The Peripatetic Reviewer

THIRTY years ago this month I pushed off on the longest bicycle trip I shall ever make. My friend Morley Dobson and I had mapped it for the Spring Vacation. He was in his second year at Cambridge University, I in my first. His love of poetry was combined with a love of height; he was intent that we should have a week of climbing in the Lake Country, and the Lake poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, went along in our knapsack. We planned to ride the Roman roads through Last Anglia to York, then into the vales and dales, and across the West Riding to our headquarters at Keswick.

The Roman roads were a joy; like a smooth straight dike pointing north, they were graded for the swinging cadence of the legions, and we too limbered our leg muscles as we rode from Cambridge to Ely, and from Ely to Lincoln. At York we spent the night the better to see the Minster, to walk the old ramparts, and to poke about the little streets and bookshops. We were living on six shillings a day — $1.50 in the currency of that, time — and that meant a double bed in the Temperance hotels, the cleanest and cheapest of hostelries, and if Temperance wasn’t available, then we looked for a spare room over the local bakery. Fresh bread in the early morning gives you a good send-off.

From York we headed northwest to Richmond with its great keep overlooking the river, and the ruins of the near-by abbey, which we walked to through the woods by moonlight. After Richmond we came to the vales and dales, now pushing the bike ahead of us as we slugged up the unridable pitch, and now sweeping down the broad deserted hills. It was sheep country with rocky streams and little stone farmhouses or tiny hamlets miles apart.

Our big meal of the day was breakfast — eggs and sausage, fresh rolls, strawberry jam, and buckets of tea. We’d be on the road by eight; would slow down to look at any ancient barrow, Roman ruin, or tempting churchyard; and knocked off at noon for beer and cheese at the local pub. There the advice from the innkeeper opened up prospects for the afternoon’s ride and where to spend the night. I remember that during one day’s ride in Yorkshire we were passed by exactly two automobiles, while we in turn passed four farm carts and one old surrey. We took in the country through our eyes and our pores, and we learned that the reward of sightseeing is in inverse ratio to the speed of the distance. Usually we covered our fifty miles by 3.30, and then it was time to find that spare room, stow our knapsacks, and stretch the legs.

At Keswick we made our headquarters in a comfortable room over the bakery, and I shall never forget the suppers of thin sliced ham, the fragrant loaves, and the comforting tea with which the baker’s wife stoked us on our return from a day on the wet and windy heights. Here we had acquired a handbook of mountain climbing by Mr. Abraham, the seer of the Lake Country. We also acquired a rope and the calked boots which we needed for the scree or the upland slopes of Scafell, Great End, and Helvellyn. Morley had been here before, and each morning he guided me to a convenient farm at the base of one of these peaks. That gave us the whole day for the climbing, and it was a tribute to our lean condition that the only lunch we took with us was a bar of chocolate — chocolate, and water from one of the tarns, was our fortifier, but the real reward was when, panting and more frightened than we showed, we scrambled up the last twenty yards of crusted snow and rolled over on the crest with the world at our feet.

On one climb we disobeyed Mr. Abraham, who had laid down firm injunctions against following the bed of a brook in late March or early April. But it was temptingly easy to get our footing in the early stages, and not until we had reached the upper icy face, the more treacherous for the film of water which coated the toeholds left by an earlier ice picker, that we realized why Mr. Abraham had said no. Then it was too late. The rope braced us, and I think we did the last fifteen yards with the strength of our fingernails. We were so winded (and terrified) when at last we flopped over the crest that we stayed on longer than usual munching the chocolate and reviewing our conquest. At this moment, up the path on the safe side (there is always a path) came a severe retired Colonel and his obedient terrier wife. “Did you see the pair of idiots below you,”he said indignantly, “messing about on that ice face? Really too sickening. Wonder they weren’t killed!" We said we hadn’t noticed.

I made the home trip alone, Morley having decided that he wanted every last minute at the Lakes. Fountains Abbey, where I spent an incredibly lovely afternoon, gave me the eerie feeling that I had been there before in another century: I all but recognized the cell I had occupied. I rode to Hadrian’s Wall; I came down through what remains of Sherwood Forest; I saw Nottingham, which holds only a very few vestiges of Robin Hood, and then I found myself pushing along through the cinders and smokestacks of industrial England, the five towns of Arnold Bennett, the country of H. E. Bates. How I wanted to get out of it!

I finally did at Peterborough, but by that time I had run out of cash and out of air. Both tires had developed slow leaks, and had to be blown up alternately every three miles. I was down to my last sixpence and Cambridge seemed a long, long distance in the future. So I took a gamble. With my sixpence I bought a platform pass to the Peterborough railway station; there I waited for the next train to Cambridge, on the chance that among the Peterborough passengers I would find at least one man from whom I could borrow the price of a return ticket. I found him in a Trinity don, KitsonClark, who after being surprised by my predicament happily bailed me out. We had supper that night in his rooms — mutton, wine, and crème brûlée. And there I told him this story.

It was Rudyard Kipling who first opened my imagination to the Romans in Britain in that stirring trilogy of short stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill. Our heart goes out to Parnesius, the young centurion defending Hadrian’s Wall from the attacks of the Picts and Scots.

When I was having tea with John Masefield in April, 1950, we spoke of these stories, and I asked if lie could tell me the name of a good, accessible book depicting the Britain of those days. His answer was to reach into the bookshelf beside him for a slim brown volume, Homan Britain, by R. G. Collingwood (Oxford University Press) which he inscribed to me despite my protest. Collingwood gives a direct and enticing approach to those three centuries when Britain was a valuable, semicultivated outpost of the Roman Empire. I read of York where the Emperors stayed when they were refortifying the Wall and from which they led raids against the barbarians in Caledonia (Scotland); of Bath, the resort, with its bathing establishments and temples; and as I followed the maps and air photographs, I realized what powerful aid the plane has given the archaeologist in the detection and clarification of ancient sites.

Mr. Collingwood opens up a prospect which Jacquetta Hawkes has pursued in still more fascinating detail in her book, History in Earth and Stone (Harvard University Press, $3.75). Miss Hawkes, while she is attentive to the Romans, is predominantly interested in uncovering those prehistoric remains of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages which long preceded them. An enthusiastic walker, she has planned her book as a series of expeditions. She acknowledges the motor as an indispensable link between points, but once on location, there is walking to be done if you are to get the most out of those relies — these caves and villages and forts, those bathhouses, monoliths, and rock carvings.

Miss Hawkes is a historian with the nose of a detective. For instance, she will conduct you to the site of the famous, the notorious Cerne Abbas Giant, a hill figure of 180 feet cut in the slope of the Dorset downs. The Giant holds a club in his hand 120 feet long and his organs are of a size which terrified the Victorians. With skill and authority, the author traces Ids antecedents back before the coming of St. Augustine to those days at the end of the second century when the Emperor Commodus was reviving the cult of Hercules in Britain. And here, as in the case of the White Horse of Uffington, “it seems hardly credible that for the two thousand years between Augustus and Queen Victoria, the generations of men and women living on the hills . . . have kept the image.. . from the patient, insidious encroachments of the grass.”But they have, and Miss Hawkes tells why. Her book reminds me of the Devil’s Dyke, that huge roadblock between fen and forest, which I used to pass on my way to the Newmarket races. She takes me to the Danes’ Graves, the great Iron Age cemetery in Yorkshire, formerly of at least 500 mounds 10 to 30 feet across. One of these held the skeletons of two men who had been interred with their battle chariot, whose metal parts — iron tires, hub-bands, linchpins — survive. She brings to life the strongholds on the hills, and shows what Stonehenge meant in those misty far-off times. If I were Coronation-bound and had a week to spare, this book would lead me to places of ancient history and fascinating speculation.

John Phillips is a first novelist whose book, The Second Happiest Day (Harper, $3.75), is the February selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. He is also the son of John P. Marquand, and to avoid confusion John the Younger decided to publish under a pen name and with a different publisher. But even had the story appeared anonymously’, there would have been no doubt of the Marquand blood in its veins, for in form it follows a pattern made familiar by the elder. Like Charles Gray in Point of No Return, Gus Taylor, the hero of The Second Happiest Day, is caught in a crisis as the book opens, facing a decision he does not want to make. Then the novel cuts back to his early boyhood in East Northrup, Massachusetts; follows his education as a scholarship boy in a private school and his ripening friendship with George Marsh, III, football captain and rich as Croesus; shows his club life at Harvard, his service in the war, and the mixed emotions with which he falls in love with Lila Norris, the fiancée of his best friend. This is the heart of the story, and in the final section Gus, like Charles, has to make up his mind. But though he has adopted his father’s pattern and style, John Phillips has achieved a liveliness of interest and an identification of the war generation which are real evidence of his own skill.

Gus, nicknamed “Gubber” at Emmanuel Academy, is an outsider; he never quite belongs and it makes him irascible. What pulls him into the merry-go-round is his redeeming friendship with George Marsh, the lion of the school, and a standout in New York society. George has the money, the popularity, the effortless entree, and for years Gus, who is good company and who plays the piano by ear, enjoys the free ride. But at heart Gus is a skeptic. He has an acid opinion of most people, and his account—for he tells the story — of the wedding at the Water Club, of his and George’s invasion of Florida, of his arguments with Ava Norris, the editor of Blythe, of his reluctant election to a final club at Harvard, and of the bachelor’s dinner in New York are fine things, witty, shrewd, full of life, sharp and laughable. His satires of the frivolous (Chee Wee Gibbons, the photographer), of the pampered (Lila’s father), of the reckless (Fuzzy Eaton), and of the divorced (Baby) really hit the mark.

Where the book is less sure is in its delineation of the prep school hero, George Marsh, who will never be any better than he was in freshman year. George’s bumbling after his return from the war (where he was also a hero) is never quite believable to me. I feel the strain developing between the two men but I simply haven’t enough reason to believe in the deterioration allegedly taking place in George. Again in the case of Gus, the one thing left out of his conversion, his escape from the wasters, is the propelling force which made him cut himself free. It must have been more than economy (they had money and he didn’t); or more than his disgust with Lila’s parents, or his dismay at her unreliability. These negatives do not provide enough motivation. Gus has ambition, but it is never defined; he has intelligence, but he never reads a book; he has sympathy for Aunt Connie who brought him up, and for Mark Marsh, the elderly New Yorker, but hardly a drop for anyone of his own years; he is as he began, an outsider, a prickly pear, and perhaps that is why he is so provocative to read about.