Reader's Choice

BOOKS such as Barbara Ward’sPolicy for the West (Norton, $3.75) and Hamilton Fish Armstrong’sTito and Goliath (Macmillan, $3.00) are a steadying counterpoint to the sour nihilism of the wailing crew, whose theme song is that U.S. policy has never done a right thing, and who irresponsibly incite us to blame most of the world’s ills on Tom, Dick, or preferably Harry. With Mr. Armstrong, the distinguished editor of Foreign Affairs, and Miss Ward, until her recent marriage one of the editors of the London Economist, we are in the world of unfailingly rational discourse, in which issues are seen in their full complexity and there is more to history than just the errors ol Western diplomacy.

Those errors are not minimized, nor is the extremity of our situation. But Miss Wards book reminds us that the West, since its belated stiffening against Russia, has impressive accomplishments to its credit — for instance, the triumphant results of the Marshall Plan (pre-war production standards have been surpassed almost everywhere in Western Europe, often by 25 per cent); the setback to Communism in Italy and France and its defeat in Greece; the acceptance of momentous new concepts of economic cooperation within the Atlantic community of nations. Mr. Armstrong, for his part. discloses just how gravely Russia has been troubled by the Titoist heresy, and he finds that the State Department has displayed notable astuteness in its dealings with Tito since his apostasy.

Policy for the West, while unequivocally rejecting appeasement, starts out from a premise not as widely taken for granted today as it was a few years ago: namely, that atomic warfare can have no other outcome but “ruin and sterility.” The only remaining alternative, Miss AAard believes, is a policy of “containment,” but a dynamic one — a strenuous mobilization of all the AN est s resources in support of a program designed to create conditions of such strength and stability in the free world as to make Communist aggression suicidal. This much sounds commonplace, but Miss Ward’s survey of the situation is full of arresting facts and arresting reasoning, and the far-reaching program which she blueprints is a bold and dispiriting one. Policyfor the West seems to me the most impressive book of its kind that has appeared since talk about the “cold” war started.

The crucial objection to a policy of containment has been that the resources of the West — that means principally the United States — are unequal to the tremendous commitments involved. The crux of Miss Ward’s thesis is that we underestimate our own strength and resiliency. A dynamic industrial economy such as this country’s has a “ built-in ” capacity for growth, and Miss Ward is convinced that not only can it meet vastly greater demands, but that in so doing it will as happened in World War II —actually gain in vitality and create economic conditions more favorable to its own continued health.

An ambitious policy of containment (including massive aid to Asia and other “backward areas”) would require. Miss Ward estimates, a 20 per cent expansion of the AAestern allies’ economy. Professor Sumner Slichter, she notes, has calculated that, without special stimulus, the U.S. economy will expand roughly 10 per cent in the next two years. Between 1940 and 1950, total output in the U.S. has increased at an annual rate of about 5 per cent, and even the infinitely weaker economies of AA estern Europe “tell something of the same tale.” The additional upsurge called for would not be as great as the U.S. and Britain achieved in 1941 and 1942.

Miss Ward discusses in detail anti-inflation measures; the Atlantic Pact; Europe’s progress toward and growing pains over Western Union; Britain’s “acute economic myopia” in not joining the Schuman Plan: and the practical measures necessary to forge a stable framework for a free economy embracing the non-Communist world. She also deals — though much less forcefully — with the spread of Communism in the Far East and the chances of encouraging Asiatic nationalism as a counterbalance. Her book repeatedly stresses the urgency of improving our moral showing on the propaganda front. A visitor from Mars, she says, would conclude that we are the arid materialists and that our enemies are the idealists who will make the deserts bloom. “An idea,” she warns, “has never yet in human history been defeated by no idea at all.”

The most menacing challenge that has arisen to the Stalinist idea is trenchantly explored in Tito and Goliath. Mr. Armstrong visited Eastern Europe last year and talked with Tito. His admirably written account of Belgrade’s rebellion and its repercussions throughout the Communist world makes a fascinating and encouraging story, which, incidentally, has its quota of grim humor — when Stalin let fly at Tito, he took on a star graduate of his own academy of propaganda.

Tension between Tito and Stalin actually originated as far back as the beginning of Tito’s resistance io the Germans. Moscow promised help but gave none, and Tito was outspoken in his complaints. His first strong suspicion that Russia’s interests overrode all else in Stalin’s mind was aroused, ironically, by instructions to seek an entente with Mihailovitch; Russia’s position was then so precarious that Stalin was worried about antagonizing the Western powers.

The fact Stalin overlooked when he decided to purge Tito for independence was that Yugoslav Communism was very largely Tito’s own creation, and that Tito’s aides, though zealous revolutionaries, looked to him and not Stalin as their leader.

Russia’s attacks on Tito as a “nationalist deviationist” quickly boomeranged. A good many Party members in Eastern Europe felt that Tito’s brand of Communism was “purer” than Stalin’s. The wave of ferocious purges which Mr. Armstrong describes has been effective, he says, as intimidation; but conditions may provoke fresh stirrings of revolt.

Individualism remains strong in Poland, where the population is almost entirely Catholic. All of the satellites resent Russia’s ruthless economic exploitation; and Stalin’s insistence that collectivization be pressed forward spells a formidable battle with the peasantry in a group of count ries where (except for Czechoslovakia) the peasants are the backbone of the nation. Mr. Armstrong points out, too, that past political statements made by Mao Tse-tung have been tinged with the selfsame heresies as Tito’s: Yugoslav officials suggested to him that Stalin precipitated war in Korea largely to widen the gap between Peking and Washington and so heighten Mao’s dependence on Moscow. What all this adds up to is that, since the Cominform’s expulsion of Tito in June, 1948, the very thing which Stalin most fervently wanted to avoid has grown and spread — “a heresy with a general and lasting appeal.”

Within the past sixteen months, all five novels which England’s pseudonymous Henry Green wrote during the forties have been brought out in this country, the latest arrivals being Caught (Viking, $3.00) and Concluding (Viking, $3.00). Green’s highly original books — poetic, ironic, colloquial, and tinged with a curiously detached tenderness — have the same underlying theme: the impact of disruptive change. Laving, Back, and Nothing subtly accented the individual’s capacity to work out some sort of “solution to the problem of happiness in a distracted world. In Caught and Concluding, the coloring Is rather sinister, the motif is dissolution — and still Croon’s slyly ironic humor is very much in evidence.

Caught deals with a unit of the London Auxiliary Fire Service during the phony war and the beginning of the Blitz. Through the eyes of Roe — a rich widower, awkward in the rough company that war has pitched him into — we see the disintegration of subofficer Bye, a peacetime fireman raised to unexpected authority: we see the general loosening of standards under the stress of war. the coarsening of Roe himself, and — in counterpoint to t his over-all motif —the dazed heroism of the Auxiliaries when the big raids begin. Against a surface tone of harassment and strain,touched with the excitement of wartime license, the real horror in which everyone is caught suggests itsell in lurid flashes — the madness of Pye’s sister, Pye’s anguished discovery of incest, and the glimpses of London at night blazing with great fires.

Of the five Green novels I have mentioned, Concluding makes the severest demands on the reader. The time is some future date when England has been more drastically regimented; the setting is a young girls’ State School for training civil servants; and the action takes place on the day of the annual ball. This story of Green’s is like an uncomfortable dream, through which run mysterious currents of evil. A famous old savant, Mr. Rock, fearing he will be evicted from his cottage on the Schools estate, worries for the future of his grown-up granddaughter, who has broken down through overwork. The two witchlike Brincipals brood as to how they can get rid of Rock, to them a disturbing relie of the bad old days when life was not tidily encompassed by “Directives.”

The book gets under way with an incident which disturbingly reverberates throughput the day — two girls have disappeared into the woods; it winds up with the ball and throbbing overtones of sexuality, as Green enchant ingly depicts the pupils, all in white, sensuously whirling to waltz tunes in each other’s arms. Nothing is settled but there is a conclusive sense of dissolution. In Mr. Rock we see the civilized man on the verge of being suffocated by Organization; and his shattered granddaughter is the image in which the schoolgirls loveliness is soon to dissolve as they graduate into drudges of the soulless brave new state.

The new novel by Jean-Paul Sartre,Troubled Sleep (Knopf, $3.50), is the third installment of the tetralogy, “Roads to Freedom.” Characters from the previous volumes reappear, but the novel is an independent unit. The action of the first two-thirds takes place during the three days following the fall of Paris, and Sartre makes some use of the kaleidoscopic technique with which he dramatized the Munich crisis in The Reprieve: the story shifts from New York to the exodus from Paris, from the war zone to Marseilles. ‘The last section covers several weeks in a German prison camp.

The novel’s animating theme is the existentialist idea that man is free only when he “engages himself,” commits himself resolutely to a course of action: the man who drifts along complacently or has lost the will to act is merely a thing; is guilty of surrendering what makes him human. Troubled Sleep dramatizes Sartre’s belief that the French had sunk into a kind of paralysis and were in effect accomplices in their own defeat. The book echoes throughout the words which Charles Péguyés Joan of Are utters in :i similar moment of extremity: “We are accomplices in this [and so] we are the authors of this. . . . He who commits a crime at least has the courage to commit it. When you allow the crime to be committed, you have the same crime—and cowardice, too. . . . There is everywhere infinite cowardice.”

France’s moral collapse in 1940 is suffocatingly objectified in Troubled Sleep — in the eagerness of soldiers who have not fired a shot to hear that the government has capitulated; in the pleasure with which the repulsive pervert, Daniel, sees the young Nazis riding into Baris: in the abject cheerfulness with which a group of prisoners look forward to life “as usual under the Germans; in all the shoddy rationalizations that were to become the gospel of collaboration.

it is a tribute to Sartre’s gifts that the novel’s atmosphere is so squalid and oppressive. But as usual he is rather unsuccessful in projecting the “optimistic toughness” of his iclons— the virtue, so to speak, of action. The schoolteacher, Mathieu, and his company are rallied by an officer and die fighting heroically. The young Russian, Boris, who has been living off an aging night-club singer, decides to escape to England to continue the war. The Communist, Brunet, starts building the spirit of resistance among his fellow prisoners. These, presumably, are the “roads to freedom.” But Sartre does not manage to make them much more inspiring than the highway to defeat.

Jean-Paul Sort re is one of the 10,000 now entries in the second edition of The Columbia Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press, $25) edited by William Bridgwater and Elizabeth J. Sherwood. Among the material added to the first edition, published in 1935, are sketches of Harry Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, Nehru. Tito, Mao Tse-tung, and the Duchess of Windsor; articles on Israel, Indonesia, and the United Nations; on plasties, penicillin, television, rockets, and atomic energy. For a one-volume work that can he handled without muscular strain, The Columbia Encyclopedia is a miracle of inclusivcness. Here, to suggest its scope, are the vital statistics: 2200 pages containing 6 million words (a million more than the original edition); 70,000 items with 75,000 cross-references; 3500 new biographies of living persons.

Looking through the sketches of my favorite authors, I found some statements which seemed to me distinctly questionable; and no doubt an ornithologist, say, would feel the same about the treatment of his favorite birds. But then the Encyclopedia is designed to meet unspecialized needs, and this it does magnificently: whenever I have turned to it for information, I have found what I wanted — concisely and objectively put.

Another outstanding reference work I’d like to tip my hat to is The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (Funk and Wagnalls, 2 vols., $15) edited by Maria Leach. It covers — from Aa to Zva — the gods, heroes, ogres, spells, rituals, dances, riddles, proverbs, folk tales, and myths of some thirty cultures. Aside from its reference uses, it’s fascinating to dip into if you have a taste for such esoteric information as that the Cinderella legend started its career in ninth-century China; or that the children’s rhyme, “cony, meany, miny, mo,” probably descends from a Druid chant used to select victims for a hideous form of human sacrifice.