The Peripatetic Reviewer

TIME was, in my youth, when a man would add up the things he had to be thankful for, and ask for more. The year was 1914 and the man I am thinking of, Rupert Brooke— a poet much quoted after his death, but now in eclipse. Brooke was the most glamorous of the Georgian poets, and his self-aware, self-examining mind had the gift of embellishing simple things. His poem, “The Great Lover,” identified for others the beauties of an unbelligerent world, and the most evocative lines in it begin with

His catalogue of delight ends with these lines: —

As a manuscript reader in the 1920s, I can testify that many beginning poets did their best to imitate “The Great Lover.” Then the mood changed; debunking became fashionable, and in Life for 1922 Dorothy Parker began publishing her “Hymns of Hate.”

So the pendulum swings. We who bear the strain of a cold war which has already lasted for eight years, and might outlast the century, can hardly believe that life will ever again be as trustful as when Rupert Brooke wrote. Exasperation, suspicion, and dread close in on us and take the joy out of daily living. Yet integrity and trust in this country are still at large, and the kindliness which so many foreigners have remarked as our first virtue. Perhaps the time has come to remind ourselves of what we hold dear.

I love big family gatherings, and the banter, the candor, and the woman’s sympathy (whether the mother’s, the aunt’s, or the older sister’s) which bring children to self-confidence.

I love American distance: the wild untapped areas you look down upon from the Smokies or the Shenandoahs, from the plane spanning Maine, or Utah, the Texas plains, or the conifer forests of the Northwest. As you look, you feel the immensity of a growing country.

I love water, not only “the benison of hot water,” as Rupert Brooke wrote; I mean water in brooks and salmon rivers, in the cresting surf of Barnegat, Monomoy, or Plum Island.

Of trees I love the beech, the elm, and the oak — the beech for its leafy umbrageous shadow, the elm for grace, the oak for strength; in spring the dogwood, in October the swamp maple and sumac whose blaze lights up New England.

I love the American humor of John Mason Brown, of Fred Allen, E. B. White, and James Thurber.

I love dogs—the mad circles of infatuation a young dog will cut around you on a morning walk, and the paw and muzzle on knee at day’s end.

I love the Brahms Fourth, the Schubert “Unfinished,” Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, the César Franck — and if I had one long-playing record between me and final silence, the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth.

I love quiet — so quiet that you do not look up from your book until the log in the open fire falls apart. So I love the Sabbath, as a time to clear the mind of worries and collect one’s thoughts. Sunday is the great restorer; we need such respite, and the best of the year is ahead in those twelve days from Christmas to Twelfth Night.

Of all the young writers whose reputations were made with war books, John Hersey has shown the most consistent development as a novelist. In A Bell fur Adana he showed that he had the power to sustain the longer narrative and the skill to make his story point up a moral issue. The Wall was remarkable for its characterization and compassion. Now in The Marmot Drive (Knopf, $3.50), his first book about civilian life (notice how slow our war novelists have been to write about civilians), Mr. Hersey has written the story of a hue and cry in Connecticut with — underscored all through it — the most burning personal issue of contemporary America: the willingness to stand up and testify for what one believes.

To the out-of-the-way village of Tunxis in the summer’s heat come a city girl, whose name is Hester, and her Connecticut suitor, Eben Avered. Eben’s father is the Selectman of Tunxis, and Eben has come home over the weekend to see what the family think of his intended. The lovers arrive in time to attend the town meeting at which plans are made to wipe out a destructive colony of woodchucks, and they are obliged by the Selectman, much against their will, to take part in the twoday hunt that follows. They are separated in the maneuvers, and Hester, who is hot-blooded and provoked by Eben’s Puritanism, makes a pass first at Ros Coit, Eben’s boyhood rival, and then at the Selectman himself. She is detected in the second episode, and Mr. Avered goes to the whipping post because she lacks the courage to tell the truth. All Tunxis talks in a spicy nutmeg idiom. The feuds and spite engendered by their close neighborliness are sharply delineated, and the leading characters — the Selectman, Mrs. Tuller the schoolteacher, Aunty Dorcas the old crone, and Hester the outsider — are people who live in the mind.

There are plenty of inequalities here, though they did not for a moment restrain my eagerness to see what was going to happen next. Eben is a willof-the-wisp— too diffident, it seems to me, to hold, even as long as he has, so lusty a girl as Hester. Hester herself comes out of nowhere; we never do have any understanding of her background. The Selectman is too given to preaching; and when his punishment descends, it sounds as if it were drawn from Hawthorne rather than from contemporary life. Finally, there are times when the Connecticut idioms have too many currants for the bread. But these are minor objections, and they do not seriously detract from the vitality of and the tensions in this woodchuck-ridden, woman-ridden Connecticut village.

There used to be a tradition of Christmas books: Henry van Dyke’s The Story of the Other Wise Man and the decorative little volumes by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews are what I mean; they were priced at a dollar and they conveyed more affection than a Christmas card. For this year the perfect Christmas book is Make Me an Offer by Wolf Mankowilz (Dutton, $2.00). Women who love shopping, men who pride themselves on their skill in buying and selling, will rock with delight when they read this unique story. The author is a London dealer who specializes in Wedgwood (his father “specialized” in army boots, blacking for grates, iron tonic, and women’s hats), and his story is a throat-cutting and amusing exposure of the antique trade. The writing is quick-witted and shrewd; the narrator is likable; the Portland vases glow with beauty; and the auction in the English country house is better than a circus.

Animal lover that I am, I have had a picnic with The Overloaded Ark by Gerald M. Durrell (Viking, $3.75). The author at twenty-eight is the youngest zoological collector in Great Britain. With his friend and ornithologist, John Yealland, an ancient of thirty-five, the author set forth on a sixmonth collecting trip in the great rain forests of the Cameroons. Yealland’s interest was of course in birds, and Darrell’s in mammals and reptiles, and this chronicle is an entertaining understatement of the difficulties encountered in capturing what the native hunters called “ big beef” and “small beef.” Durrell enlisted a remarkable native team: Elias, fat-bottomed and waddling, and Andraia, who was very tall and quick as a flash. With his Gallagher and Shean he penetrated the thickest undergrowth, the stickiest swamps, and the dankest caves; much of their questing was done at night. In this time-honored fashion “I lowered myself to the ground, hung the collecting bag round my neck, put the torch in my mouth, and proceeded to crawl up the tunnel on my stomach . . . the most painful means of progression known to man.”

Young Durrell may have been green to the forests, but he certainly knew the species he was looking for, and his descriptions of the putty-nose guenon, of the pangolin, the squeaking fruit bats, the python, the skink, the bulbul and drill and angwantibo, are most engaging, He writes with the light touch of Peter Fleming and with the constant reminder that once an animal is caught, it is your job to keep it alive and well. His text is pointed up with black and white portraits of the leading characters by Sabine Baur.

Autobiographies have a way of losing their bloom the closer they come to the present, but this is decidedly not the case with Nicholas Roosevelt’s very personable volume, A Front Row Seat (University of Oklahoma Press, $4.50). He was a cousin of T.R. and one of seventeen young Roosevelts who were brought up together at Oyster Bay. Archie was his closest friend; he adored T.R.; and his sprightly and affectionate account of the days at Sagamore Hill provides a most enticing beginning.

Mr. Roosevelt entered diplomacy at an age when most men are still in college. In 1919 he had a front row seal at the armistice commission in Central Europe. He served as Vice-Governor of the Philippines and as our Minister to Hungary. For a quarter of a century his observant mind and quick, firm prose made him an admirable newspaperman, and he served as an editor of the New York Herald Tribune and later for three years as assistant to the publisher of the New York Times.

I like his historical judgment, but most of all I admire his gift for characterization. His contrast of Alice Longworth and Eleanor Roosevelt; his thumbnail sketch of young Sumner Welles; his account of the byplay between Frank H. Simonds and Charles Evans Hughes, then Secretary of State; his description of Admiral Kato’s poker face at the Washington Conference when the Japanese Navy was obviously not going to be scrapped; his admirable portrait of Willkie; his superb summing up of Carr V. Van Anda, perhaps the ablest managing editor in the history of American journalism— these are just a few of the brilliant vignettes in which this book abounds. The author, of course, writes with the passion and prejudice of the Roosevelts — nothing Woodrow Wilson said or did could be right — but making such allowances, I find this a forthright, likable narrative.

Vermont could ask for no better spokesman than Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She has lived in the state, as her father used to say, “ever since 1763.”Her great-grandmother was a pioneer in the Green Mountains, and for decades Mrs. Fisher herself has been storing up the history, the living experience, and the characteristic Vermont episodes which are bound together in her new book, Vermont Tradition (Little, Brown, $4.50). She tells how the young veterans of the French and Indian Wars, young men from Connecticut and Rhode Island, having campaigned through the Green Mountains, were drawn back to settle there with their brides and what a different breed they were from the landowning squirearchy of the Province of New York. She tells of the different booms, of the money earned from potash as the forests came down, of the brief, golden prosperity which came in with the Merino sheep from Spain, and of the great days of the Morgan horse. She tells of how badly bled Vermont was by the Civil War, and of how more lifeblood drained away in the migration west by stagecoach and canal. She describes her book as “The Biography of an Outlook on Life,”and it will be treasured by those to whom Vermont is a taciturn kind of Paradise. No Vermonter has ever had a good word to say for New York, nor has she. But you expect every good book to show some temper.