The Peripatetic Reviewer

AS EVERYONE knows, there are various modes of walking about a city, and the more pleasurable are seldom indulged in. On most of our walks we are in too much of a hurry — to catch a train, to keep an appointment, to see the dentist. Those are functional walks, but even in them there is a difference — the world looks totally different when you walk away from the dentist’s office with a clean bill of health for the next six months. You are not hurrying then, not fighting the traffic at each corner. You are simply sauntering, which I think is the essence of any good walk.

The Dog Walk, for instance, is a saunter. There are, of course, certain functional aspects to it, and if your dog is a fighter or oversexed, you proceed with caution. But at its best the Dog Walk permits the leisure and the moments of surprise and identification which are the fun of any meander.

The first thing you need for a good city walk is a pleasurable objective. It could be the polar bears in the Central Park Zoo, which Sir Osbert Sitwell and I spent some time admiring in the winter sunlight. Or it could be the Cardner Museum here in Boston, with the blazing color of Sargent’s “El Yaleo" and the fragrance of the flowers to greet you as you come out of the chill mist of the Fenway. Or it could be Brooklyn Bridge at dusk on a clear December eve.

In the short, dark days of winter the best walking is done alone. In his stimulating essay, The Name and Nature of Poetry, A. E. Housman has told of the creative process which went on in his mind on those walks most conducive to his poetry. Something like this on a more modest, less poetic scale is potential in all of us on the soft, snowy dusk of a winter’s evening. Winter is the city’s season, and the old parts of Boston take on a singular beauty when lamplight and snowfall have smoothed away the bleakness. A walk down Cornhill with an early supper at Durgin-Park or the old Union Oyster House; the steep, slippery amble around Beacon Hill — up Joy Street, down Pinckney, with a glance into the half-disclosing windows of the tiny houses, through Louisburg Square, and then up Mt. Vernon; or a jaunt along Charles Street, that village within the city, with its old curiosity shops, the bakery, the florist, and the delicatessen — these are a few of my escapes from being shut in. There is only one enemy to all this — the north wind, which is well-behaved enough at Christmas but which by February has become a harsh, impersonal adversary. The wind across the Charles River brings tears to the eyes, and it’s no fun walking while you weep.

Some of my happiest hours in London have been spent in the company of those delightful perambulators, H. M. Tomlinson and James Bone. Together they have shown me the docks and old taverns and the secluded works of Wren; and my pleasant hours with them came flooding back to me as I read Winter in London (Doubleday, $3.50), those essays of excursion in which Ivor Brown, formerly the editor of the Spectator, has expressed his devotion to the great city.

Out of his vast reading Mr. Brown has peopled Hampstead, Highgate, Southwark, Chelsea, Stepney, Limehouse, and Paddington with their more famous residents of the past. He knows where their houses stood or stand, and on his walks he reshifts the scene to show you what that particular niche of London was like when John Harvard or Blake or Marvell or Keats lived there. He points to the curious coincidence that brought the Harvard family and the Shakespeares together in the same borough.

He seeks out the walls of Marshalsea prison, where John Dickens, the father of Charles, was confined as a debtor and where the story of Little Dorrit had its origin. He walks us to Wentworth Place to show the view of the Hampstead Ponds Keats loved in those days when he was living next door to Fanny Brawne. He shows us No. 2, the Pines, the sedate residence where Sir Max Beerbohm went to visit Swinburne. He takes us underground to some of the more famous wells, dungeons, and crypts, notably the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. I like this book for its pleasant memories, for its lively sense of participation, and for its refreshing use of the essay.

May Sarton is an American novelist and poet whose books have a sensitive affiliation with Europe. Her father, a historian of science, is a Belgian; her mother was English. Her parents fled before the German invasion of 1914; they took refuge across the Atlantic, and May was brought up in Cambridge, where her father had joined the Harvard faculty. But in the summers she went back to renew her ties with Belgium and England; so it is natural that she writes about Europe with exceptional understanding. Her first novel, The Single Hound, was laid in England; her second, The Bridge of Years, is a beautifully authentic portrayal of a Belgian family between the wars; and her new book, A Shower of Summer Days (Rinehart, $2.75), is a story of contemporary Ireland, ripe for mature appreciation.

I find it a delight to read a book which concentrates on only four characters — or five if you include Annie, the cook — and which makes of their relationship and of their reaction to each other such an exciting, evocative affair. The scene is Dene’s Court, an austerely beautiful, long-slumbering Irish country house which has survived the burnings, and to which after an absence of twenty years return Violet Dene Gordon, a daughter of the house, and her English husband, Charles, whose job in Burma has evaporated. The house is reopened for them; and they have hardly adjusted themselves to its isolation, its cool rooms and overgrown garden, when an SOS arrives from Violet’s sister, long domiciled in America: her daughter Sally has become infatuated with an actor, and the easiest way to break it up is to have Sally spend the summer in Ireland. Can she come?

Violet and Charles have no children of their own and they rather resent this intrusion. Sally hadn’t wanted to come and she was still mad when she arrived; she is impulsive and outspoken, and the fact that her aunt and uncle are so much in love locks her off in her loneliness. But as the Irish summer blooms, she capitulates, first to Violet’s beauty and then to Charles’s flirtation. At this point comes a cable from Sally’s actor, Ian, saying that he is flying over for the weekend.

Miss Sarton is at her poetic best in describing the moods of the house in sunlight and in rain, and scenes such as the picking of the wild strawberries, the expedition to the hilltop, or Ian’s conversation with Violet in the walled garden, where she manages to touch every color with that peculiar and transitory brilliance so characteristic of Ireland. I am captivated by Violet, the professional beauty who must be loved and who spends her summer days reliving her youth and at the same time so deftly keeping at bay Sally and Charles and Ian. The men in the story are of weaker metal than their bosses, and Ian in particular is too pliant, but I do enjoy Miss Sarton’s delineation of temperament and the skill with which she lets her men and women reveal themselves as they strive in cross-purposes and in intimacy to be true.

In The Sojourner (Scribner’s, $3.50), her first novel since The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has written the story of a slow-burning family feud and of what happens to the strong silent man of the family, a farmer with a green thumb, who keeps the home light burning while his more adventurous older brother, whom he adores, is seeking a fortune in the West. The keynote is struck in the opening scene, which finds Amelia Linden and her two tall sons, Benjamin and Asahel, returning from the grave of her unloved husband. In this harsh lithograph it is made bluntly clear that Amelia’s only thoughts are for Benjamin, and that Benjamin, who hates farming, is determined to get out. He signs away his third of the estate and disappears that night, leaving Ase to farm the land and care for the obsessed woman.

Ase Linden is a good farmer and a kind man, and his rich acres — which I take to be in western New York — soon make him a prosperous one. He marries Ben’s girl, Nellie Wilson — as Ben had told him to — and their house with its fast increasing family and its well-stocked barn gives every outward appearance of being happy. Ase is so inarticulate that he cannot confide even to Nellie, whom he truly loves. It is only to Mink Fisher, the trapper, and to Tim McCarthy, the fiddler, that he can unburden himself. Ase’s character shows in what he does: he is scrupulous with his neighbors, unsparing in the care of his animals, his soil, and his family.

The ever-turning continuity of farm life is beautifully depicted. The smell of the harvest, the coming of the first snow, the preparations on the morning of Christmas Eve, the honeys and the jellies which Nellie puls up, the visit of the gypsies, the great meals Nellie serves for the harvest hands — the round is so even and productive that it takes the shock of little Dolly’s death in the blizzard, when she is led astray by Amelia, to make us realize the vindictiveness with which that old woman haunts the place.

It is in these oppositions of human nature that the story seems to me forced beyond belief. I cannot believe in Amelia’s implacable hatred of Ase; I cannot believe Ase himself would have so hopelessly antagonized his three oldest children any more than I can believe in his undimmed longing for Ben over sixty years. I cannot understand why he never took the strap to Nat, never took the boys fishing, never in rough usage broke down tinpartitions which this story keeps setting up. In the face of these feuds Nellie and Nellie’s food constitute the one strong bond that holds the family together. She supplies the plausibility which the scheming Amelia and the absent Ben do not.