Reader’s Choice

“As a matter of fact, there is,” I objected. “For once, a Churchillian title is misleading: out of twenty-four chapters, there are only one and a half about the discovery and settlement of the New World. The book is essentially a history of the British Isles from 1485 to 1688.” Arbuthnot: “True enough. But in the succeeding volumes Churchill’s commanding sense of historical perspective wall no doubt reassert itself.” Self: “Well, there’s another surprise. Churchill says next to nothing about the cultural flowering of the ElizabethanJacobean era; and he conspicuously neglects the broad social background — limits himself to such summations as ‘Beggars and vagabonds were many!’ ” Arbuthnot: “Come now, you can’t maintain that really surprises you. The first volume made it clear we were going to get from Churchill an old-fashioned narrative history — a schoolbook made grandiose by the well-known Churchillian magic. You simply can’t get by without paying tribute to the fine familiar stuff: the gusto with which Churchill reconstructs the battles on land and on sea; his flair for dramatic imagery — that memorable picture of Mary Queen of Scots as she removed her outer garments for ‘the headsman’s act’ and stood in crimson velvet, ‘blood-red from head to foot against the black background of the scaffold’; the bold, magistral character sketches, like that of Oliver Cromwell — ‘the harsh, terrific, lightning-charged being, whose erratic, opportunist, self-centered course is laid bare upon the annals.’ Then there’s the famous style. You’d better quote examples — ‘Now [1485], in the advance of culture, precedence was regulated by gunpowder’; the ‘smoky soul’ of Cromwell; and that bit about the Puritan Revolution, ‘a brew of hot Gospel and cold steel.'”

With a parting salvo of clichés about “glorious readability" and “a history which in itself is a historical event,” Mr. Arbuthnot left me to wind up with a note of my own about Churchill’s interpretation of the past. To Churchill, the essence of the English spirit is a shunning of fanaticism, an openness to sensible compromise, a deep-seated respect for law and order. Consequently Churchill, citing our contemporary knowledge of where techniques of “frightfulness” can lead, takes issue with the Victorian condonement of Cromwell and offers us a more searching and harsher reassessment. He views the whole Puritan interlude as a period in which English life was more sorely distempered (“everywhere was spying and prying”) than under even the personal rule of Charles I. And the tolerance and mercy shown by Charles II earns him warmer commendation from Churchill than has usually been accorded to “the merry monarch.”

But for all the excesses of the English Revolution, the dominant subject in this majestic volume, Churchill finds in it a reaffirmation of his central theme. “Here,” he writes, “is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it could give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition. Deep in the nature of the men who had broken the king’s power was the conviction that law in his name was the sole foundation on which they could build.”

Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769 (McGraw-Hill, $6.00)— edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle — is the fifth installment of the Boswell Papers. It is the first in the series which focuses steadily on a story with a clear-cut beginning, middle, and end.

The book opens with Boswell’s return to Scotland, and it immediately launches him — he is now twenty-six — on a determined search for a wife. A remarkably diversified array of ladies are considered, and three of them figure prominently in the story. First Boswell pursues the dazzlingly desirable Catherine Blair — referred to as “The Heiress" or “The Princess" — who presently dashes his pretensions in a scene of unconscious farce, in which she politely repeats that she likes him no better than any other man and that he doesn’t stand a chance. Then Boswell hies himself to Ireland to court a sixteen-year-old beauty, “formed like a Grecian nymph” and endowed with inviting financial prospects. Simultaneously, he records a growing love for his cousin and long-suffering companion, Margaret Montgomerie, whom he patronizes insufferably as the poor relation and who, in the concluding pages, becomes Mrs. Boswell.

Boswell’s earnest pursuit of matrimony is counterpointed by an unusually busy sex life. He has a romp with the gardeners daughter, then takes an accredited mistress who bears him a daughter; and even before this liaison is liquidated, each drunken evening ends on the couch of streetwalkers.

There are four other main strands in the present volume. One is Boswell’s campaign on behalf of Corsican independence: he wrote his Account of Corsica, which made a strong impression and won him fame; he pleaded (unsuccessfully) with the Prime Minister, Pitt, for British intervention; and he kept planting propaganda in the press, a mixture of fact and amusingly imaginative fictions. Two other major themes are Boswell’s strained relationship with his father and his growing practice at the bar, which involved him dramatically in a cause célèbre of the period. Finally, there is the maturing of his friendship with Dr. Johnson, solidified by two visits to England in the course of which Jamie begins to take his place among the leading spirits of the day.

As Mr. Brady says in his helpful Introduction: “These were [Boswell’s] marvellous years.”Any reader who still retains, as I do, a relish for Boswell may find this section of his autobiography the best to date.

Russia Without Stalin (Viking, $3.75) by Edward Crankshaw, a British authority on Russia, is in part the product of a return visit to the Soviet Union in 1955. Finished just before Khrushchev initiated the anti-Stalin campaign last spring, the book has been published unaltered. The new trend in Soviet policy confirms Crankshaw’s general argument and attests to his discernment. Some recasting would have given his report a greater immediacy; another weakness is that it is something of a hodgepodge. The main point, however, is that Crankshaw’s potpourri of observations really does shed light on “the emerging pattern” of the post-Stalin era.

Never having been a Communist, Crankshaw is free from the guilt, the rage, the absolutitis, which have warped the vision of most of the exCommunist pundits on Russia. Unlike them and the apologists of Communism, he never makes the fatal mistake which might be called reductio ad abstractum: the mistake of viewing everything in terms of theory and ideology. To Crankshaw, the Soviet Union is not a symbol of this or that, but a geographic area inhabited by real people with human impulses, good and evil. Consequently, his scrutiny of the Soviet scene has a down-to-earth quality which is rare in books about Russia and exceedingly refreshing.

Crankshaw found that, with Russia now in the advanced stages of the Industrial Revolution and with Stalin gone, the people were beginning to make good their demand for more consumer goods — at least in the towns. This rise in the standard of living is a process which, Crankshaw believes, the authorities will find it virtually impossible to reverse. In fact, they can no longer put off coping with the problem of improving the condition of the peasants, from whom greater food production is needed and cannot be obtained by coercion.

The appreciable relaxation of tyranny since Stalin’s death has already shown that, despite four decades of Communist conditioning, the Russians retain most of the foibles of nonCommunist peoples. The Soviet press is full of articles about two sets of disoriented juveniles—the gooligani or hooligans and the more prosperous stilyagi, playboys, who affect the same dress mannerisms as London’s “Teddy Boys,” are “sent” by American jazz, call each other “Mister” in place of “Comrade,” and in Moscow refer to Gorki Street as “ Broadway. ” Blat — a mixture of “pull" and graft — is a major element in the functioning of the Soviet economy; and everywhere Crankshaw heard of the tolkach or “fixer” and the spekulant, a racketeer whose most flourishing operations are in the black market for spare parts and for imported jazz records.

Crankshaw does not suggest that there is any breakdown in the Soviet system. On the contrary, he finds it recovering from “the paralysis that crept over so many aspects of life during Stalin’s last years.” His survey ranges all the way from the drabness of Soviet fashions to the revival of Leninism as a substitute for Stalin’s authority; and one of its main conclusions is that Russia will always be Socialist in some shape or form.

While it does not match up to Sean O’Faolain’s Sicilian travelogue, An Autumn in Italy, Mr. Kubly’s book is sprightly reading throughout. In a somewhat patchy way, it does achieve an image of the moral and physical landscape of Sicily, with its long roll-call of invaders; its veneration of the Mother-figure; its peculiar sense of truth, in which fact and fantasy are inextricably intertwined; and its people’s proud spirit of independence counterpointed by a fierce yearning to leave a land where most are under sentence of poverty for generations to come.

Giovanni’s Room (Dial, $3.00) by James Baldwin— author of one of the most impressive first novels published in the 1950s (Go Tell It on the Mountain) — confirms the original impression that here is an exciting talent: a writer endowed with exceptional narrative skill, poetic intensity of feeling, and a sensitive command of language. This endorsement is made despite the fact that Mr. Baldwin’s subject is one of which I have had my fill. His story, to sum it up crudely, is about a young American in Paris who, when his girl goes off to Spain to decide whether she really wants to marry him, becomes embroiled in a homosexual relationship with a barman in a pansy night-club.

Mr. Baldwin says on the jacket: “David’s dilemma is the dilemma of many men of his generation; by which I do not so much mean sexual ambivalence as a crucial lack of sexual authority.”This sounds to me pretentious nonsense. We know that David’s problem is not uncommon; and it merits compassion. But there is surely no “lack of authority” as to whether boys should like girls or other boys. Fortunately, Mr. Baldwin’s literary artistry pushes such objections into the background. Giovanni’s Room is a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction concerned with homosexuality.

Count Luna (Criterion, $4.00) — subtitled “Two Tales of the Real and the Unreal” — marks the first American appearance of the Austrian novelist, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, who is clearly a maestro at conjuring up an atmosphere of mystery and suspense. As Robert Pick says in his Introduction, both of these Gothic tales are basically ironic parables about guilt and sin. In “Baron Bragge,”a bachelor much censured for having driven two women to suicide explains why he is incapable of loving, He narrates an hallucination he experienced when wounded in wartime — an hallucination in which he married an enchantress so haunting that he still feels wedded to her. The second novelette chronicles the mounting desperation of a company director whose irresponsibility sent a certain Count Luna to his death in a concentration camp, and who becomes convinced that Luna is stalking him to wreak a murderous revenge. An elegant and urbane writer, Lernet-Holenia is working in the tradition of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who once wrote: “As soon as we actually sum up reality, we approach dreaming, or rather, poetic creation.”

This being the season when the problem of Christmas presents is spreading harassment if not anguish throughout the land, it might be helpful to say a few words about some of the outstanding new art books. My own choice for such as deserve good gifts is Venice Observed (Reynal, $15.00)—a collaborative venture in which top billing goes to Mary McCarthy, author of the text. Three photographers are mainly responsible for the sixty pages of color illustrations of paintings and of Venice, and for the seventy-odd photographs in black-and-white. André Chastel, Professor of Art at the Sorbonne, contributes comments on Venetian civilization and notes on the plates. And the whole project has been executed under the editorship of Georges and Rosamond Bernier, directors of the art review, L’Oeil.

The tourist Venice, says Miss McCarthy, is the real Venice. Venice is “a folding picture-postcard of itself,” and its inhabitants are all “ Professori di Belle Arti” — even Harry’s Bar has confected drinks named Tiziano, Bellini, Giorgione. Modulating from past to present, from literature and painting to life, Miss McCarthy develops the theme that the fairy tale which is Venice is the logical creation of a people “ who lived solely for gain”; a people who — having inherited from Byzantium a taste for sensuous luxury and therefore desiring above all business as usual — shrank from fanaticism, carefully curbed their rulers’ power, and produced a way of life and an art characterized by reverence for the concrete world.

Visually, Venice Observed is a splendid affair even though some of the color plates fall short of the highest standard. And Miss McCarthy’s text — while it may be unpalatable to those who expect Venetiana to be pitched only in the high romantic key — has the signal attraction of conveying an individual interpretation of a city about which almost everything that can be said has been said.

Salaams are also in order for PostImpressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin (Museum of Modern Art, $15.00) by John Rewald, whose History of Impressionism established his eminence as an art historian of this era. The plates — 442 in blackand-white, 47 in color — are of the highest quality; and the text is admirably written, though its encyclopedic richness of detail limits its appeal to those seriously interested in the period. Mr. Rewald opens in 1886, when Paris was “ literally bursting with new movements and new ideas”; and he chronicles the ensuing seven years of ferment, weaving into his study the contemporary literary currents and personalities in such a way as to re-create the whole aesthetic climate of the times. While Gauguin and Van Gogh dominate the book, Seurat, Signac, Pissarro, Odilon Redon, and half-a-dozen lesser painters — little known today but prominent in the development of post-impressionism — also receive full-dress treatment.

Another book from the Museum of Modern Art is Masters of British Painting, 1800—1950 ($5.50) by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Director of the Museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. The panorama Mr. Ritchie brings to us is characteristically British in its eccentricity — its curiously individual mixture of revolutionary and reactionary movements. Mr. Ritchie has singled out thirty-one artists, whose work is represented by a total of 104 plates (16 in color). Beginning with Turner and Constable, he includes, among others, Blake, the Pre-Raphaelites, Sickert, Augustus John, and such contemporaries as Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, and Francis Bacon. The accompanying text is terse and to the point — an admirable introduction to the subject for the layman.

The Selective Eye, 1956-57 (Reynal, $8.75), edited by Guorges and Rosamond Bernier, is one of the most visually exciting and certainly the most startlingly diversified of the recently published art books. This is an annual anthology of the best from L’Oeil, a European art magazine. The essays range from “Work, Fun and Games in the Middle Ages” to “Miró the Ceramist”; from “The Friday Mosque of Isfahan” by Sacheverell Sitwell to recollections of Soutine; from the frescoes of ancient Crete to the avant-garde artists of today. There are 51 pages in full color and 190 illustrations in black-and-white.