Reader's Choice

JAMES BOSWELL is in much better form in Boswell on the Grand Tour (McGraw-Hill, $5.00) than he was in Boswell in Holland. The stern and successful effort to reform described in the earlier volume almost drove him out of his mind and sometimes made rather dull reading. But toward the end of his stay in Utrecht, the rigor of his convictions was eased by the influence of Rousseau’s ideas and by the assurance of a Dutch physician that chastity was bad for his health. During his travels through Germany and Switzerland, “the fiend” — Boswell’s melancholia periodically laid hold of him. But by and large, the present volume presents to us a high-spirited young gentleman enjoying to the hilt the delights of the Grand Tour.

Though he failed to obtain an audience with Frederick the Great, Boswell was immensely impressed with the splendors of imperial Berlin. His progress through the courts of the German states was (with one enraging exception) an intoxicating triumph. Boswell traveled, he congratulated himself, “as a Philosopher”; but his pursuit of enlightenment did not keep him away from a succession of suppers, balls, and festivities of the noblesse. “I am quite the Great Man,” he wrote to a friend; and at Wittenberg he decided that his birth entitled him to call himself Baron Boswell.

From time to time, the grossness of the London era asserts itself, and the “great man” reverts to picking up streetwalkers. Meanwhile, he is corresponding with the heroine of his Dutch Journal, Belle do Zuyleu, and he debates the idea of making her his wife.

Boswell on the Grand Tour — superbly edited, like its predecessors, by Frederick A. Pottle — reaches its high point and its conclusion with Boswell’s visits first to Rousseau and then to Voltaire. An extraordinary letter gains Boswell access to the prickly hermit of Moîtiers. The first interviews are rich in unconscious comedy: Boswell is resolved to spread out his life story and to get “full advice”; Rousseau, sick and in pain, eludes the confessional and keeps the meetings brief (“You are irksome to me. Go away”). But Boswell’s fervor and charm win out. When he sends Rousseau a written “Sketch" of his life, it is read and Boswell is invited to dinner in Rousseau’s kitchen. After a long and gratifying visit, he leaves transported by Rousseau’s assurance, “There are points on which our souls are bound.”

At Ferney, Boswell maneuvered Voltaire into extended conversations when the other guests went off to supper. Their talk is recorded in detail, and this memorable exchange shows that even Voltaire’s wit and eminence could not put a damper on Boswell’s brashness.

The better I get to know James Boswell, the more — despite his glaring faults — I am captivated by his Journals. He was inordinately vain, a fearful snob, and an insufferable Prig. But what stands out, most vividly, in the Boswell papers is the young Scotsman’s enthusiasm, his exceeding oddity, his almost lunatic candor. And, of course, his genius as a diarist.

Like Boswell, Vice Admiral Leslie C. Stevens — former U.S. Naval Attaché in Moscow, extracts from whose Russian Assignment (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $5.75) have appeared in this magazine — is a chronicler with a profound attachment to the concrete, the particular. He is the first commentator to report the reassuring fact that young Russians have been known to chalk up publicly “John Loves Mary" — only in Russian it goes “Vanya plus Nina Equals Love. This is the sort of observation which I find decidedly more enlightening, today, than a hundred pages of cerebration to the effect that Communism is a Bad Thing. The tendency in writings about the Soviet Union has been to give primacy to ideology, politics, statistics, with the result that, in Virginia Woolf’s expressive phrase, “life escapes.” Admiral Stevens’s large book — which gains immensely from the fact he speaks Russian fluently and is well grounded in Russian literature and history - communicates more sharply and more richly than any other published since the war the texture of everyday life as seen by a keenly observant American in Russia.

Despite the difficulty of breaking through the iron curtain drawn around foreigners, despite the grimness of so much that he encountered, Admiral Stevens found that getting to know Russia remained an exciting experience; and his zest and curiosity make his book enormously absorbing. He visited Tiflis, Leningrad, and Central Siberia. He explored bookstores and read the best Soviet writers; he saw most of the plays produced while he was in Moscow; he attended a trial at a minor law court; he went hunting and fishing with simple Russians and shared their hospitality. Most important, he succeeded in talking to Russians of all sorts — in trains, parks, restaurants; and, after vodka or the desperate need to unburden themselves had overcome their caution, they were often startlingly outspoken about their dissatisfactions.

Unaccountably, two details which may or may not be trivial stand out in my mind. Among the headline attractions of the Soviet musical theater are three monuments to bourgeois frivolity and sentimentalism: Die Fledermaus, The Merry Widow, and Rose Marie. The only bar which the Admiral ever discovered in Moscow is across from the offices of the MVD. I suspect that, after Beria’s arrest, it did a roaring business.

Fire in the Ashes (Sloane, $5.00) by Theodore H. White, the Bookof-the-Month Club’s November selection, seems to me not only the best book of the year in the field of foreign correspondence, but the sanest and most specific appraisal to date of the pluses and minuses of U.S. postwar policies toward Europe.

In this survey of “Europe in Mid Century,” Mr. White concentrates on France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, believing that this is the decisive area. Perhaps the most important aspect of this book is its welldocumented proof of how wrong the wailing chorus has been with its dirges that Europe was kaputt and the policy of containment a total failure. Mr. White certainly brings out forcefully the discouraging and dangerous aspects of the European picture, but in the over-all view his findings strike a soberly encouraging note. Contrary to the catastrophic prophecies typified by Koestler’s Age of Longing, Communism in France, so far from proving itself the only faith with dynamism, has tended to become ossified and inept in its tactics; and the acceptance of the Schuman Plan, truly momentous in its implications, is one of a cluster of signs that Europe has already passed the first lap on the hard road toward integration. Perhaps the most heartening change is in the military picture. In 1948, the sad truth was that, as one U.S. general put it, “All the Russians need to get to the Channel is shoes.” Today, on the critical German front, the NATO powers “can mass a heavier weight of armor and men than the Russians.”

Fire in the Ashes is strikingly free of any doctrinaire approach. Mr. White does not deal in facile condemnation, but strives, with remarkable success, to arrive at an understanding of European attitudes and policies that are apt to annoy American commentators — France’s resistance, for instance, to the rearmament of Germany (which Mr. White considers an urgent necessity); or Britain’s conviction that its economic future hinges on the development of the Commonwealth’s resources rather than on close partnership with the United States.

Aside from some lapses into awful journalese (“the broodmare bodies of concupiscent Hitler maidens”), Mr. White has done such a good job that I’d sooner pass up my disagreements and mention a few more of the points that impressed me — the realistic balance sheet of the achievements and shortcomings of British Socialism; the analysis of France’s infinitely messy post-war politics; the evaluation of the various movements toward European integration; and the discussion of the factors dangerously obstructing greater economic productivity. Expanded productivity and German unity are the two crucial issues, White concludes. The third is the self-defeating contradiction in the policies of the U.S. Congress. It has voted billions to help Europe achieve the goal “trade not aid;" it preaches to Europeans the gospel of free competition; and it will not relax this country’s barriers to the free flow of trade.

Another top-notch book of foreign correspondence is Jon Kimche’sSeven Fallen Pillars (Praeger, $4.50), an account of the turbulent post-war era in the Middle East. Mr. Kimche, a British correspondent, is not as flexible in his approach as Mr. White: he is convinced that Britain’s Middle East policies, especially under the Labor Government, constitute one of the most abject failures in her diplomatic history. The three visits I have made to this area since 1945 have, regrettably, left me with a similar conclusion. My chief reservation is that Mr. Kimche rides his thesis too hard — diplomacy has always been fallible, and the difficulties in this case were harrowing. He is also strangely soft toward some of his country’s less estimable adversaries; Mossadegh, for example.

The decisive voice in shaping Britain’s Middle East policies had been that of the leading officials on the spot, the so-called orientalists. The “Middle East Club,”as Kimche calls them — I have heard them referred to as “ the ersatz Lawrences" — made the Arab cause their own with a fervor which totally blinded them to two crvcial realities. The first was that British and Arab interests were not necessarily identical; the second was that the Arabs themselves could not have felt this more strongly — the argument that Britain was their best friend by and large struck them as imperalist chicanery.

Supercilious, arrogant, sentimental archaists in their social outlook, the oriental experts threw their weight behind the feudal aristocracy. They grossly misjudged the stirrings of popular unrest, and obstinately refused to see that this unrest was being channeled into a deepening hatred of the British. Their Arab complex caused them to prefer extremists to moderates; and they assisted the formation of the Arab League though it was obvious to all non-experts that the League would immediately become an instrument of opposition to Britain. The Arabs’ burning sense that they were betrayed by Britain in their war against the Jews — when actually Mr. Bevin gave them all the aid he dared to — was in no small measure due to the fact that certain British Middle East officials had strongly encouraged the Arabs to risk a military showdown.

Kimche is obviously a correspondent who works hard to get the inside track. Ranging from Tripolitania to Turkey, his lively book covers, with an illuminating fullness of detail, the war in Palestine; the coups d’état in Syria; Naguib’s revolution in Egypt; the Anglo-Iranian debacle; turmoil in Iraq (another potential crisis area, Kimche believes); oil politics, political assassinations, and Anglo-American friction.

The Middle East is rapidly becoming an American rather than a British headache, and the great question mark is whether U.S. diplomacy will act on the lessons suggested by Britain’s mistakes. “Can American capitalism,”Kimche asks, “embark on a progressive social policy which alone can bring political stability? And can it find willing allies among the local peoples in that policy’s pursuit?”

The Wild Place (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $3.75) by Kathryn Hulme — winner of the Atlantic’s $5000 NonFiction Award — brings to us, in terms of the experience of a California woman, the vibrant story of one of the greatest constructive enterprises of our time: the rehabilitation and resettlement of the more than two million homeless persons found in Germany at the war’s end. This is a beautiful book; heartbreaking, and at the same time veined with humor and a crazy sort of comedy.

Kathryn Hulme worked for UNRRA and the IRO from 1945 to 1951. She was Deputy Director of Wildflecken, The Wild Place, a camp deep in the Bavarian forests, where eighteen UNRRA workers of six nationalities were responsible for up to 20,000 Poles. Later, as director of her own camp and at the Resettlement Center, Miss Hulme’s charges were Balts, Ukrainians, and Jews.

At first, the task was to keep alive broken bodies on pitifully meager rations and equip the sturdier cases for repatriation to Poland. Then in January, 1947, Poland was taken over by the Communists, and the inmates of Wildflecken were left without a homeland. Missions from many countries arrived to take their pick from this pool of cheap labor. Some 1800 coal miners were offered a decent future in Belgium; farmers were sought out by the Canadians, the Australians, the South Americans; there was even a demand for reindeer herders. But for the thousands of city workers and for the physically unfit, the “muscle-gathering missions" only spelled crushing disappointment. President Truman’s Displaced Persons Act was the first great ray of hope, but with it also came untold heartbreak as its restrictive clauses blighted the hopes of thousands.

Whether she is writing about “My Poles,” “My Balts,” or “My Jews,” Miss Hulme’s eye is always fixed on the individual. Hers is a book about people and it is alive with the drama of the individual’s destiny, with dramas such as that of Ignatz, her chauffeur, whose first baby died of starvation while he was helping to store away cans of condensed milk; who fathered other children at Wildflecken; surmounted obstacle after obstacle to gain admittance to the United States — the necessary documents, laid side by side, stretched 17 yards — and was turned back at the very last moment when, in the final X rays, his small daughter was found to have tuberculosis.

Although tragic, The Wild Place is not depressing reading. It projects the passionate sense of purpose experienced by a compassionate woman struggling desperately to salvage human lives; and it leaves us with a quickened awareness of the astounding tenacity of the human spirit, the astounding durability of hope. It is a book not of death but of life.

In 1912, E. M. Forster visited the state of Dewas Senior in Central India as a guest of its young ruler, and nine years later he spent six months there as the Maharajah’s Private Secretary. The Hill of Devi (Harcourt, Brace, $4.00) is a record of those two visits: it consists of letters which Forster wrote at the time, amplified and cemented by a commentary. I’m afraid this may sound as though the author, wanting to get out a book, has fallen back on some mildewed correspondence. Actually, these are wonderfully good letters, and Mr. Forster, the most scrupulous of artists, has shaped them into a delightful book — a vivid, amusing picture, permeated with the grotesque, of a vanished civilization.

Dewas Senior and Junior, ruled by two branches of the same dynasty, were tiny twin states which, one would imagine, could only have existed in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. Forster lived as a member of the court of Dewas Senior, whose Maharajah, deserted by his Maharanee, had replaced her with his Diamond Concubine (the other Concubines were rated Gold and Silver). The English Secretary wore Indian clothes; his salary was poured into his topi in silver rupees; he attended an unending round of bizarre ceremonies, secular and religious, and was treated as the ruler’s beloved friend.

Forster’s duties, in effect, were to cope with an awesome state of muddle. The arrangements in the Palace gardens were characteristic of the Alice in Wonderland logic that governed affairs in Dewas. Pipes had been laid along the flower beds and were connected with an empty water tank which was connected with an almost empty well; the well’s electric pump not only lacked sufficient power to raise water to the tank but was fed by an electric system which operated only at night, when all its energies were needed to light the Palace. The Palace was a majestic sort of junk yard of broken telephones and warped pianos — a triumph of ugliness.

The Maharajah, says Forster, was “certainly a genius and possibly a saint.” I see nothing in Forster’s account of him resembling genius or sanctity, but he is a curious and a touching figure; and his story, which is carried to its tragic conclusion in 1937, is a strange one.

There is more to Forster’s book than Dewas and its oddities. He writes about visits to other states; prickly encounters with British officialdom; the impact, on an Englishman still fairly new to India, of the Hindu religion and its mores. Here, in fact, is a slice of the experience which went into Forster’s masterpiece, A Passage to India.

Marchette Chute, whose Shakespeare of London met with a warm reception a few years back, now gives us another excellent biography enriched by her Shakespearean researches: Ben Jonson of Westminster (Dutton, $5.00). Miss Chute is a biographer who sticks firmly to the documented facts. She shies away from conjecture and keeps subjectivity to a minimum; her aim is to let the data communicate their tone and color to the story. This method has its virtues and its liabilities. It tends to deprive biography of style, for style is the expression of individuality: the supremely stylish biographies — Chesterton’s and Strachey’s, for instance — are strongly impregnated with the author’s personality. The Strachey-Chesterton kind of portraiture, to my taste, is the most stimulating and the most fun. But Miss Chute’s approach makes for greater accuracy and a more justly balanced picture. I should add that she combines with painstaking scholarship a gift for bringing facts to life: she writes for the literate reader rather than the literary specialist. And in the life and times of Ben Jonson she has found a spirited subject.

Though poverty prevented him from going from grammar school to the university and he was, instead, apprenticed to a bricklayer, Jonson became the most learned poet in England. His great crusade was to impose the doctrines of classical restraint and fidelity to life on the excitable world of English letters. Paradoxically, he was himself a highly excitable man. He feuded violently with his contemporaries, and was once sentenced to death (but reprieved) for killing an actor in a duel. Of his family or his private life little is known. He cheerfully admitted that he was “given to venery.”He was also an experienced and talented drinker. Another side of his conduct, however, reveals strong moral principle. His conversion to Catholicism at one time brought him close to the gallows, but for several years he endured the substantial risks of remaining a Catholic. Then, when the penal laws against Catholics began to relax, he returned to the Anglican Church.

In the early years, Jonson gained his living as a soldier, an actor, a hack writer. But before he was thirty, he had earned the distinction of seeing his poems in anthologies; and his plays, though often unpopular, won him a reputation in high places. The first masque he wrote for royalty was a complete success; and in spite of his pride and quarrelsomeness he achieved a long and successful career as Court Poet in the notoriously slippery Court of King James. He survives as the highbrow of the Elizabethan theater, though he was also the most realistic playwright of his time. His masterpieces — Volpone and The Alchemist — are still occasionally performed. But no line he wrote is as famous as the epitaph written for him by an anonymous admirer: “O Rare Ben Jonson.”

The Doctor and the Devils (New Directions, $2.50) is a screenplay by that hugely talented poet Dylan Thomas; it is based on a story by Donald Taylor narrating a cause célèbre that actually occurred in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century. My guess is that Mr. Thomas’s screenplay should make a memorable film. As a piece of rending, it is a gripping, imaginatively written drama: the drama of a man fanatically devoted to the cause of science who discovers too late that the end does not justify the means.

Thomas Rock is a brilliant and celebrated lecturer in anatomy. The sole legal source of corpses for his dissecting room, that provided by the hangman, comes nowhere near to meeting the needs of Rock and his associates, and they pay a good price for the bodies brought to them by grave-robbers. Two keepers of a sordid flophouse hit upon an easier way of earning these rewards: they start suffocating the most helpless of the paupers who land in their lodgings. When a colleague of Rock’s discovers what is afoot and tells Rock he is subsidizing murder, Rock contemptuously replies that it is not his business where his “subjects" come from - “We are scientists, not moralists. . . . I pay for what I need. I do not hire murderers.”But when eventually Rock finds himself ruined and excoriated, the truth forces itself into his consciousness and fills him with horror: “Oh, My God, I knew what I was doing.”

With its arresting central figure; its low, drunken villains, its sluts and its tavern brawls; its bold sallies into melodrama and the poetic quality of its language, The Doctor and the Devils is an unusual work that has both robustness and refinement. It is further evidence of the variousness and vitality of Dylan Thomas’s gifts.

A Handful of Blackberries (Harper, $3.50) is a novel of post-war Italy by Ignazio Silone, author of two of the finest novels of the thirties, Fontamara and Bread and Wine. The setting is a mountain village in the Naples region; and Silone’s hero, the engineer Rocco, once an embattled Communist, has returned deeply disillusioned from a sojourn in Poland and Russia. After a harrowing struggle, Rocco decides to break with the Party, and the Party goes to work to shatter his life. It tricks the girl he loves, Stella, into providing evidence which can be used to disgrace Rocco, and which, at the same time, will make it appear that Stella has shamefully betrayed him.

This new novel of Silone’s left me with rather mixed feelings. It seemed to me shakily constructed: the narrative is diffuse and sometimes confusing. But as in Bread and Wine, Silone has given us a vivid and poignant picture of simple Italians struggling with the age-old problems of poverty and social injustice: a picture drawn with love, compassion, and wry humor. He is one of the few writers of the political novel whose characters are not puppets manufactured to spell out a thesis, but creatures of flesh and blood from whose story the author’s message spontaneously emerges.

The attractions of the Communists to Silone’s poor villagers are that the Party is strong, and they respect strength; that it promises to crush oppressive landowners such as the hated Tarocchi; that it talks of work and bread. But at bottom these Italian villagers are profound skeptics, for their lifetime’s experience has taught them this bitter truth: “Whatever happens,” — whatever the government in Rome may call itself —“for poor folks nothing ever changes.” And those who come to them with alluring promises always encounter, as the shepherd Massimiliano fiercely asserts, “some one that refuses to sell his soul for a handful of beans and a piece of cheese.”