The Peripatetic Reviewer

WITH this November issue the Atlantic begins its one hundredth year of continuous publication, a long time as magazines go, and we intend to go still further. Like many other enterprises of the nineteenth century the Atlantic was founded on a monopoly: in 1857 a monopoly of the best writers in America were living in Concord, Cambridge, Boston, and a few points north. Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whittier, Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, and Longfellow were, so to speak, our charter contributors. They pledged themselves to write for us; they were intent on breaking away from British leading strings, and what they wrote in their American idiom made our first decade a golden age.

James Russell Lowell, our first editor, declared the policy in firm, resounding words: the aim was to concentrate ‟the efforts of the best writers upon literature and polities, under the light of the highest morals” (translate that into modern English unci it meant that the magazine would be half belles-lettres, half articles of fact and controversy); furthermore, the Atlantic was to be ‟the organ of no party or clique,” meaning that we should be nonpartisan — not a Republican organ, not a Democratic, but a periodical big enough to hold the trust of both. At every national election during my editorship good friends have assured me that this is no longer possible. But it is.

By 1900 the New England monopoly I speak of, this self-sufficing community of writers, was a thing of the past. So too the self-sufficiency of the United States, which was giving way to a new kind of interdependence, perceived and unpopular. Change was everywhere, and the old certitudes were being cross-examined by doubt. The impact of science upon religion had resulted in spiritual confusion. The new wealth, the new plutocracy, was a challenge to the old thrift and, even more, to

federal regulation. The new feminism was a rebellion against life with father. The new discoveries in medicine and the physical sciences, in transportation and communication, were revolutionizing our daily living. In this ferment, literature turned away from Victoria, away from the romantic and toward a new realism. The trend seemed benevolent.

But in the summer of 1914 we entered a period of intermittent violence, the like of which has not been felt since the breakup of the Roman Empire. The nervousness, the sense of loss, the brutality in mid-century writing, are directly traceable to the emergencies we have lived through. War and the uprooting of the unwanted; the persecution of the Jews; the collapse of empires and the revenge of young nationalism; torture and brain-washing and atomic bombing — are the shocking experiences we have all been exposed to in writing and imagination, if not in actuality. They prove that modern man is incredibly adaptable, that he is tough and resilient, and that he continues to live with the belief that peace is possible. They show that the modern writer, despite the paralysis of the war years, is deeply compassionate and truly creative.

Caught up as we are in a world in turmoil, it has seemed to me that the most appropriate way to signalize our 1957 Centennial is not by reproducing the old Atlantic classics but by bringing together in a series of special issues the most distinguished forward-looking writers of today, to speak 1o us about science and industry, about literature and the arts, about the new inventions in communication, all of which, emerging from the Atlantic’a century, point the way to tomorrow.

One of the very first results of the vast network of communication which now binds the continents on close speaking terms is the emergence of the synthetic public man whose speeches are written by a P.R.O. and whose casual utterances, like his winning, televised smile, are carefully rehearsed and taped. This poses a new problem for the editor, who learns to be wary of ghost writing with its high content of soft soap and special pleading. All through the 1930s, when private enterprise was on trial as never before, it seemed to me lamentable that neither the leaders of industry nor the leaders of the big unions dared to speak out in their own words. Both sides depended on the ghost. Thus it was a bright day for the Atlantic when we received “over the transom” (meaning unsolicited) our first manuscript by Clarence Randall, President of the Inland Steel Company. It was a short paper addressed to young men who were eager to serve in the personnel relations of big business. Crisply and candidly Mr. Randall told the candidates some of the questions they would have to think through and settle for themselves before they’d be of any use to a large corporation. This was an individual, not a ghost, speaking, and it was a joy to come to grips with him. We accepted the piece for the issue then making up, and not till a year later did I learn that it had already been declined by a Cornell periodical as not being ‟scholarly enough.‟ Thank heavens, it wasn’t.

I wanted to get closer to this articulate Chicagoan, and the chance came that summer when we were both invited to speak at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. I heard him in the Opera House and watched him affirm his creed again in two lively question periods. Then we went for a walk together to a high place, ostensibly to do some bird watching, and along the way I said I wanted him to do a short book on private enterprise for publication early in the new year. The wine was ready and once we got the cork out it flowed. He finished the writing in record time, and it was well he did, for the steel industry was digging trenches for a long strike. We went from typescript to galley proof in fourteen days and, by prearrangement, corrected proof in a three-hour telephone talk one Sunday. So his Creed was in print before President Truman seized the steel mills and before Mr. Randall delivered his famous reply coast to coast. All this and much else of a personal nature is to bo found in Mr. Randall’s new book, Over My Shoulder (Atlantic — Little, Brown, $3.50), a reminiscence, friendly and resourceful. I am simply putting readers on notice that here is a man who speaks for himself.

Like her mother before her, Anne Morrow Lindbergh has achieved a remarkable synthesis of her private life and her public commitments. She must write, and in her writing she has found release and reassurance. North to the Orient and Listen, the Wind recorded the exhilarating, sometimes intimidating flights with her husband, and her Gift front the Sea was an eloquent reminder of that inner reorientation by which we renew our grip in this wind-tossed existence. Her new book, The Unicorn and Other Poems (Pantheon, $2.75), bolds the distillation of her verse for the past two decades, and in an age when poets tend to put too much strain on the cobweb connections between writer and reader, Mrs. Lindbergh’s poems are a joy for their clarity and restraint and for the feeling which so swiftly Hows from the word to the listener.

She is not a difficult poet to read. Her style depends upon the simplest rhymes and a metre which at times seems almost conversational. It serves her admirably, showing the occasional and striking image in a clear light, as when in “Back to the Islands” she writes: —

I like to think that some of the best verses have appeared in the Atlantic, including “The Stone,” “A Leaf, a Flower, and a Stone,” ‟Winter Tree,” “Closing In,” and “Elegy Under the Stars.” One feels a ripening in this book; and in the last section of all, in which she speaks so tenderly of the difficulties of communication between the generations, the two poems “Family Album” and ‟Revisitation” will have a very special meaning for those like myself who have reached the middle distance. Again and again it is the quality of Mrs. Lindbergh’s mind which attracts and holds her readers.

Aesop, a deformed Greek slave of the seventh century B.c., is said to have won his liberty because of his skill in reciting fables. These pithy stories of animals who think and speak like men, each with a moral in its tale, have been embellished down the ages, and for our taste the most ingenious provider of them is James Thurber. What would Aesop look for in Thurber’s Further Fables for Our Time (Simon and Schuster, $3.50)? The moral, of course. Take this sampling of ‟The Hen Party.” Here is the opening sentence: “All the hens came to Lady Buff Orpington’s tea party and, as usual, Minnie Minorca was the last to arrive, for, as usual, she had spent the day with her psychiatrist, her internist, and her beak, comb, and gizzard specialist. ‛I’m not long for this barnyard,’ she told the other hens. “What do you suppose I’ve got now? With this you are captured; you see the application of what is coming; you delight in what the other hens do to Minnie; and when they have done it you are ready for the moral: Misery’s love of company oft goeth unrequited.

Aesop would be surprised by the modern twist which Thurber gives to his morals: I think he would be jolted by some of the words which the American has invented (“bragdowdy” is one) and by the outrageous puns (‟monstrosity,” Man says to the dinosaur, ‟is the behemother of extinetion”); and he would certainly he amused by the way that some of the most respectable of the old proverbs have been turned upside down.

For piecemeal reading — never more than three at a time — this is the most succulent book of the fall, and the fables I have already read aloud — and will again if I can catch a listener — are “The Lover and His Lass”; “The Peacelike Mongoose”; ‟The Goose That Laid the Gilded Egg” (‟‛Lo, I have laid the golden egg of lore and legend,’” cried the goose. “‘Lo, my foot,’ said a Plymouth Rock hen. ‘That is an ordinary goose egg painted yellow, if you ask me.’”); “The Bragdowdy and the Busybody”; ‟The Tiger Who Would Be King” (which should be read in all public schools for Armistice Day); and “The Grizzly and the Gadgets.”

Born and brought up at the foot of Beacon Hill, Helen Howe knows her Boston quite as acutely as John Marquand, and in her new novel, The Success (Simon and Schuster, $3.95), she has found the subject perfectly suited to her talent. There are rebels in every generation of Bostonians, and Maggie Fraser was one of them. On her graduation from Vassur she had a light flirtation with the stage and lived in New York just long enough to get a taste for success and a distaste for the somber side of Boston life. Her marriage to Dexter Bradfield was propitious, for the Bradfields had one of those big carefully invested family fortunes and Dexter, a former Harvard halfback, was a solid young medico making a name for himself in research. But her in-laws hedge Maggie in; her summers with them at Far Fields are more than she can endure, and the tough humor of Dexter’s friends at the M.G.H. is little more to her liking.

Maggie has too much impatience to share the quiet satisfaction of life with Dexter, and the arrival of their daughter Priscilla only adds to her restlessness. With her preconceived idea of success she begins to look afield, and the more she is committed to Boston and Cambridge society, the more alluring is the thought of what she might be in New York or Florida or Hollywood. When she meets Ray Masters, whose novel. The Joneses, is the season’s best seller, she first gushes and then tempts, for this New Yorker has all the graces which Dexter excludes.

The story of Maggie’s divorce; of how she takes over Ray, and their encounters in Hollywood; and of how during Ray’s service in the Navy she rises to be the greatest hucksteress in radio, is quite the best writing we have had from Miss Howe, the characterizations sharp and perceptive, the satire crisp and authentic, and the development of Margot’s (as she now calls herself) ruthless career irresistible and sad. The severance of her family loyalties is felt like a series of cuts — her parting with her father, her loss first of Roger, her brother, and then of Kitten, his wife, and the final repudiation by Priscilla. Dr. Fraser, who is the salt of Boston, in a mood of self-reproach, says to Maggie in what is the finest scene in the book: “I now have the nasty feeling that perhaps you’ve been shoved off into the jungle of the twentieth century without the proper weapons in your hands.” And the pity of it is, as the novelist makes clear, that too often in America success can become this terrible blunderbuss.