The Peripatetic Reviewer

ON THE wall of my library, among the photographs is one of a man in white ducks and white shirt sitting on a paddock fence grinning down at a fat mare grazing placidly beside him. The man is Hans Zinsser, and because the picture was taken in the sunlight you almost catch the glint of his snapping blue eyes and the ginger in his hair.

Hans Zinsser had the resourcefulness of four men, and it was part of his greatness that he kept all four of them active throughout his life. Poetry was in his blood; he published his first volume of verse while still an undergraduate at Columbia; he contributed lovely sonnets to the Atlantic throughout his career under the nom de plume R.S.; and his final book of poems appeared after his death. He knew his classics and was at home in English, French, and German literature. While still an undergraduate he served in the Cavalry in the Spanish-American War and was shocked at the “unbelievable, miserable sanitary condition of the camps.” One might call this the bugle call which led to his courageous, lifelong campaign against infectious diseases, a campaign which made him one of the most eminent pathologists in the world. “I had the luck to enter a new field,” he once told me. “It was like stepping into a great hotel on the coast. I could have any room for the asking and they all looked out to sea.” He loved horses and riding (which was why he was in the Cavalry) and in the last months before his death he had his saddle and stirrups brought to his bedroom so that the smell of the leather could send his thoughts afield. But even more than horses he loved music, and he played the violin with skill. The member of the Harvard faculty who went down to Columbia to welcome Dr. Zinsser to the staff of the Harvard Medical School was directed to an office at the end of a long corridor. As he approached he heard the strains of a string quartet and peering in the door saw Hans and his three assistants, bloody aprons and all, fiddling away for dear life. “Sit down,” said Hans softly, never ceasing to play. “We’ll be through in a minute.”

It was my good luck that the Zinssers lived right across the street from us during my early years as Editor of the Atlantic. I could tell from the light in his library when Hans was working; sometimes we had beers together at evening’s end and sometimes we all went over to them for Sunday supper bringing our leftovers to add to the fund, as there was never any telling how many might turn up — former students from India, China, or Paris, members of the Harvard faculty, doctors, and writers — with the talk ranging from T. S. Eliot to Pareto to the Black Death. I had the fun of editing Hans’s book Rats, Lice and History, that unique account of what infectious diseases had done to change the fate of nations. It was fun and it was exacting too, for Hans was a perfectionist and accepted no change without scrutiny and not always then.

Early in 1938 Hans was in China helping pupils of his to stave off an epidemic of typhus which was there threatening. He came back late that spring feeling below par and went for a checkup. The finding was hopeless, for he was incurably ill with lymphatic leukemia. He told me in July and at that time he thought he had twelve months left. It was the first time I had seen one I loved under the death sentence, and his courage was contagious and wonderful. He carried on his work at the Medical School with no slackening of pace; he submitted himself as a guinea pig for the most exhausting tests against leukemia; and in the evenings he was busy with a great mound of yellow paper on which for years he had been writing down episodes of a semi-autobiographical nature. He was determined to finish it and “damn you, don’t, you ever refer to it as an autobiography,” he said half jokingly, “for it isn’t.” The problem of finding the right tone of voice in which to tell it had long perplexed him. “I would like to tell it in the third person,” he once remarked. “But Henry Adams pre-empted that in his Education.” What he did was to write about a central figure whose initials were R.S., a medical man known intimately to Dr. Zinsser, and whose career touched his at many points. So began a work of biography whose gaiety and laughter, whose tenderness and knowledge, not least of human nature, will make it long remembered. Of self-pity there is not a trace; the note of poignancy that you hear especially toward the close is that life is so brief. “Ted,” he said to me one morning when the book was nearly done, “if I could only find a raft to step onto from this old hulk—there is so much more writing I would like to do.” He did keep the “old hulk” afloat for a year longer than he had first expected and so lived to see his book published and praised. I should rank it on the very top shelf of American biography together with Ben Franklin’s fragment, The Education of Henry Adams,Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Eliot Morison, Clarence Day’s Life with Father, Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee, and Sandburg’s Lincoln. As I Remember Him belongs in that company for all the reasons I have suggested, and for one more which his friend Dr. John F. Enders described so movingly in the memorial exercises which were conducted at Harvard in the autumn of 1940. “Always loving,” he said, “and even often seeking out a struggle where benevolent causes were at stake, this lifelong conflict with the agents of syphilis, tuberculosis, typhus and the rest which he regarded perhaps only half-humorously as sentient malignities satisfied in large part his need for dangerous experience in the pursuit of generous ends.”

Hans believed that a man had to walk dangerously, and certainly he himself was never finer or more expressive than in that most precarious test of all. I am glad that his big book has been reissued this year; I am glad that the Hans Zinsser Memorial Fund has now been established at the Harvard School of Public Health to give support to promising young scientists in the field to which Hans was devoted. Those who loved him will wish to see it grow.

During the Second World War, the separation between combatants and their wives was much longer than in the First World War, the distances greater, the loneliness more harrowing. In this dilemma, love affairs of propinquity were inevitable. Strictly speaking they were infidelity; but in many cases they were compassionate and irresistible. This is the conflict which Lionel Shapiro describes in his novel, The Sixth of June (Doubleday, $3.95).

Brad Parker, Connecticut-born and a young graduate of Dartmouth, married a newspaper fortune when he married Jane Lakelock, and he was well on his way to succeed his father-in-law as publisher when in his twenty-seventh year the war called him. He volunteered for the Special Service Force training in Montana in parachute and winter warfare, partly because of his love for skiing and partly to shake himself out of the fat-cat habits which had been settling down on him. But his Congressman, without Brad’s knowledge, has him transferred to a safer staff assignment in London and there, through the preparations for the North African and Italian campaigns, Brad toils at a mountain of paper. In his loneliness he seeks the sympathy of Valerie Russell, a lovely, war-weary English girl serving in the Red Cross. Their attraction sweeps Val away from the English Commando Captain to whom she was half engaged and puts Jane, Brad’s wife, out of mind. The affair keeps Brad from rejoining the paratroops; it leads to an open break with his family; and only in the final preparations for Overlord is he roused from the enchantment.

The situation as Mr. Shapiro has told it is decently, pathetically true. We see Valerie’s disrupted home where her father, the Brigadier, sits embittered and useless after Dunkirk; we see the warmth and surprise with which Brad enters her life, and her anguish as she tries to live up to her divided loyalties thereafter. Brad is the weaker of the two; his sleek acquiescence in Connecticut has left him content to do the paperwork in London, and it is only after repeated provocation that he is roused from his bemusement. As for John, the English suitor, we see him only in brief moments and at his best on D-Day. The vignettes of wartime London are well drawn: the nervous gaiety, the binges, the flare-ups between Yank and limey. The best writing is in the last forty pages with the graphic account of the landing and assault on Pointe Ange. But the shortcomings of the book are its superficiality and its lack of emotional depth. There are too many “darlings” and not enough real impulse. One feels sorry for no one and in the end is left wondering about Brad’s uncertain homecoming.

“Setting aside the years at war, I have had no other aim or occupation than that of writing; and it is the ambition I had when I was a boy. It is hard work; and in the good hours when words are flowing well it seems there is hardly a pleasanter way to spend one’s time on earth. Never mind the bad hours. There is no life without them.” So says Herman Wouk, the Manhattan-bred son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who in his forty-first year is the most fluent and successful of New York novelists. Three of his four novels have been distributed by major book clubs and his Pulitzer Prize package, The Caine Mutiny, has been an international best seller and a smash hit on stage and screen. The Mutiny grew out of his experiences aboard destroyer-minesweepers in the South Pacific. But Manhattan, and in particular the city beloved by the middle-class Jews, is the source of Mr. Wouk’s new big novel, Marjorie Morningstar (Doubleday, $4.95), as I predict it will be of his books to come. The city is in his blood; he was born in the Bronx, is the product of its public schools and of Columbia, and for five years had the stimulus of Broadway as a member of Fred Allen’s writing team in radio.

Marjorie Morgenstern, his heroine, travels, so one surmises, much of the path which Mr. Wouk himself has taken. She is the pretty and respectable daughter of a Jewish immigrant who began his career sorting feathers at $2 a week and has at last risen to be the head of his precarious little business. Socially Mr. Morgenstern has progressed upward; he has moved his household from the Bronx to Central Park West and he is intent on giving Marjorie and Seth, his younger son, the advantages he never had. In this he has the decisive assistance of his shrewd, outspoken, fiercely protective wife.

The story is the story of Marjorie’s development from a pretty adolescent into a stage-struck beauty. Marjorie is the star of her class at Hunter College; it is she who attracts the more glamorous of the fraternity boys at Columbia, and it is she who steals the spotlight in the amateur theatricals. Even before graduation she has begun to fancy herself as “Marjorie Morningstar,”the promising young actress soon to burst on Broadway. At the ornate Adirondacks camp, South Wind, she has the chance to play bit parts, and here she becomes infatuated with the stage director, Noel Airman, the raffish, ironic songwriter. Noel, whose real name is Saul Ehrmann, has rebelled against his family; he is a wolf in wolf’s clothing (black turtleneck sweater and corduroy jacket) and he has modeled himself on Noel Coward though his talent is a good deal frailer. Marjorie is almost a pushover but not quite, and as their love affair develops — as it does at prodigious length — it becomes a question whether she will succumb to Noel’s blandishments or whether he will be led to the altar. Noel is wise in the ways of women, and his clever wit and unpredictable moods make him the most magnetic person in the book.

The love story, always threatening to be unconventional, takes place in the midst of Jewish family traditions which furnish Mr. Wouk with some of his very best scenes. The best of all is the Bar Mitzvah, its feast and celebration, in the course of which Uncle Samson-Aaron and Aunt Dvosha provide such wonderful comedy. Mr. Wouk has a gift for the swift and telling episode: Marjorie and her father in the rowboat, “the Uncle” as matador, the rainy day under the lilacs, George’s ghastly drive to Long Island, Mrs. Zelenko slamming away at Bach — these are moments of velocity which keep the book moving. But there are not enough of them. The book is a third too long for its best effect. Noel’s philosophizing is endless; he writes a twenty-page letter and we have to hear every word of it. Even his sexy talk about the models, rather racy at the first, ends by being tedious. As for Marjorie, it seems to me that the younger she is the better. In her feuds with her mother and in her college-girl confidences with Marsha she has vitality. But she keeps the reader, as she keeps Noel, waiting too long, and the final answer is empty.