Reader's Choice

THE third volume of Winston Churchill’s great chronicle of the war is, if anything, more absorbing than its predecessors, for now the scale of the drama becomes global. The Grand .Alliance (Houghton Mifflin, $6.00) covers the tumultuous year 1941, climaxed by Pearl Harbor. Here, again, is a thrilling display of the qualities which make Churchill so incomparable a narrator of the history he has helped to shape: the bold and illuminating candor and vastly stirring sense of the high drama of the times; the measured judgment of men and events; the genius for compact summation and for eloquent recording of the historic moment — moments such as Churchill’s meeting with Roosevelt at Placentia Ray or his reaction to the news of Pearl Harbor.

Even the reader steeped in memoirs of the war will find in these pages an abundance of fascinating disclosures. Perhaps the most remarkable b Charchill’s revelation of how abysmally unrealistic the “realistic” Russians were vis-à-vis Germany. Not only did Stalin’s Intelligence apparenth fail lo report German preparations for invading Russia, well known to the British for several months, but Stalin crassly disregarded Churchill’s repeated warnings and actually speeded up deliveries of rubber to Germany during the week preceding the attack.

Churchill now lays before us the momentous exchanges between himself and Roosevelt during the period in which U.S. policy moved toward all-out aid to Britain “short of war.” He points out, with sardonic pleasure, that, notwithstanding “all the tales of my reactionary Old-World outlook,” if was he who wrote the first draft of the Atlantic Charier (Welles and Sherwood have reported this, but with less emphasis on Churchill’s authorship). The Prime Minister’s memoir is packed with intriguing footnotes to the main events. Among these is the revelation that Churchill, during his return from America in January, 1942, narrowly missed getting killed. The flying boat in which he was traveling lost its bearings in misty weather, found them just in time to turn north before running into the German batteries at Brest, and then approached England from the enemy’s direction. Churchill later discovered that “six Hurricanes from Fighter Command were ordered out to shoot us down. However, they failed in their mission.” The Grand Alliance sheds a good deal of light on the much disputed question of Churchill’s caliber as a strategist. As in the preceding volumes, his “directives, telegrams, and minutes on the daily conduct of the war” form the main thread of the narrative. Today’s reader, fortified by hindsight, can see clearly from these documents that Churchill— granted, as he says, that war is “mainly a catalogue of blunders" displayed on the whole remarkably sound military judgment and often flashes of genius. The Prime Minister was more sanguine than his generals as lo Russia’s prospects, and more prescient than the U.S. military experts who told him, in 1941, that Britain should not strain lo defend the Middle East. It was Churchill’s decisiveness which led to the quick defeat of Rashid Ali’s pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq — Wavell was against diverting forces to this area — and there are several other instances of daring and successful strokes of which Churchill was the prime mover.

Further evidence of his military competence ranges from a paper on the use of artillery, which foreshowed the tactics that later routed Rommel at El Alamein, to four papers on AngloAmerican grand strategy, written during a brief rest in Florida, which closely coincided with the plans of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the actual plans that led to viclory.

One piece of grim humor in this book struck me as belonging among Churchill’s more memorable savings. When the Prime Minister announced his decision to give all-out aid to Russia, his private secretary asked whether, for an arch-anti-Communist, this was not compacting with tHe Devil. Churchill replied, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

As might have been expected nl mid-century, historians and commentators have been taking a long, hard look at the shape of things gone by. Close on the heels of Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind, a history of the evolution of American thought and character since the 1880s, there now comes Gerald Johnson’s account of “ The Odyssey of the Average American in the last half-century” — Incredible Tale (Harper, $3.50), a Bookof-the-Month Club selection.

As in the ease of Professor Commager’s generalizations about “the American mind,” it could be objected that Mr. Johnson’s statements about, “the Average American” are sometimes distinctly arbitrary; but then a certain amount of license in the use of such abstractions seems to me preferable to smothering the argument in continual qualifications. The main point, anyhow, is that Mr. Johnson — one of the mosl seasoned observers of the American scene, and the possessor of a style endowed with singular pungency and verve — has turned out a lively, engaging, and salutary book.

Incredible Tale is an exhilarating counterblast to the several post-war books (a few of them best-sellers) whose theme song has been that Roosevelt led the United States to rack and ruin; and that as a democracy we are, if not dead, certainly moribund. Johnson finds these strictures of the Wailing Crew ludicrous and shameful. He is of the firm opinion that this nation has come through two world wars and a harrowing economic crisis rather creditably — that is, with its liberties unimpaired, its durability confirmed, and its sense of responsibility heightened.

Johnson’s chronicle focuses on the impact made on the Average American by the era’s political giants, especially by Wilson, Lenin, Roosevelt, and Stalin. In this twentieth-century “Odyssey,” political immaturity — “that fruitful mother of every kind of bigotry” — is the Circe who changes decent Americans into swinish citizens; and Woodrow Wilson is seen as a “stern realist” who tried to steer his parochial countrymen toward political maturity. He failed, because “the Common American was still a simpleton,” ready to let himself be “robbed . . . betrayed . . . debauched.” But there had been a moment of vision; Roosevelt vastly enlarged it; and the second post-war era found Americans unwilling to tolerate a repetition of the “‘back-tonormalcy’ degradation.” Stalin too has given us a push along the road to maturity: the cold war has forced us to think rationally and act vigorously in international politics.

Incredible Tale retraces an oft-told story from a familiar viewpoint. Its animating principle is that this country’s strength is not its system but the spirit that built that system; and Johnson’s conclusion is that this spirit has shown sufficient staying power to justify at least a shred of optimism. These are, of course, commonplaces; and the measure of the book’s vitality is that they emerge as vital, strongly projected truths.

Gerald Johnson’s history clearly seeks, among other things, to loosen up the thinking of doctrinaire conservatives and recall them to a sense of the variousness and possibility inherent in the American tradition of government “for the people.” In The Liberal Imagination (Viking, $3.50), Lionel Trilling undertakes a closely related enterprise in a very different sector. Trilling’s new book of literary essays seeks to loosen up the thinking of liberal intellectuals and recall them to a sense of the variousness and possibility inherent in the idea of liberalism.

Mr. Trilling is outstanding, in the higher ranks of criticism, for his freedom from pedantry and his alertness to the intimate connection between the world of literature and life itself. Working with the insights of a flexible, undoctrinaire modernism, he has shown himself to be a resolute and perceptive researcher into the problems of the moral life.

The present group of essays have as their point of departure the paradox that liberalism, though it is our dominant cultural tradition, has for long betrayed a growing cultural aridity. The liberal ideology, says Mr. Trilling, has been “at best a matter of indifference” to the writers whom serious criticism has designated as the greatest figures of our time. It has produced “a literature of piety” — commercially successful but having “neither imagination nor mind.”Too rigorous a critic to allow the shallow separation of content and form, Trilling concludes that the deficiencies of this literature reflect a flaccidity and corruption in the liberal imagination. His book, then, is more than a critic’s collection of his recent papers: it is, in effect, a searching critique of contemporary liberalism by an unwavering liberal.

The table of contents, to be sure, attests more to the variety of the author’s interests than to any unity of purpose. We have essays ranging from Tacitus Kipling; from Parrington to Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald; from “Art and Neurosis" to sex and Dr. Kinsey. But from these seemingly scattered explorations, there emerges a clear and unified statement of what ails the liberal imagination. It is, to hazard a capsule summary, that liberalism has not seen life whole; has not seen that man lives by poetry as well as bread-andreason. This narrowness of outlook could not be better exemplified, according to Trilling, than in the Kinsey Report. Typically liberal in its transparent desire to promote the Good Sex Life, it takes a “nothingbut" view of sex in which “good” is synonymous with “frequent.”

In the interests of its vision of a better life, liberalism tends, says Trilling, “to select the emotions and qualities susceptible of organization.” It thereby drifts toward “a denial of the emotions and the imagination”; toward an unbridled and oversimplifying rationalism, hostile to every sort of complexity. Opposing “reality” and “mind,” liberalism has seen crude experience as somehow “virtuous” and intellect as suspect. Liberal critics have piously sentimentalized clumsiness (in Dreiser’s case) and “honest stupidity,” and have turned censorious when confronted with the subtle and disturbing talent of a Henry James. Liberalism, in effect, has turned its back on its true self— its original essence was adventure — and has become in practice a credo that plays safe.

This critique furnishes its own answer, explicitly elaborated in some of the essays. To the fatuous optimism of the doctrinaire progressive, Trilling opposes the deep truth of James’s moral imagination, with its awareness of disaster, and the tough psychology of Freud, which invites a more complex estimate of human motives than liberalism has made. Trilling, in sum, asks of liberalism that it pay its neglected dues to the irrational, and realize that the moral life has dangers against which progressive formulas are not a shield.

I found these essays so rewarding, and I so greatly admire the whole bent of Trilling’s work, that it is disagreeable to have to register a brace of complaints. Trilling repeatedly makes statements which betray that, he is thinking of a small segment of the U.S. intelligentsia but which are certainly not phrased accordingly; for instance, the incredible assertion that nationalism “has become doubtful and debilitated.” This noticeable group-centeredness of Trilling’s is surely akin to liberalism’s narrowness of outlook. There is, too, a certain lack of color in Trilling’s prose which, considering his otherwise fine command of ways and means, suggests that he still, perhaps unconsciously, shares the liberal’s overvaluation of utility at the expense of grace.

It would be misleading to end on a querulous note. The Liberal Imagination is the very worth-while product of a first-rate critical intelligence, exceptionally in tune with the urgencies of our time.

Another notable book of essays cemented by unity of purpose comes to us from Aldous Huxley, and here, in Themes and Vaviations (Harper, $3.50), it is the mystical imagination which furnishes the binding values. Huxley’s chief point of focus is the relation of the individual to history. The opening essay is a lengthy study of the nineteenth-century French philosopher, Maine de Biran, whose Journal Intime Huxley considers “one of the classics of the inner life.” The other pieces deal with “Art and Religion” and the Death-theme in Baroque sculpture; with El Greco, Piranesi, and Goya; and with “The Double Crisis ” of our era — the basic crisis of overpopulation and soil erosion which, Huxley believes, underlies the “upper level” political crisis.

It is no accident, he says, that the twentieth century is one of centralized government and aggressive nationalism; it had to be, for ihc reason that it is the century of planetary overcrowding and — not poverty in the midst of plenty — “ poverty in the midst of growing poverty,” growing exhaustion of the world’s resources. In this concluding essay, Huxley carries forward the enterprise which has been conspicuous in his nonfiction since Ends and Means: to demonstrate that, from the spiritual outlook which he has called (after Leibnitz) “the perennial philosophy,” there follow practical ideas highly pertinent to the problems that beset us.

Themes and Variations is not a book for the uncompromising rationalist. But at a time when a liberal such as Trilling takes Reason down a peg, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., tips his hat to the “crisis theology” of Barth, it can be said—with less extravagance than when a Tory Premier told Victorian England, “We are all Socialists now” — that to some degree (not, of course, Huxley’s) “we are all mystics now.” The tough-minded Arthur Koestler, stressing the connection between snlvalion-by-rcform and Commissar psychology, has paid his solemn respects to the insights of “The Yogi”; and David Lilienthal’s This I Do Believe reflects Huxley’s long-standing conviction that bigness in government and industry is reducing human life to “ thing-hood.” The charges of “escapism” leveled at Huxley since his change of outlook in the mid-thirties are beginning to look rather hollow.

There is, however, a reverse side to this picture. Some of Huxley’s ideas may now be current, in enlightened quarters, but there is every indication that the world is moving toward the horrors of Ape and Essence or, at best, the death-without-tears of Brave New World. And in this connection, I see some contradiction in Huxley’s thinking. He has firmly reiterated that man, without knowledge of the divine essence, cannot fail to conduct himself like a destructive ape. On the other hand, we find Huxley arguing that it is not utopian to advocate a world-wide alliance in support of soil conservation and population control, and to hope that such a program would find its way to “the top of the agenda of every international conference.” This is as utopian, it seems to me, as for any of us to hope that the N.A.M. will take to heart Huxley’s warning: “In more than moderate doses, efficiency is incompatible with humanity.”

A good part of Themes and Variations concerns itself with probings into the nature of soul and spirit, which carry over into extrasensory perception and the phenomena of trance—a region in which I am a rather bemused alien. The essays on art bring fully into play Huxley’s unrivaled erudition and intellectual virtuosity, but not, to any marked extent, his wit. I couldn’t help regretting the rarity of such Huxleyan touches as the remark that the Baroque artist Canova, voluptuously obsessed with death, endowed his mortuary statue of the last Stuart with “the most delicious buttocks in the whole repository of art.”

Two scholarly historians have stolen a spectacular march on the historical novelists, and thereby hangs a remarkable coincidence. After long years of research, Amy Kelly, a former Professor at Wellesley, and Curtis Howe Walker, Professor Emeritus at Vanderbilt, have each brought nut — almost simultaneously, and both from University Presses— a biography of a strangely neglected lady whose life is made to order for the Cecil B. De Mille school of fiction; and, no less, for Cecil B. De Mille.

This ideal heroine, who lived in the turbulent and picturesque twelfth century, was in a sense the first prodigiously successful career girl of the Western world. Beautiful, passionate, very gifted and ambitious, she married two kings, Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and was the mother of two more, Richard Coeur do Lion and John Lackland. She traveled on the First Crusade; later had a hand in shaping wartime strategy; and in her eighties she directed the defense of a beleaguered castle. Her name was, of course, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The two biographies now offered us are extremely distinguished productions, which should please those readers who like a vivid page of history written with impressive scholarship. Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Harvard University Press, $5.00) is a good deal longer and somewhat more austere than Curtis Walker’s Eleanor of Aquitaine University of North Carolina Press, $5.00). The former is as much a detailed history of the period as a life story of the Queen, and for this reason it will offer rather more, I imagine, to the historian, but the general reader may regret Eleanor’s long absences from the stage. Professor Walker’s biography is a far more personalized account .

Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, married the very devout Louis VII when she was fifteen. On the way to the Holy Land eleven years later, she came to the decision that Louis was an unexciting husband, and the Pilgrimage was shocked to learn that she had asked him to agree to an annulment; which, despite his opposition, she eventually wangled from the Church. Shortly afterward, she set out to capture the dashing young Henry Plantagenet. Her success was instantaneous, and two years later she was Queen of England.

For nearly two decades, Eleanor was Henry’s close adviser. When the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket sparked baronial uprisings on both sides of the hannel, the Queen joined her two embattled sons in France — Henry’s continual infidelities had long since lost him her loyalty. War then ensued between father and sons, and Eleanor was captured and imprisoned by her husband for nine years. After his death, she ruled England while Richard was on the Third Crusade, and when John first came to the throne he leaned heavily on her guidance. She remained actively involved in the struggles of her time right up to her death at the age of eighty-two.

Culturally, Eleanor’s influence was immense. It was largely through her that the complex codes of chivalry and courtly love became embedded in the mores of the period. She encouraged the illumination of manuscripts and the development of French liturgical music, and was a generous patron of the troubadours and the trouvércs. Her life story brings before us the entire cultural panorama of the medieval world.

Jan Valtin, whose sensalional personal history, Out of the Night, has sold a million copies in various languages since it appeared nine years ago, has now written a novel about occupied Germany which has something of the same shock quality. Set in the T.S. zone in 1940, Wintertime (Rinehart, $3.50) unfolds an appalling picture of sullen, conscienceless Germans struggling to keep alive in the face of ghastly privation; and of wellmeaning but hopelessly humbling Americans, naïve, self-righteous, and luxuriating in plenty. In this nightmare landscape, rustling with resurgent Nazism and overhung by the Russian menace, the focal point of life is the Black Market. Confusion is the norm and lawlessness routine.

Wintertime is a novel of contemporary history with the plot of a super-thriller— a tale of hunted lovers. The hero — a decent German, one of the few — is a tugboat captain, Martin Helm, who together with a displaced Latvian girl, Lisa, is struggling to wrest some semblance of a normal existence out of monstrous abnormality. But Lisa is wanted by the Russians; and Helm finds himself caught up in a desperate game of hide-and-seek, which Valtin punctuates with flashbacks into Lisa’s unspeakable wartime experiences. The story is climaxed by a chase at sea which cries out to be screened by Alfred Hitchcock.

It seems to me quite a drawback that the book’s documentary elements, crucial to a novel of this kind, are distinctly out of date. The present situation in Germany is sufficiently different from the context in which Valtin dramatizes the German problem for a good deal of the discussion to appear a dead issue.

As a work of fiction, Wintertime obviously comes nowhere near the upper bracket. There is no question, however, but that Valtin has a strong narrative gift. His tempo is fast, and he generates a rising current of excitement. Though his book is overcolored, it has a good deal of crude vitality.