowing upon the embers of violent, experience, of the 1940’s.

In The Wall (Knopf, $4.00) Mr. Hersey has sensitively enlarged the novel of contemporary history. His subject is one about which most Americans know little: the walling-in by the Germans of the Jews of Warsaw and other Jewish refugees, to form a defenseless ghetto of half a million persons within a hundred city blocks; a community ravaged by typhus and systematically exterminated by the Nazi brutality in the years 1940 - 1945.

Such is the “documentation” of The Wall, and the novelist’s first problem was to bring the huge, prostrate, bleeding body of material within the focus and unity of a single observer. This he does by creating the character of Noach Levinson, a prying, persistent little scholar who comes to be the diarist of the ghetto. “N.L.’ sparks this story: his gaze and his great heart transmit to the reader the warm, living humanity in the long ordeal. Trained to write against all handicaps and toughened by poverty, Noach begins his recording as the thick-lensed clerk for the Judenart, the ghetto’s community council; but as families are dispossessed and the merciless crowding goes on, he fuses his identity with the others’, and his curiosity and compassion, his fortitude and dreadful forethought, speak for them all. It is “N.L.’s” diary, supposedly some four million words, unearthed by a searching party after the liberation of Warsaw, which Mr. Hersey selects from and edits. There is his creative architecture.

And in it there are evident disadvantages: the diary runs longer than two ordinary novels, and both in its intimacy and in its ceaseless comings and goings it precludes any easy reidentification of the innumerable characters of whom N.L. is keeping track; in the early stages I found myself turning back and back to recapture clues. Again, the typography is at first forbidding to the eye, and with its brackets and interjections at times confusing.

But the advantages are greater. For by no other device could the novelist have encompassed so many lives; by no other means could he have traced and developed people as diverse as Dolek Berson, the impulsive, hardy drifter, a musician in the faroff days, with the buoyancy to keep him living to the end; or Pan Apt, the diamond merchant with his two daughters — Halinka, the beautiful gold digger, and Rachel, plain as a brick wall and twice as stalwart; or Menkes, the self-contained baker, and Professor Benlevi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Schpunl, the defiant clown. Only in the diary form could their separate adventures be woven together so understandingly, and only by their intermingling and by the fierce humor and pathos of their resistance could the tragedy toward which they approached be kept from becoming intolerable. Had this novel been written by the omniscient eye, we should have missed its wonderful plausibility; we should have missed the delicacy and force with which N.L. himself reacts to his own people, and the poignant half disclosures with which he is taken into Rachel’s heart. We need such scenes to pick us up, and so they do, as on that New Year’s Eve when Berson plays to the “family” (twelve people living in three rooms) the forbidden German composers.

As the story reveals, the Jews, for all their heritage, were unready for such systematic brutality. The warnings which came to them from Wilno, Lublin, and Lodz did not at first weld them together. Within the ghetto the orthodox, the socialist, the communist continued to struggle for command, and the blind followers to find comfort in inaction. The Germans dealt their blows on the holy days and with calculating surprise, and the Jews temporized, bribing, smuggling, hoping for the way out.

From the swift and lambent characterization by Mr. Hersey, what we see is the dignity of man in a desperate struggle for survival. The coarseness, the squirming torture, the degradation of finely attuned people from disease, filth, hunger, and no privacy, the savagery of the man hunts, — these are conveyed and strained through the compassion of the diarist. The words are not brutal or obscene in themselves: it is the feeling which tells the story. I feel as if I had been living for a long time in this book, although actually my reading of it consumed less than ten days. I find it a searching, heroic store, and so will others if they approach it as a story of humanity transcending horror.

Most diaries are a mass of trivia from which living people and crucial events rarely emerge. As I turned from Mr. Hersey’s fictitious diary to rereading Mary Boykin Chesnut’s famous diary of the Civil War, A Diary from Dixie (Houghton Mifflin, $5.00), the contrast sharpened my appreciation of both writers: I recognized the selectivity with which Mr. Hersey had built up his episodes and the verisimilitude which he achieves without the touch of triviality, and I recognized Mrs. Chesnut’s remarkable gift for catching the spirit of the moment and for reflecting in her so readable paragraphs the rise and fall not only of her personal hopes but of those of the Confederacy.

Mrs. Chesnut’s diary in the original ran close to 400,000 words. In the first version, published in 1905, the editor had deleted everything likely to offend Southern elders or sentiment; now those deletions have been restored and we see in a volume twice the length of the earlier what Mrs. Chesnut was really thinking. Ben Ames Williams turned to this source in the preparation of his big novel, House Divided, and in his introduction to the restoration he gives us a charming sketch of the lady herself. He points out her unusual qualifications as a diarist. Her husband was aide to Beauregard and then to President Davis; her father, Stephen Decatur Miller, had been Governor of South Carolina, and had represented the state in the Senate. So Mrs. Chesnut knew Washington, she knew almost, every one of the leaders of the Confederacy, she knew the life of the plantation, she knew the Negroes (and how she loathed slavery!); she was high-spirited, quick-witted, thirtyeight, and very attractive to men. They told her the works.

I think her diary is the clearest expression of the emotions, the intelligence, and the forebodings which were flowing through the Southern mind in those years of anguish. Mrs. Chesnut’s principal interest was people, but through that interest, which expresses itself in a running commentary of courtships, legal and illegal, of births, deaths, and kinships, shine the stronger rays of her discerning philosophy.

Slavery she abominates as much for what it did to the Southern men as for what it did to the Negro. She knew the Yankee would fight, and disbelieved the atrocity stories. She detected the secession within the South — the inclination of Southern politicians to withhold from 1 he Confederacy even before the capital was established at Richmond. She reports, from her husband, the lack of ammunition and the lamentable service of supplies at the time of the first Bull Run. She is acute in her reading of character. She rejoices in “this blessed American freedom to go straight to the top of the tree, if you are built for climbing.” She despairs that she can have no children, and is remarkably candid in her delineation of that cool, poised gentleman, her husband. Her sympathy was quick, and defeat is a bitter pill. She saw it coming far in advance, and as things went from bad to worse, “I spend my time now,” she wrote, “like a spider spinning my own entrails,” and in that web of hers are the hopes and anguish of a great people.