Reader's Choice

Robert Ruark, who contributes a column of jet-propelled badinage to the Scripps-Howard newspapers, has attempted to write the Great African Novel of our time. His Something of Value (Doubleday, $5.00), the May Book-of-the-Month Club selection, is a work of more than a quarter of a million words about the spiritual turmoil of primitive Africa as manifested in the eruption of Man Mau terrorism in Kenya. Mr. Ruark’s credentials are that he has “been, in the Iasi four years, extensively in Africa,”and has fortified his observations with intensive research.

To my mind, any novel which seeks to portray on a major scale a people foreign to the author almost inescapably has about it elements of absurdity. Mr. Ruark could not very well have written this story without giving his Africans more to say than “Yes, Bwana.” Yet for an American journalist to dish up thousands of words of Kikuyu talk is intrinsically a ludicrous undertaking; and Ruark’s efforts to reproduce the idiom of his British characters occasionally sound like unconscious parody to this British-born reader. Another point that bothered me was that when Mr. Ruark gives us the lowdown on Kikuyu rites and customs, it is blatantly obvious that he is interrupting his story to unload the fruits of his anthropological researches.

But if one judges it simply as fictional journalism, Mr. Ruark’s novel is certainly an expert job which packs a considerable punch. The title comes from a Bantu proverb which states that when a man discards the traditions of his ancestors, “he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them.”Mr. Ruark shows us that while the white colonists, understandably enough, have tried to suppress the dark and bloody customs of primeval Africa, in so doing they have left the African in a spiritual vacuum in which he cannot find release from his primitive fears and instinctual savagery. The resulting yearnings and hatreds are diabolically exploited, in Ruark’s novel, by agents and dupes of Communism. Whether or not he is right about the extent of Communist involvement, he has presented the dilemmas of both the African and the white man in all their force and with a telling objectivity.

His story begins in the middle of the Second World War and carries through to the present. Its hero, Peter McKenzie, grows up on his father’s farm some distance from Nairobi; becomes a professional biggame hunter; and later organizes a commando unit which fights Mau Mau barbarism with equally barbaric reprisals. The other main protagonist is a proud young African who winds up as a Mau Mau group leader. Ruark’s narrative is filled with descriptions of appalling tribal rites, unspeakably revolting oath-taking ceremonies, and ghastly atrocities.

Along with these horrors, the novel is amply stocked with ingredients which make for success at the box office. McKenzie is a ladies’ man of legendary sex appeal and a hunter fit to conduct Hemingway on safari. The girl who loves him is a long-stemmed redhead of breath-taking loveliness. There are stirring passages about the Virile satisfactions of life in the great African outdoors, and there are jazzy passages about, frenetic revelry in the clubs and night spots of Nairobi. I can readily see why the screen rights to Ruark’s novel have commanded the highest price paid for a book property in the last ten years — $300,000. As Sam Goldwyn is alleged to have said once upon a time; “He’s overpaid, but he’s worth it.”

The Cypresses Believe in Cod (Knopf, $10.00, 2 vols.) by Jose Maria Gironella is a novel even longer than Mr. Ruark’s; in fact, one hundred and fifty thousand words longer. It chronicles the life of the Catalan town of Gerona through the fine years climaxed by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A Yale professor is quoted on the cover as stating: “Some readers might say that this Is another War and Peace.” This reader will say, here and now, that it most certainly isn’t. Senor Gironella has written a distinguished documentary novel — no more and no less. The notable thing about it is that, in contrast to most novels of contemporary history, it is not a tract but a study of human nature — the nature of the Spanish people.

“Spain is an unknown country,” the author writes in a foreword to the American edition (translated by Harriet de Onis); and he argues that even gifted writers have usually overlooked Spain’s complexity. “What is characteristic,” he observes, “is a tendency towards the instinctive . . . the individualistic . . . the anarchic.” There are in Spain “thousands of possible ways of life,’ and whichever one the Spaniard embraces, he embraces with fanaticism. “This accounts for the inclemency of personal relations, the small respect for laws; this, too, is what causes our periodic civil wars.”

The panoramic story, in which there are seventy-six characters, revolves around a middle-class family whose five members, while united by deep love and personal loyalty, reflect the divergent attitudes which are splitting the country. The eldest son, Ignacio — the novel’s hero — reluctantly enters a seminary in obedience to his pious mother’s wishes, but eventually persuades his parents to let him abandon a life he finds intolerable. His sense of outrage at the social conditions he sees around him presently carries him into left-wing political activities. As the situation in Spain nears the boiling point, he becomes disgusted with the extremists who are bossing the left-wing elements in Gerona. But he feels no less strongly that if the Rightists win out, “They will be right back at the old stand . . . even heavier-handed than before.”Taken in its totality, the novel’s treatment of Spain’s political turmoil achieves a remarkable impartiality. Somehow the author manages to suggest that his characters, whatever their political credo, are simply behaving like Spaniards.

I should perhaps correct the possible impression that The Cypresses Believe in God is continuously focused on politics. Young love has its part in Gironella’s vast canvas; religious fervor, too; and also the tensions, joys, and sorrows of family life. The author’s narrative power is admirably sustained throughout the novel’s thousand pages. And his numerous characters— whether sketched or portrayed in detail — are drawn with vigor, humanity, and a sharp sense of individuality.

In August, 1922, Colonel T. E. Lawrence enlisted as a private in the R.A.F. under the name of Ross. At the Uxbridge depot, he started making notes for a book about air force life which he hoped would be his masterpiece, but the following February the press discovered Ross’s identity and Lawrence was turned out of the R.A.F. When he was permitted to re-enter it in 1925, he felt incapable of resuming his magnum opus. Several years later, however, he “regrouped” his Uxbridge notes and added to them some pleasanter recollections of his early days as an aircraft hand at the Cranwell Cadet College. Typescripts of his journal were sent to a few literary friends; but because of “the horror the fellows . . . would feel at my giving them away,” Lawrence decided that the book must not be published before 1950. Shortly after his death in 1935, Doubleday, Doran & Co., in order to establish copyright, printed a few copies and put them on sale at a prohibitive price: $500,000 apiece. Now The Mint (Doubleday, $20.00) has been released in an edition limited to one thousand copies.

The passage of time has, I’m afraid, robbed Lawrence’s journal of much of its original bite. The unsparing candor with which Lawrence recorded the brutality of officers and noncoms, the cruel stupidities of military discipline, and the manifold degradations of barracks life would certainly have startled readers in the nineteentwenties; but during and since the Second World War, the dirty linen of military life has been extensively exposed to the public eye. Lawrence, moreover, had a poor ear for the speech of common men, and a selfconscious artiness creeps into his prose which often makes The Mint sound affected when it needs above all to sound natural. One has a particularly jarring sense of incongruity when Lawrence, who was distinctly a prig and a prude, doggedly reproduces the obscenities of soldier-talk at its foulest.

The Mint strengthens my impression that there has been a good deal of idealization on the part of Lawrence’s biographers (with the exception of the latest, Richard Aldington, whose book — recently published in England and soon to appear in this country — goes to the opposite extreme). Lawrence’s “oddness,” as he observes in The Mint, was “bonedeep”; and there was much about it that is unappealing—the nagging self-consciousness and the incessant posturing; the excessive self-depreciation which, counterpointed by a Strain of boasting, has an artificial ring; the courting of attention by making an inordinate to-do about escaping it.

Lawrence and other great British eccentrics of a similar stripe are usually regarded as spectacular cases of deviation from “public school” orthodoxy. But I venture to suggest that it is really they, with all their oddities, who are the exponents of this code in all its juvenile purity — the “true believers” who have not allowed maturity to modify their youthful outlook. Lawrence’s complexes reflect, in an extreme form, the amalgam of perfectionism, asceticism, and subtle hypocrisy which goes — or used to go — into building the character of young English gentlemen. His ideals were the ideals of the “higher type” of schoolboy among my contemporaries at Charterhouse — to aim at great achievement untarnished by so much as a hint of self-seeking; to guard one’s “fitness” by avoiding such contaminations as girls or indeed any sort of indulgence; to demand of oneself superiority in all things while keeping up a show of extreme modesty.

My suggestion that the great British eccentrics, though on the surface they appear to be rebels, were deeply imbued with an ethos which is peculiarly British has its counterpart in a book which re-examines the relation of American writers to American society. About a century ago, the United States witnessed the flowering of stories and handbooks dedicated to the gospel of success. This gospel’s most celebrated exponent was, of course, Horatio Alger, Jr. (who, ironically, didn’t even recognize success when he held it in the palm of his hand—he sold his books outright, thereby throwing away a fortune in royalties). The mythology which Alger so compellingly popularized has permeated American society to this day. But both the critics and the champions of our business civilization have agreed — naturally with opposite emotions — that, in the main, American writers of any literary consequence have been “alienated” from the dominant values of their environment. This viewpoint is challenged by Kenneth S. Lynn, a young Harvard professor, in The Dream of Success (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $4.00). Focusing on five novelists — Dreiser, London, Norris, David Graham Phillips, and Robert Herrick— Mr. Lynn seeks to show that they were deeply imbued with the mythology of success.

What Alger’s mythology really celebrated was not success but rather the successful struggle for success — the glory of achievement; and its basic premise was that American life was a wide-open race. When it became apparent, after the eighteennineties, that this simplistic premise no longer fitted the realities of American experience, it was widely concluded that the realities rather than the myth called for revision. Thus the mythology of success, as Mr. Lynn shows in his chapter on Phillips, was the inspiration of the “muckraking" novel, which denounced “Wall Street” or “the Forces of Privilege” as the assassins of Opportunity. Herrick’s passionate and despairing critique of the American society of his day, and in particular of the decadence of those who had inherited their wealth, had its origins in his nostalgic vision of the previous generation as one of “splendid brigands” who, while they spent their lives amassing fortunes, were interested in epic achievement, not in dollars. Jack London’s Socialism was to a large extent Algorism with a Nietzschean and Marxist twist: contemptuous of the masses (“helpless as cattle”), London envisaged a revolution which would carry to the top supermen who had been “denied room for their ambition in the capitalist ranks.” In Dreiser’s case, we see, among other things, another consequence of the mythology of success: bitter disillusionment at the recognition that success does not bring happiness.

Mr. Lynn, I feel, has a sound and illuminating point in his contention that criticism has underestimated the extent to which the cult of success has influenced American writers. He has written a readable book in which literary criticism mirrors social history and provides some provocative insights into American life.

A Train of Powder (Viking, $3.7.5) by Rebecca West is a book of reportage which combines the allurements of the detective story with the insights of a penetrating treatise on morals and politics; and its artistry is a reminder that Miss West is one of the outstanding stylists writing in the English language. The six essays which make up the book are all concerned with crime and punishment. The first focuses on the climax of the Nuremberg trials; and the moral peculiarities of the Germans are examined in two other pieces about postwar Germany. “Opera in Greenville” describes the trial of thirty-three citizens of that South Carolina town for the lynching of a young Negro in 1947. “The Better Mousetrap” deals with a semi-farcical case of treason — that of a young telegraphist in the London Foreign Office, a pathetic misfit, who gave away secret information to a member of the Soviet Embassy, using well-known restaurants as rendezvous. “Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume” is the story of one of the queerest and most tantalizing unsolved murder cases in the annals of British crime.

The essays are linked by a common purpose: the pursuit and reassertion of moral reason in the face of the huge indecencies of totalitarianism and the extremities to which they have pushed our world. The study of trials provides Miss West with materials particularly suited to this endeavor, for the trial symbolizes the struggle of order against disorder; it furnishes a close-up of wrongdoing and a measure of the conscience of society. Miss West is able to show us where this conscience falters or goes grievously astray while never allowing us to doubt that it exists and that it is more effective than the mocking cynic perceives. Her account of the Nuremberg drama omits none of the controversial issues, none of the moments of zaniness. But it resoundingly affirms that the trails represented a triumph for moralily; that little vileness of the Nazis had to be fully exposed, recorded for posterity, and punished. In her brilliant chronicle of the Greenville lynching trial, Miss West registers the point that — despite its clownish and disgusting aspects, and the certainty of acquittal the defendants were made to feel shame, and an obsolescent crime came a step nearer to becoming obsolete.

Miss West arrives at the truths of a situation by meticulously piecing together fact, human detail, setting, and atmosphere; and she raises the particular to the general by the infusion of history, politics, and psychology. The impatient reader is liable to conclude that she invariably travels on the longest and most winding route, but to my mind she makes every inch of the going completely fascinating.

Subtitled “The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution,” Apes, Angels & Victorians (McGraw-Hill, $5.00) by William Irvine is a singularly felicitous dual biography — scholarly, lucid, and slylishly written. Seldom has an alliance between two great minds furnished a more piquant study in contrasts and paradoxes. In the emergence of evolution, Darwin was “the quiet, sedentary cause; Huxley the brilliant event. Darwin caused history and Huxley made it.”The discoverer of evolution was a Milquetoast who seemed inescapably destined for failure and who “muddled into genius and greatness like a true Englishman.”On the other hand, Huxley, who broadcast Darwin’s doctrine, was a man with “more talents than two lifetimes could have developed ” —nobody would have been surprised if Huxley had explained evolution. A born preacher, he rained explosives on the buttresses of Victorian theology. The great debate which shook Victorian England is eloquently chronicled in Professor Irvine’s biography; and through its pages stride many of the leading figures of the Victorian era.

The Hidden River (Harper, $3.00), Storm Jameson’s sixteenth novel, a Book-of-the-MonthClub selection, is one of those stories which I irresistibly associate with England’s senior lady novelists. It sounds as though it had something serious to say; it has a wellbred intensity; and it is quietly and expertly written. The trouble is that I’ve read this story, in varying forms, at least a score of times, and it impresses me less and less as time goes by. A former British captain, Adam Hartley, revisits a French family who hid him from the Germans during the war; and he is still burning to know who betrayed one of the members of the household, a fighter in the Resistance, who saved Hartley’s life by remaining silent under torttire. What follows can be accurately summed up in an impressionistic description which was once applied to Ibsen’s plays: “There is a room in which the air is very had. Someone opens a window. Everyone catches pneumonia and dies.” An exception is made in favor of Hartley, who wins the girl he loves, which hardly seems fair since he was the chap who was so anxious to let in the draft.