The Peripatetic Reviewer

ON A June day more than a century ago Henry Thoreau noted in his journal: “If a man walks in the woods for love of them for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising—making earth bald before its time.” Few Americans wake up to this irony before middle life, and the people who wake us, who lead us to appreciate the value of wild places, are the naturalists. They form a goodly company, they and their books: Thoreau; the two great ornithologists, Audubon and Alexander Wilson; George Catlin, friend and painter of the Indians who was first to propose the creation of a great national park; Louis and Alexander Agassiz; T.R. and Pinchot; Tom Barbour and John Phillips; in California and the Northwest, John Muir; in the Southwest, Roy Bedichek; the great anglers, Edward R. Hewitt in the Adirondacks and Roderick Haig-Brown in British Columbia; Sally Carrighar and Rachel Carson; Donald Culross Peattie and Sigurd F. Olson, and Edwin Way Teale. What a gathering they would make could we get them all together and hear them talk about this country and its precious, perishable heritage.

It is not until autumn, not until Indian summer, that we realize how much we have been missing. The signals are usually surprising: a pheasant exploding out of a familiar thicket, a sugar maple seen suddenly in flame, the honking of the migrating geese, a flood tide in the salt marsh, the smell of burning leaves — signals of how little of the year is left. These golden days have an urgency that makes us feel truant; if only one could step off time’s treadmill, relegate the job to one’s assistant, and be free — free for a visit to the Vermont uplands, for two days of surf casting on Monomoy, for a slow troll down the Parker River or a midday picnic collecting shells on Plum Island. But, for an editor, the best time of year is always the busiest.

Edwin Way Teale is one of those fortunate few who are paid to live in the open. Writer, naturalist, and explorer of forgotten trails, he is now devoting himself to a series of four books on the American seasons. In North With the Spring he followed the first season from its awakening on a Florida key all the way North to its late arrival in Canada. Now in the second volume, Autumn Across America (Dodd, Mead, $5.75), he pursues the magnificent progress of the fall from Cape Cod to California, “cutting across the advancing front of a season . . . across the four great flyways of the migrating birds, through the multicolored forests of the hardwoods, over the prairie fall, through the high autumn of the Rockies and the desert autumn of the salt flats and the rain-forest autumn of the Northwest.” It is a magnificent assignment and Mr. Teale is just the man for it. He sees so many things we have no eyes for; all nature is his province

—he is an observer in the prime, and his chronicles are diverse in color, lively and precise, his photographs magnificent.

I have read his book not from first to last but moving about in it, now to those familiar parts of the country where I could follow his experiences with a kindred interest, now to those parts which are strange. The index provides an excellent roadmap for this kind of reading. Monomoy and Cape May were old stamping grounds for me, though I had never witnessed such concentrations of whilebreasted swallows as he describes. (He reminds us that they were once sold for food in the New York market, and that a meat-gunner near Cape May “fired into a cloud of tree swallows, killing or maiming 102 birds with a single shot.”)

It is his special gift to take a subject of which we have a sketchy knowledge and to fill it in with fascinating detail. He tells us, for instance, of how the swallows, making ready for fall migration, gorge themselves on bayberries, building up the fat that will provide fuel for the longer flights ahead; he tells us of the eelgrass of Shinnecock Bay, of the mysterious epidemic which attacked it in the 1930s, and of what the destruction meant to all manner of organisms along the seaboard; he tells us of the migration of the monarch butterflies at Point Pelee; of why the graylings disappeared from the Michigan Peninsula, and the experiments which demonstrate that salmon can tell apart, by their smells, fourteen different kinds of aquatic plants. He tells in delightful detail of the visit which he and his wife made to Lake Itasca, “the very beginning rill of the mighty Mississippi”; of the fossil birds’ eggs in the Bad Lands and of the tall fossil story of Jim Bridger, the pioneer trapper who reported seeing “peetrefied birds on peetrefied limbs singing peetrefied songs.” He tells us of the fern gatherers in the forests of western Washington, and his talk with Donald Braun and Orlo Stephens makes the whole incredible business come alive. He tells us of the sea lions in their cavern on the Oregon coast, and of Leslie Peltier, the backyard astronomer who in his homemade observatory over the past thirtysix years has found more new comets than any other amateur alive. He writes of John Muir roaming alone among the mountains with “a sack of bread over his shoulder and a notebook tied to his belt ”; and of Mariposa Grove, the great stand of redwoods where Muir camped with Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, and of how thirty-two years earlier he had shown the same sequoias to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mr. Teale gets the best out of people as he does out of books; he is good for wild life and particularly good for Americans who should know more about America.

When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey I spent many a wintry Saturday afternoon at Proctor’s Vaudeville. It was a place of inextinguishable anticipation; you would step into the lobby out of the raw cold and study the billboards before you plumped down your quarter, and I shall always remember the strong odor of disinfectant which enveloped you as you entered the darkened interior. The movie was on. Bill Hart was riding across the prairie and the pianist was playing “Pony Boy.” When that was over, the screen was hoisted up, the footlights and spot flooded the stage, and against a pictorial curtain crowded with local advertisements a comedian made his appearance. The show was on. I liked the animal acts, the soft-shoe dancers, and the jugglers. Women who sang “The Rosary,” women in spangles who shook their hips, were a pain in the neck.

I never saw Fred Allen in his heyday as “the Worst Juggler in the World,” but I wish I had. I didn’t meet him until many years later, when “Allen’s Alley” was my favorite show on the air. Meeting him then and hearing him talk about his early days in vaudeville gave me the instant conviction that his autobiography, when he wrote it, would be a joy of a book. For ten years I urged him to write it, and the manuscript was nineteentwentieths completed before his death.

Much Ado About Me (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $,5.00) is the wry, wistful, always funny, often penetrating story of a Boston boy born John Florence Sullivan whose father was a Micawber and whose mother died when he was two. It was the boy’s Aunt Lizzie who stood between him and the world, and he never forgot her. Until he met Portland she was his nearest thing to a heroine. The transition by which the Sullivan boy became first a juggler, then “Fred Allen,” and eventually, after Will Rogers, the most intelligent comedian on the stage, began in the Boston Public Library. There he celebrated his fourteenth birthday by going to work in the stacks; when the employees put on their annual Christmas show and asked the youngster to do something, he said he could juggle — tennis balls, tin plates, cigar boxes, and silk hats. He had even memorized a few jokes (“I had a dream last night. I dreamed I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up the blanket was half gone.” And “How can you stop a dead fish from smelling? Cut off its nose.”) which he told as he did his routine. At the end of the show a girl in the audience burbled, “You’re crazy to keep working here at the library. You ought to go on the stage.” And Fred adds: “If she had only kept her mouth shut that night, today I might be the librarian of the Boston Public Library.”

Fred’s book is his own story, set in the golden age of vaudeville and full of those incredible and dedicated people with whom he lived and acted during his rise from small-time to top booking at the Palace. Fred wrote every word of it; I think it gave him great happiness in his last year, and it is fun for us all the way.

The lost cause is almost always a more poignant story than that of the winning side. For this reason and because the flower of our professional army went with the South, the history of the Confederacy and the biographies of its great leaders, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart and Longstreet, have held first place in our reading and remembrance of the Civil War. We have waited for a book which would speak fairly, critically, and yet respectfully of those who were striving to preserve the Union, and at long last Bruce Catton has righted the balance in his spirited volume, This Hallowed Ground, The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War (Doubleday, $5.95), a big book full of action, alive with soldiers and politicians, persuasive in its judgments. It is remarkably concise for so panoramic a theme, and it makes fast, vivid reading. In his biographical portraits as in his judgment of the military campaigns, the author is as free from prejudice as a historian should be. It is, in short, an illuminating book, and a major contribution to the Mainstream of America Series.

What strikes me very early is the fresh emphasis with which he points up this great and supposedly familiar theme. He shows more clearly than ever I had realized before the cohesion which existed in the North, Midwest, and the border states. What men saw, he writes, “briefly but clearly — after so many years in which nothing was clear—was the fact that they did have a country and that their common possession of it was the most precious thing in the world. For a time this lifted them up, so that they went off to war jubilantly. . .”The land was used to peace, and in pompous, dropsical Winfield Scott, commanding general of the United States Army, the North began with a leader too old to take the field. Yet even in the dim days before Bull Run, it was General Scott who foresaw the winning strategy: “seal off the coast, strike down the Mississippi, destroy Secession state by state, working east from the west” — the strategy which would divide the South and eventually compel the surrender.

Mr. Catton is shrewd, critical, and ironic in his characterization of the Union generals: the romantic, undependable Frémont; Pope the bombastic; Burnside so stubborn and so stupid; Joe Hooker whose will crumbled when Lee faced him. He tells of Allen Pinkerton, the most preposterous source of military intelligence an American army ever employed. He is excellent in his appraisal of McClellan, “Little Mac,”who lacked only the willingness to fight; and his best portrait of them all is of that square, solid, brown figure, Ulysses S. Grant. He explains with graphic touches the differences and the destinies of the three great armies, the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Cumberland, and the Army of the Mississippi, and makes clear why the last was the most rugged and decisive of the three.

Lincoln grows in these pages. We see his hesitation and his disinclination to evoke emancipation as long as there was any chance of bringing the rebellion to a swift conclusion, and how that chance went glimmering when McClellan let it slip away from him on the Chickahominy in June of '62. We hear Lincoln remark that if McClellan did not propose to use the army, he himself would like to borrow it for a time; and we understand, thanks to Mr. Catton, the President’s uncanny and accurate grasp of the military situation. We see his relentless quest for a general who would fight, and why he gave Grant the latitude he did.

All through this epic of heroism, fallibility, and destiny there are echoes of the past, some of them in Mr. Catton’s eloquent phrasing, some of them as they were spoken at the time. A Wisconsin soldier looking on in silent wonder at a Negro prayer meeting writes home, “I beg you not to think of it as being in the jargon of the burnt cork minstrels who sing for money. I cannot describe the pathos of the melody, nor the sweet tenderness of the words as they arose on the night air.”A Confederate officer picked up by Union stretcher-bearers at Corinth tells them as they made him comfortable, “You licked us good today, but we gave you the best we had in the ranch.” And Lee looking down from the heights of Fredericksburg on those blue waves soon to be decimated, says quietly, “It is well that we know how terrible war really is, else we would grow too fond of it.”