The Peripatetic Reviewer

CAMBRIDGE in May was a time for languor and self-indulgence, especially if you were a senior living in the Harvard Yard. The Finals were only three weeks away but by this time examinations had lost their terror for most of us; we would do what had to be done but meantime we would savor the amenities for the last time in this place which had suddenly become dear. We climbed up to Copey’s rooms and, close-hunkered on the floor, heard his mellifluous reading of his old favorites, the Book of Ruth, Leacock’s “My Financial Career,” and that spring poem, “The County Mayo by James Stephens. We attended the last meeting of the Advocate Board, and afterwards Bill and I, retiring editors, feeling a little high, wandered over to the steps of Sever where we settled down to talk and where Bill wanting space stretched himself out full-length, his head cupped in his hands as he solemnly addressed the moon (there were no Radcliffe damsels underfoot those days; no one thought of them). We went for walks along the river and there, in the spirit of spring, I saw a sculler, suddenly fascinated by what the wind was doing to a pretty girl, take his eyes off the water, catch the air with both blades, and row himself right over the prow into the Charles. On Sunday we went for the last time to sup with those famous spinsters whom I shall designate as the Perkins sisters of Cambridge. It was the older Miss Perkins who, when the first Latin American students enrolled at Harvard, asked “Cousin” Lawrence (Lowell) if he still thought it was safe for maidens to venture forth on Cambridge streets after nightfall; il was also she who was once heard to say to her younger sister, “My dear, the trouble with matrimony is that it breaks down the natural barrier between the sexes.”

In the Yard the elms unfurled their tender green; the windows were all open and in the evening you would sit smoking in your window seat three flights up in Hollis, hearing the medley of talk, the piano player in Holworthy, and the distant singing — was it from the Music building? — until an idiot coming in from the Square shouted, “Hey, Rinehart, stick your head out.” This of course was addressed to no one in particular—legend had it that a lonely soul named Rinehart used to stand under his own window and call to himself for creature comfort; the cry would be taken up by half a dozen voices and then subside. The night air was soft; we heard time passing as the bells tolled the quarter hours, but we felt no spur for book or love letter. This was our last chance to be indolent.

May Sarton’s new novel, Faithful Are the Wounds (Rinehart, $3.00), is by all odds her best. It is a clearly lit, impassioned story of the American Liberal and of what he has been living through recently. Edward Cavan, a Harvard professor, is the pivot of the book about whom revolve the controversy, the anger, and the remorse. He has achieved a national reputation by what he has written on American literature and by the brilliance of his seminars. Edward’s dilemma, which in the end destroys him, is like that of so many of his intimates. An ardent Socialist who took his cue from the Fabians, and in particular from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, he has lived to see his dream become a spotted reality. He has seen Communism snuff out the Socialists in Czechoslovakia, and Wallace, whom he fiercely supported, misled by the Progressives. He has seen opinion, even among those he loved, swing back toward the center of a new Conservatism, and all this has made him infuriated and unyielding. He feels walled in, and when he can no longer get through to those he used to t rust, he kills himself.

The novel, then, is the cause and effect of Edward’s suicide, and the elucidation of the tragedy is relayed to us by Edward’s sister Isabel, whom he had long ago shut out of his bachelordom. Isabel, the elegant, well-cared for wife of a San Francisco surgeon, had been incapable of following her brother in his quest for the Liberal ideal, and it is only when the disaster has called her to Cambridge that she begins to relate the boy she had worshiped as an older brother to the famous scholar now so cruelly in the headlines. The truth about the mature Edward is conveyed to Isabel by his Cambridge friends, and it is she who again and again supplies the missing links going back to his family.

Isabel’s portrait is as finely drawn as Edward’s; despite her poise and apparent complacency she is capable of deep feelings, and these are aroused in her encounters with Miss Grace Kimlock, the egocentric zealot; with Orlando Fosca, so swiftly intuitive, the Socialist of the old school, a refugee from Mussolini; with Damon Phillips, the physicist, and with Julia, his wife, who was half in love with Edward; with Dr. Willoughby, the rector of the little church where the service is conducted — they share with her a sense of communion and affection, rare to find on the printed page. The story takes its pulse from these people with their fighting principles and their candor; and while at times Isabel finds them childishly passionate, she also realizes how deeply they are committed to her brother. The only one I cannot quite believe in is Ivan Goldberg, the head of Edward’s department; the relation between these two antagonists is not nearly as plausible as Edward’s effect on his seminar and especially upon his star pupil, George Hastings. Edward, the angry idealist, the scorner of compromise, who had fought so long against the extreme Right that he could not tolerate the enmity of the Left, is a figure who will walk in our imagination long after the book has been put down.

Since the story parallels a tragedy which took place in Cambridge in 1950, there are few in the Harvard circle who can read it objectively. The novel, I think, will be better appreciated by those who do not approach it as a book based on fact.

Destroyers are the cavalry of the sea, fast, fierce scouts who rode herd on our convoys and flattops and drove the U-boat to bay. Adventurous, spirited, and with a crew small enough to be passionately devoted, it is no coincidence that the destroyer — or the destroyer-escort — has been the protagonist in three of the best seafaring novels to emerge from the war, Delilah, The Caine Mutiny, and The Cruel Sea. To this famous trio I now add C. S. Forester’s new book, The Good Shepherd (Little, Brown, $3.95).

In his memoirs published at the end of the first World War, Admiral Jellicoe, the hero of Jutland, paid tribute to the heroism of the U-boat commanders, but he also pointed out their gravest error: if the U-boat packs, he said, had been sent to do their hunting much nearer the American coast, they would have taken a greater toll. Hitler’s admirals took the hint and that is why Mr. Forester’s hero, George Krause, U.S.N., captain of the destroyer Keeling, 1500 tons displacement, begins to run the gantlet while he is still six days away from his English destination.

Commander Krause, known to the crew as “Kraut,” is an Annapolis graduate, forty-two years old, who has been given a convoy command after having been twice passed over. He was twenty years in the Navy, but this trip was the first time that he was to see a shot fired in anger. He had thirty-seven cargo vessels and tankers to shepherd, and three other smaller ships besides his own with which to protect them: the Polish destroyer Viktor and two smaller escorts, one English, one Canadian. This is the team with which he went into action forty-eight hours before there was any possibility of air cover or reinforcement from Britain, and The Good Shepherd is the story of what he did, of how he figured, and of what he experienced during the long hours on the bridge which he never left except for quick trips to the head. It is a story of enormous vigilance, of great courage in handling men and ships, and of the compassion which again and again rouses his mind through the fog of fatigue.

Mr. Forester, who began as an English reporter in Spain, has risen to be an expert narrator of warfare at sea whether in our time or Napoleon’s. This book is made memorable by a hundred vivid touches: the narrowing deadly circles cut by the destroyers as with depth bombs they would try to force the sub to the surface; the Commander’s swift calculation of compass, radar, and sound; what hot Java will do to relieve a sagging physique; the Bible texts that keep bobbing up in the Commander’s mind, relic of his boyhood in a parsonage; old Tubby’s signoff as his ship goes down; the self-questioning that holds up Krause’s call for help and his flooding relief when at last the big PBY swings into view. One emerges from that forty-eight-hour ordeal on the bridge with a profound respect and a touching affection for Mr. Forester and his modest, lonely hero.

In her latest collection of short stories, The Bride of the Innisfallen (Doubleday, $3.50), Eudora Welty has moved away from her preoccupation with Southern life. Three stories out of the seven are decidedly far afield, and although Miss Welty establishes her own peculiar world in any setting, the effect is still pleasantly varied. It is interesting to notice that while the Southern stories are all further revelations of the pattern underlying a fixed, immovable world, the non-Southern stories all involve, one way or another, the unexpected enlightenments of travel.

In “The Bride of the Innisfallen” a young woman bolting from too much domesticity enjoys loneliness in the Irish boat train, which is full of people who become positively miraculous by the mere fact of being strangers. “Going to Naples is about the passengers on the Pomona, most of them Italians bound for home, and the fat, rackety, bewildered girl who is both an appealing clown and the essence of all travelers.

The Southern stories disentangle the layers of meaning and emotion behind such ordinary episodes as a family visit on the wrong day, an impulsive drive into the country, and a small boy playing hooky. The exception is “The Burning,” a Civil War tale in which the horrors on both sides are blurred over by the observer’s limited point of view, the result being rather like a death march played on a music box.

The writing throughout is at Miss Welty’s best level. Glittering, full of apparently random details which inexplicably fuse into a solid image, and of mischievously promising revelations which never come, her prose is a continual delight. Her partially revealed characters are far more convincing than the most elaborate character studies of many another author, and she is just as deft with Irishmen and Italians as with her own neighbors.

The expectation aroused by John Masters’s earlier novels, Nightrunners of Bengal and Bhowani Junction, will not, I am sorry to say, be sustained by his new book, Coromandel! (Viking, $3.95), and the fault lies as much in the scope as in the execution. This is the story of a swashbuckler, Jason Savage, who was born in a little village on the edge of the Salisbury Plain, and who in the year 1627 and in the reign of Charles I decides that he will leave home and find his fortune in Coromandel. He has heard of the place from an old poacher, and he has a phony map to guide him. His leave-taking is also impelled by the fact that he has seduced the Squire’s daughter and stabbed to death her brother who detected them. Jason is dark, good-looking, and amorous; he can dance like an angel and has a head hard to break. With these assets he escapes the bailiff, finds refuge in London, and works in a night spot, dancing, until he has enough gold pieces to take ship. His single-handed conquest of much of the Indian continent and of many of the women who stray into his path makes up the bulk of this story. He finds Coromandel, climbs the twinpeaked magic mountain, always with the map miraculously preserved, and is eventually nominated as “the reborn Lama of Tsaparang.” Long before this the thread of credulity had snapped for me; and if I followed, it was out of duty and as an unbeliever.

Sabatini and Shellabarger have done this kind of thing far better than Mr. Masters, and it seems to me a pity that he tried. The nearer India, the India of the past two hundred years, is the magic land for which he holds the open-sesame, but when he goes back to the seventeenth century and tries to endow an English lout not only with a murderous temper but with the gift of tongues and the imagination of a poet, he is trading what he knows for a most improbable riddle. It is the duty of the novelist to make us believe in his people, and it is here I think that Mr. Masters has failed. In his next book, I wish he would take us back to the India of William Hickey.