The Peripatetic Reviewer

IN MY first year at Harvard, the Harvard Advocate, a struggling literary sheet, announced a short story contest with a first prize of $25 in gold. I entered a manuscript with the alluring title “Ink,”and at the end of the judging my story was declared the winner. But the Harvard Advocate was very hard up in those days, and instead of paying me the $25 in gold, they elected me to the staff, no money changed hands, and everyone was supposed to be satisfied.

As the assistant editor of the Advocate in my second year, I soon discovered that our circulation was limited to members of the Freshman Class and to the parents, aunts, and uncles of the editors. Indeed we were so short of cash and advertising that in desperation we decided to produce a special issue, an issue which would satirize some wellknown New England institution. After looking over the available targets, it seemed clear to us that the Atlantic Monthly of 1920-1921 was the easiest thing for us to parody. That was the year in which Ellery Sedgwick had published at length a somewhat remarkable diary by Opal Whiteley. So for our leader we had an article entitled “The Journal of a Bleeding Heart" by Isette Likely.

Mr. Sedgwick was also featuring a series of articles written by inmates of American prisons who had different reasons for objecting to their board and lodgings; so in second place we had an article entitled “Prison Cruelty in the Harvard Yard.”The Atlantic of 1921 seemed to be troubled about the morals of the Younger Generation, and to make fun of this alarm. I wrote an article on babies — “Babes I Have Known.”We ran through the entire twelve issues of the Atlantic and picked out the four goofiest poems, and these we reprinted, giving them in each case what seemed to us a more appropriate title. We had no trouble soliciting advertisements for this mock issue of the Atlantic, and on the cover we superimposed a replica of the Atlantic’s buff-brown Table of Contents so that at a distance we looked like a somewhat younger brother of the rather austere sheet.

When the advance copies came off press, the President of the Advocate and I went in to see Mr. Sedgwick. I remember with what trepidation we entered his big high-ceilinged office on Arlington Street, and I remember holding our presentation copy of the Atlantic behind my back as we approached his desk and shook hands. When we were seated and he asked us what he could do for us, I solemnly laid the copy before him. His face was expressionless as he skimmed the Table of Contents; then with a snort he began reading in and out of the opening pages. Then his snort turned into laughter, and I knew our case was won. When we left, it was with an order for 1000 copies of our parody issue, to be distributed to the colleges which were using the Atlantic as a textbook in English.

It would be a nice Horatio Alger touch if I could add that, from that moment on, Ellery Sedgwick had his eye on me, but such is not the case. Three years later, in 1924, when I was employed as the First Reader for the Atlantic, no one on the staff remembered that I had ever been impelled to tease the magazine. It was simply a case where I came to scoff and remained to pray.

As I look back across the vista of twenty-five years, back to my early and oh, so peaceful days on the Atlantic, these are the things that stand out in the primer of my experience. As the First Reader, I had to read up to my capacity of unsolicited manuscripts every day, and I had to stretch that capacity month by month. As a student and in the Army I had been a very slow, meticulous reader, seldom doing better than forty pages an hour; now I found that by narrowing my gaze and reading down the center of the page, I could get the sense and, where style was involved, even the flavor of the prose. At the end of six months I had increased my rate of reading to the point where I was consuming sixty-five envelopes of manuscripts five days a week.

In that time I was also learning to dictate. At the outset I did not trust myself before the level gaze of my secretary. I used to make notes for my letters of rejection on the back of every envelope, and then read from them. But after six months I no longer needed the notes except in the most difficult cases.

More important still, I was learning that editing is essentially a calling for innumerable decisions. Some of the decisions are very easy; some of them so difficult that they must be held over and thought about for days. The decisions of the First Readers are, of course, confined to the rejection or recommendation of manuscripts: I simply wrote down what I thought of them on the envelopes, and the Chief made the final choice of what we printed.

The 1920s were for all editors a time of very pleasant security. It was a time when fiction was ripe and plentiful. You never had to worry about good short stories or good novels to serialize. It was a time brimming with poetry; poems by Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benét, Elinor Wylie, Carl Sandburg, and Amy Lowell were coming to us at regular intervals. I remember how hard Mr. Sedgwick had to work to find anything to argue about. Prohibition was the one staple subject of controversy, divorce came next, and one or two of our economists were beginning to question the soundness of the credit structure and the pyramiding then rising to new heights in Wall Street. But no one worried about war, and no one had ever heard of atomic energy.

Robert Henriques, whose novel No Arms, No Armour won him many readers here and in England, is a man of the right talent and age to appreciate the enormous changes which have oxertaken England since the 1920s. In the Second World War he served in the Commandos and then as liaison officer between Patton and Montgomery; Wingate, who was his close friend, wanted him to be chief of staff on the hazardous expedition in Burma. At the war’s end, Colonel Henriques turned back to his writing and experienced the rustiness which afflicts any creative artist who has not been practicing. But he was in no hurry; he had a fertile farm to attend to, and one or two volumes of official army history to exercise his mind.

Gradually the scope of his new book began to open up. It was to be the story of an English country family, a family long accustomed to leisure and command, whose money had dwindled away through bad management and expensive tastes; it was to be the story of two generations: the older dispossessed and disintegrating after the First World War, the younger remembering the golden days but living in constant jeopardy as they experience the hazards, the losses, and the austerity after Munich. Five years of writing and reflection have gone into his new novel, Too Little Love (Viking, $3.75), a capacious, warm-blooded, beautifully conceived story of England before and after.

A family novel designed, as this is, to cover two decades must have plenty of length in which the characters are to grow. So the story has been divided into four Books. It begins in the Cotswold hills the week before Christmas in 1926 with the Hunt gathering at Neapeaster Park, the comfortable, well-staffed country place of General Harry Meredith, measuring “twice five miles of fertile ground ” — an estate to all appearances as solid as the massive house where the Merediths have lived so well for so long.

From the small talk in the village, it seems to be common knowledge that things are now going poorly with the General; his farms are run-down, and even though he has been selling off his property he still cannot meet his creditors. At the dinner party which follows the Hunt, fortified by the Lafite ‘95 he breaks the news to those who are dearest to him that he is selling out.

The loss, which the General takes as a personal defeat and which aggravates the flirtatiousness of his wife, is only part of a larger ground swell, as the General’s Agent, young Geoff Greenley, comes to realize in his desperate efforts to hold even a fragment of Neapcaster together in the early 1930s. In this the second Book, Geoff emerges as the central figure in the story; it is Geoff who opposes the adversity setting in after Munich, and it is he who in the fourth and final part of the novel shows to us, on his homecoming after seven years in the Service, how deep and implacable are the changes which twenty years have wrought in those Neapcaster people.

These people are individuals who typify the different strands in Britain’s fabric: the General is the generous, improvident squire, and Ralph his son the selfish, tough-skinned hedonist; Anne Meredith is the impulsive Lady Bountiful, and her lover Colonel Black is the thin-shanked horseman living by his wits and his charm. The huge and successful Danny Levine is the Jew whom the English admit and admire and taunt; the brusque redhead Dr. Macdonald is the uprising Socialist; and Geoff, the conscientious Agent, is the English dependable, strong in tradition and resourceful in change.

I find this an absorbing book to live in whether I am enjoying the luxuriousness of Neapcaster before the fall, or reliving the anxiety before Munich, or realizing with fresh perception what England is like when the pinch is on. Colonel Henriques is a stylist and a poet. He has a tendency, I think, to concede more emotion than I find plausible in his men. I find it plausible that young David would scream when his horse rolls on him, but implausible that young Geoff, a robust sixteen-yearold, should vomit twice in a single day at sights which disagree with him. But this is simply a question of squeamishness, and there is not much of it in the big book. It is a big novel and an absorbing one, a panorama of English character set against a countryside well known and beautifully described, and integrated with a social commentary penetrating and illuminating.