Reader's Choice

“THE twenty-fifth hour,” says one of the characters in The Twenty-Fifth Hour (Knopf, $3.50), “is the hour when mankind is beyond salvation. It is Western Civilization at this very moment. It is NOW.”

A sensational success in Europe, this novel is the work of a Rumanian, C. Virgil Gheorghiu, now living in Paris. The two chief protagonists are a Rumanian peasant, Johann Moritz, and an eminent man of letters, Traian Koruga — a sort of twentieth-century Candide and a Pangloss in reverse, a tough-minded pessimist, who separately and together journey through a nightmare world in which to be human is to be guilty. There is no garden left to cultivate — “The earth has ceased to belong to men.” What Gheorghiu calls the “Anti-human Revolution” — the mechanization of life — is an accomplished fact.

The novel opens in 1938, in the village of Fantana. Johann Moritz, though not a Jew, is suddenly drafted into a Jewish labor battalion: the local sergeant of gendarmes has taken a fancy to his wife. Every attempt, even his confessor’s, to correct the mistake is stymied by bureaucratic formulas. The officials refuse to bother with “an individual case” or confess they dare not try to undo the rulings of the anonymous deity, the machinery of state. The fact is that once Moritz was officially registered in the category of Jew, he became, in a world that thinks in categories, a Jew.

Johann escapes to Hungary, and there, as a Rumanian, he automatically fails into the category of spy, is tortured and deported to Germany as a slave laborer. Here categorization first saves and later ruins him. A specialist in Race delightedly finds him to be a member of a rare Germanic group and he is transferred to the Military Police. When the Americans arrive, he is sent to a concentration camp as a war criminal. Traian Koruga, too, and his Jewish wife wind up in American camps as “enemy aliens.” And back in Fantana the manure pit is choked with the remains of men and women butchered by the Communists for belonging to the wrong categories.

Coincidence shows its hand rather clumsily in the atrocious course of events, and the novel has other literary failings. Even so, with its graphic presentation of the European inferno and its appalling ironies, it establishes a strong hold on the reader and dramatizes Gheorghiu’s somewhat theatrically phrased ideas with a terrible effectiveness. Though not up to the standard of Darkness at Noun or Orwell’s 1984, The Twenty-Fifth Hour is certainly an arresting specimen of the thesis-novel of contemporary history: a book filled with compassion for man’s fate and horror of the technocracy that is dehumanizing life.

Many readers will find it difficult to believe that Gheorgbiu’s picture of U.S. procedure in Germany is not overdrawn — he himself has assured American friends that every incident is based on personal experience. At any rate, Gheorghiu’s characters are presented as the victims not of American occupation policy, Rumanian fascism, or Russian Communism, but of Technological Civilization. His thesis is that the mechanical proletariat of our age, the machine, has proletarianized the ruling minority, man. The laws and traits and jargon of the mechanical world — uniformity, anonymity, categories, statistics — have established their supremacy in our society. Jt is the hour beyond salvation because man has grown to despise human beings: he evaluates and orders human life by technical standards. Life is being inexorably collectivized and salvation can only be individual. “Civilization,” says Traian Koruga, “has reverted to the automatism of a barbarian age.”

What Gheorghiu has to say about the distemper of our time is in many respects strikingly paralleled and is sweepingiy amplified in an altogether different work: Post-Historic Man (University of North Carolina Press, $3.75). This breath-taking treatise on the meaning of history is written by a layman, a New York architect, Roderick Seidenberg, who displays an impressive knowledge of science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history. His book is highly commended by divers authorities — among them a Nobel Prize winner in physiology and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr — who, though they disagree with his viewpoint, affirm that he has made a challenging contribution to the study of man’s destiny. Readers with a taste for bold speculations on this subject should find Post-Historic Man a stimulating adventure.

Mr. Seidenberg holds that the present trend toward increasing organization — the collectivizing trend of society under machine production — is irrevocable; and that modern technology, while it has crucially accelerated this trend, is not the original cause of it. “ Collectivism,” he writes, “is implicit in the historic development of man.” His vindication of this view runs roughly as follows: —

The social cohesion achieved by primitive man was an unconscious process, guided by instinct. With the emergence of intelligence, man’s instinctual harmony with nature was disrupted and there came the beginnings of conscious organization. Henceforward man pursued his course under a twofold compulsion: that of instinct and intelligence. But the fixed pressure of instinct was unequal to the dynamic impact of intelligence, continually fortified by the accumulation of knowledge. “Thus man found himself diverging ever farther from his instinctual harmony along a precarious path of unstable syntheses. And that path is history.”

In Seidenberg’s view, history is merely “a transitional stage in man’s development”: a period of warfare between the instincts and intelligence, in which the organizing drive of intelligence had been gaining the upper hand slowly and spasmodically until the discovery of the machine. The machine — “the purest type of organization”— has speeded up the advance of organization in the same way as a crystal breeds crystals. Thus what we are witnessing in the twentieth century is a universal process of crystallization: the original drift toward organization has become “an all-pervasive principle.” Like Gheorghiu, Seidenberg in effect suggests that it is already the twenty-fifth hour, the hour when man as a spiritual being is beyond salvation. The organization of the world, he argues, is destined to become so flawless and encompassing that man will eventually change into a depersonalized automaton, devoid of consciousness and without a history — Post-Historic Man.

The obvious objection is that all this is far too neat and sweeping, that history’s mazy gyrations have been reduced to a mathematical equation; but that objection, I believe, is out of place. Mr. Seidenberg has addressed himself to the challenge that preoccupied Henry Adams: the possibility of establishing a precise dynamics of history — he approaches history as (the phrase is Adams’s) a “physicisthistorian.” The important point is not whether his formulations are “true,” but whether, put to work, they yield fresh understanding — a matter I’m in no position to judge. An altogether different aspect of the book must not be overlooked. The author of this bleakly deterministic interpretation of history, which forecasts humanity’s transformation into men-machines, shows himself to be, paradoxically, a man deeply imbued with the spirit of humanism.

The trend toward collectivization is also John Dos Passos’s major concern in The Prospect Before Us (Houghton Mifflin, $3.75), a book of reportage which visits Britain during the Blitz and under the Labor Government (1947); Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile; and a number of farms and business enterprises in the U.S.A.

The crucial social reality today, says Dos Passos at the start, is that most people — under American Capitalism, British Socialism, and Russian Communism — make their living by working in some capacity for corporate organizations (which may be the government, a private enterprise, or a labor union); everywhere you find “centralization of power and isolation of the individual in his routine.” Dos Passos suggests that the “bogeyman” which Americans see in Socialism and which many Europeans see in Capitalism lies “somewhere in the structure of industrial society itself. . . . The antithesis between Capitalism and Socialism is beside the point. ... It doesn’t affect the way in which the people who work . . . actually behave.” Dos Passos’s book, accordingly, sets out to be a study of behavior “in the empirical tradition,” its goal being to show by direct scrutiny of people’s lives what ways there are of saving the individual from being organized into semislavery.

In the light of this promising preamble, The Prospect Before Us seemed to me a disappointing performance, which develops along much more conventional lines than the overture leads one to expect. Dos Passos applauds the traditional spirit of free enterprise, denounces bureaucratic interference and high taxes, urges some decentralization, stresses the importance of fostering self-governing institutions, pleads for peace between labor and management, glorifies high-pressure salesmanship. This may be all very well so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go much further than

and wallows in the same clichés as — the speechmakers and newspaper columnists. Dos Passos never really comes to grips with the issue which he seems to point toward at the oulset (the issue highlighted in Seidenberg’s book): namely, that the very principles of modern technology appear to lead irresistibly toward some form of collectivism.

The Prospect Before Us is cast in the rather grating form of lectures, supposedly illustrated by a movie projector and punctuated by naÏve questions and interjections from the audience. Dos Passos’s documentary talent fortunately has plenty of scope. There is a great deal of first-rate reporting; but there was also much that I found wearisome. The book’s killings, I believe, grow out of a doubleedged paradox. In the first place, Dos Passos, while arrayed on the side of individualism, shows very little interest in individual life. He seems virtually incapable of portraying people except as units of a social category as farmers, socialists, small business– men, officials; their human quality es– capes him. This impersonality makes for dullness; it also makes the author’s perceptions defective. Whether he is discussing the hostility to the U.S. in Latin America or the grumbling in Britain, he focuses almost exclusively on economics and politics; he gives little indication of realizing there is something we call human nature which makes most people envy powerful neighbors and enjoy a good grouse.

The other edge of the paradox is that Dos Passos, though he detects a menace to the individual in industrial society, is fascinated by modern technology. He is all for all-out efficiency, even though efficiency has shown itself to be, in large doses, incompatible with humanity. Impressed by the achievements of the PerÓn regime, he dwells less on its dictatorial aspects (which he compares, with qualification, to those of the Truman administration) than on the controls exerted by the Labor Government. Dos Passos’s book, in sum, reflects a curious blend of sentimental, old-fashioned individualism and hard, forward-looking devotion to technology. This looks to me rather like making the worst of both worlds.

Classics and Commercials (Farrar, Straus, $5.00) is a collection of sixty-seven critical pieces written by Edmund Wilson during the forties — a readable and pleasantly diversified volume held together by a very spirited viewpoint. Mr. Wilson ranges from the lowest point the brow can reach, The Turquoise, to the most elevated, Finnegans wake (Skeleton Key To): from Mrs. Post’s Etiquette to M. Sartre’s Existentialism; from the homespun pietism of The Robe to the lush depravities of Salvador Dali’s Hidden Faces. He gives you Gilbert, without Sullivan and Wilde with the Spirochaeta pallida, Connolly in his condemned playground and Huxley in his mystical oasis. He travels, in sum, all the way from the fine old mansions of literature — Jane Austen, Thackeray, Saintsbury — to the literary slums, where he tangles with the detective story and gives it such a drubbing that friends of the victim shower him with abuse, and one lady Informs him she has always expected the worst of men called Edmund.

The function of criticism being to criticize, it is, I suspect, a grave liability for a critic to possess a sunny and benign disposition and to prize the affection of his fellow man. There is no indication that Mr. Wilson suffers from this handicap. And as fur as I am concerned his asperity — which does not prevent him from applauding the good whenever he finds it — is a useful corrective to the prevailing GemÜtlichkeit of the reviewing business. Sometimes Wilson is guilty of gratuitous waspish ness and sometimes he is glaringly condescending. Occasionally he employs a tank attack against a molehill (the syntax of Mission to Moscour), and once or twice, notably in Maugham’s case, he carries depreciation to very questionable lengths (granted Maugham’s lifelong love affair with the cliché, some of his work is surely not completely second-rate). But by and large, Wilson tellingly points up the failings and limitations in the work of wellknown writers — O’Hara, Saroyan, and Steinbeck, for instance — without losing sight, of their qualities. His loathing of commercialism and championship of the nonpopular; his respect for writers who toil for the mot juste; the slightly romantic feeling he projects of the glamour and dignity in the calling of letters — all this I find admirable and it outweighs Wil– son’s crotchets.

One feature of his criticism is at first sight puzzling. The strategy of his resistance movement against the vulgarization of reading taste has been, in the main, to attack mediocrity and trash and to turn back to the classics and semiclassics: he has strangely neglected most of what little serious new fiction has appeared in the forties. When he does deal with it — with Sartre, for example — Wilson’s form is not quite up to par, he seems not to establish really close contact: Sartre, tough-minded and highly cerebral, is said to have the same kind of talent as Steinbeck, who is tenderminded and relatively unintellectual. This and the previously mentioned omissions suggest a certain alienation from the writing that most closely reflects the philosophic temper of the forties: and elsewhere there are numerous indications that Wilson’s interests, sympathies, and perceptions are strongly influenced by a far-reaching emotional attachment to the twenties.

It is not, I hope, GemÜtlichkeit but a desire to straighten out these notes which prompts a blunt statement, before passing on, that Classics and Commercials gave me keen pleasure and considerable profit.

Evelyn Waugh surprised us a few years ago by suddenly switching from satiric burlesque to the seriousness of Brideshead Revisited; then he surprised us again by following through with two novelettes in the old manner. He has again turned up with something rather unexpected, a short novel, Helena (Little, Brown. $2.75) — part divertissement, part history, and part Christian legend — about the life of St. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, who in her old age traveled to Jerusalem and is supposed to have discovered the True Cross.

Waugh says in his preface that many of the facts about St. Helena in the encyclopedias “dissolve on examination.” Where the authorities differ, he has chosen “the picturesque in preference to the plausible”; where they are silent, he has freely invented. St. Helena’s life “begins and ends in surmise,” and Waugh has joined hands with the British historians who claim her for Britain. He makes her the daughter of old King Coel, whose seat is in Colchester, and introduces her as a young girl in the year 273. Tall, slender, and with copper-colored hair, she was everything we esteem beautiful today and in her own age was dubbed “the plain one.” But a young Roman officer — a greatnephew of the Divine Claudius — who is visiting Coel on a mission, falls in love with her at sight. The King fails to persuade Helena that British girls shouldn’t go marrying trashy foreigners, and the newlyweds set off for Nich, where Constantius is commander of the imperial garrison. All this is most amusingly handled in the traditional Waugh fashion.

The middle section of the book is made of more sober stuff: Helena’s disillusionment as she discovers her husband’s absorption in the struggle for power; the turnover in Emperors and the turmoil in the Empire; the rise of Christianity. In the third phase, Helena, now in her seventies, a Dowager Empress and a Christian, has come to Rome for the Jubilee of her son, Constantine. There is the glint of satire in Waugh’s picture of the Roman court, then a more devotional note as he retells the crucial part of the legend — the old lady’s journey to the Holy Land; the dream in which an ancient Jew tells her where the True Cross is; the search and discovery in the well and the Cross’s restoration to Christendom.

Helena should not, I think, be approached as a novel (it is too cluttered with history and slight in characterization to be an impressive novel), but as a fictionalized history or reworking of a legend. From this standpoint Waugh has done his job with fine artistry. I confess, though, that Waugh is one case in which I prefer to see an author stick to his rut. He is incomparably at his best in the audacious harlequinade, and that best is nothing short of comic genius.

The Rest They Need (Dial, $3.00) by Herbert Lyons is a novel about “The Office” — the tight little world of people who work on an American weekly magazine. Dark Green. Bright Red (Dutton, $3.00) by Gore Vidal is a novel about “The Revolution” — the tight little world of conspirators involved in a coup d’état in a backward Central American Republic. In Mr. Lyons’s book the central character is overdrawn, not completely credible. Mr. vidal’ book is credible but somewhat underplayed: it never quite achieves sufficient impact. The good point about both books is that each imparts a vivid sense of the feel of its special world — the nervous tensions and competitiveness on the big magazine; the seediness and treacheries of the small-time Putsch.

Vidal’s hero, Peter Nelson, is a young American who, court-martialed out of the U.S. Army, has welcomed the invitation of a wartime friend, the son of General Jorge Alvarez Asturias, to train the levies for his father’s projected insurrection. The General, a former President of the dictator type, had been overthrown several years previously by a more liberal regime, but he has lately been allowed to return from exile and is organizing his coup from his estate beside the jungle-ringed town of Tenango. His chief aides are a disappointed Parisian novelist, who for ten years has been his adviser on life and the use of the Word; Colonel Aranha, a pure-blooded Indian, his chief of staff; and Father Miguel, whose role is to serve as mediator with the Archbishop, who takes a poor view of the General for having once reported his financial peculations to the Vatican. In due course a Mr. Green, boss of The Company — the American fruit concern which is the real power in the Republic — also shows up in Tenango with his son, who is engaged to the General’s fetching daughter, Elena. Mr. Green is alarmed by the liberal tendencies of the present regime and appears to be willing to line up The Company behind the General.

We have here a pleasantly conceived but rather ambiguous situation, one that hovers between seriousness and farce. The General’s pomposity and speechifying; the dinners with their ten revolting courses and ghastly native wine; the primitive trainees who loathe to drill but love to shoot so long as there’s no enemy around; the ramshackle tropical town with its sticky-eyed children; the wide-open conspiracy and tarnished American hero — all these elements in the minor melodrama under way suggest infinite possibilities for burlesque. Mr. Vidal plays it straight but he extracts a certain amount of quiet humor from the situation. There is humor, too, in the one fantastic battle fought, and the story’s denouement is absolutely right — a low-down, farcical surprise, which brings to light a host of villainies wonderfully in character with The Revolution.

It’s a pity, I feel, that Vidal didn’t try his hand more boldly at satire. The straight drama in the book — the halfhearted love affair between Peter and Elena; the jealousy of Elena’s brother and his death; the periods of tension and depression — fails to achieve real importance and rather subdues the suggestions of opéra bouffe. As it stands, Dark Green, Bright Red is a skillful impressionistic picture of a political blowup in a banana Republic.

The Office in mid-town Manhattan — magazine, advertising, or publishing — has for several years been a favorite setting among magazine, advertising, and publishing folk (exor otherwise) who have finally got around to writing a novel. The besetting sin of these novels has been to glamorize the milieu out of recognition, and it is refreshing to find that Mr. Lyons has steered clear of this kind of hokum. His editor’s office is not equipped with a bar; no one takes a cab to “21” when he wants a CocaCola. Lyons shows the whole complex machinery of office government, and his stenographers don’t appear in the novel solely for the purpose of providing sexual distraction.

The book’s storm center is Gregory Grigson, editor of the Weekly Review. On returning from Europe, Grigson finds that his second-in-command has encouraged the owner to write, for the first time, an article for the magazine. Grigson immediately suspects a plot to oust him from his position, and this neurotic phobia becomes the mainspring of the story. The editor is one of those deceptive characters

— brilliant and hard-working, utterly dedicated to their job and not much interested in money — who seem to be idealists and who really are slaves to their vanity, wildly neurotic megalomaniacs: what Grigson wants out of life is to be Jupiter in his chosen sphere. He is a cunning tyrant who, if he cannot turn a subordinate into a sneak and a toady, sadly recommends that he be sent elsewhere to acquire “seasoning.” He is also a sanctimonious lecher, in many respects a weakling, and certainly a sadist.

There is nothing in any of this that, makes Lyons’s characterization implausible, but he lays everything on too thick. The fawning of the editor’s subordinates, the general emotional turmoil in The Office, are somewhat overdone, too. I kept wondering how on earth they ever got a magazine out — and a weekly, at that.