The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE summons to jury duty is something one opens with a groan, but I must say that each time I have served I have come away with a feeling of reassurance. The men and women in the jury pool are on their mettle, and they know it; they are nervous when they enter the court, and although some of this wears off, what does not wear off is their respect for the judge. In their attentiveness they are swift to realize that the judge is their referee, that the opposing counsel are special pleaders, and that the witnesses are as vulnerable as they, the jurors, might be under the given circumstances. This feeling of “There but for the grace of God go I” is always present in the jury room. I remember during Prohibition one juror saying to a group of us while we were waiting to be called: “I warn you boys that I won’t find against any motorist charged with driving under the influence unless he’s done real harm. I take a drink sometimes before I drive home, and I’m damned if I’ll be a hypocrite,” and another juror saying, “I don’t see how we can accuse a man of playing the numbers when we all do it ourselves.”

This fellow sympathy can result in a spontaneous verdict, as it did in a case of alleged highjacking. The driver of the truck defended himself, without a lawyer, and with an honesty and indignation which were transparent; the lawyer for the trucking company, charging conspiracy, was a shuffler of papers and a master of insinuation. His manner was contemptuous, and he antagonized the jury in less than forty minutes. Jurors are just as irritable in the face of warped testimony or downright lying. In a rape case on which I sat, it was perfectly apparent that both sides were skirting the truth. Innocence was not a party to the proceeding, yet there was the child, and the question was how much the young man could honestly contribute for its upbringing.

It is my experience that a jury is most susceptible during the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the trial. Here is the opening narrative as it is presented by the first witness, and if the witness has a colorful idiom and is being led on by a skillful lawyer, the jury will receive impressions which are lasting and which, by a deft touch here and there, can be made to confuse the issue. I remember a murder case involving three Negroes: the dead man, the accused (it had taken years to apprehend him), and the single witness, whom I shall call Jenkins. The lawyer for the accused was himself a Negro, mellifluous and polished, and the opening testimony as he drew it from little Mr. Jenkins was a thing of beauty. It appeared that the trio had been drinking and gambling in a lodginghouse bedroom; Jenkins had been cleaned (except for his insurance policy, which he wouldn’t play for), and while he dozed on the couch, the other two played passionately on.

“And what woke you up, Mr. Jenkins?” asked the lawyer.

“The knives did. The knives were out and the blades were crying.”

“And how would you describe Mr. Smith? [The victim.] Would you say he was excited?”

“Yes, sir, he sure was excited. He was more — he was rambitious!”

“And then, what did you do?”

“I sprang between ‘em, brave as a lion!” — which indeed he had done, with the result that his cheek was laid open from his ear to his chin. We saw the hairline of the long scar, but more than that we heard the pleading of the lawyer not to judge these men by our standards but to remember “the law of survival . . . self-defense.” Through this comitragedy the excuse of “self-defense” was woven like a thread. The accused, a formidable figure, was never put on the stand; instead his lawyer lead him over to our box and ripped open his shirt to show us a most appalling scar.

We were a shaken jury when we were locked into our room, and the first vote was ten to two for acquittal. But there were two of us who had some experience with wounds, and when we pointed out that Jenkins’ cut and the great welt on the chest of the accused could never have been sustained in the same fight, the emotion began to change. Nine hours later we went back into the court to have the first fifteen minutes of testimony read back to us. Then we knew that the big fellow had been looking for trouble from the start. Verdict: Manslaughter, second degree.

Juries can be misled, but they keep on trying, and it is my conviction that in the majority of cases their findings are right. The most noticeable difference between my recent term and my first, which was served under Prohibition, was not in the jurors but in the witnesses. I should say that the morality of the witnesses has declined, particularly in the civil suits. People trying to gouge the Metropolitan Transit system, people claiming preposterous indemnity for trivial or nonexistent injuries, were an ugly demonstration of this ‘’something for nothing” age. But murder will out, and so will dishonesty, and it was reassuring to note with what conscientiousness the jury would settle down to figure out the costs when injury had really been proved.

The most distinctive feature in the Paris Review since its first issue has been the series of literary interviews which the young editors arranged with the leading writers of our day, men and women of the stature and diversity of E. M. Forster, Mauriac, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Thornton Wilder, and Frangoise Sagan, to name a few. For reasons of economy this was the only way the Review could hope to attract such sought-for contributors to its columns, and the book which has resulted, WRITERS AT WORK, edited by MALCOLM COWLEY (Viking, $5.00), a collection of sixteen of the dialogues, is a refreshing tribute to the eagerness and preparation of those who asked the questions and to the writers who gave so generously of their time and thought. For those who like to go behind the scenes of contemporary writing, these discourses, so frankly inquiring, so laden with experience, are a must.

These sixteen, as might be expected, are in agreement on only a very few points: They agree, most of them, that writing is “fun”; that three or four hours’ work is the maximum for any one day; that what Angus Wilson calls “the gestatory period” is important and of unpredictable length, and that a first draft of a story had better be written at top speed with the filing and polishing to come later, although to this Dorothy Parker says she needs six months to do a story.

What gives the book its fascination is not the general agreement but the differences. I found myself absorbed in Mr. Forster’s architectural discussion of his novels, particularly of his Passage to India. In Robert Penn Warren’s interview, the cultivated sensitive Southerner is speaking, and I like the account of his growth and of the redefinition of his ideas from I’ll Take My Stand, through the novels, to Segregation. I was surprised by the prodigality of Simenon — a one-man factory, he — and the humbleness of Sagan. Dorothy Parker may be her own worst critic, and certainly she has no illusions about her poetry when she says: “My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated — as anything once fashionable is dreadful now.” But her prose is in a class by itself, sharp-edged, probing, in a voice unmistakably her own. There is always a temptation to read aloud or quote from a book like this, and I cannot resist doing it with Parker and Thornton Wilder.

INTERVIEWER: How about Hollywood as provider for the artist?

PARKER: Hollywood money isn’t money. It’s congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are. . . .

Thornton Wilder in his turn was asked to consider the problems confronting young writers: “Is advertising or journalism or teaching English a suitable vocation?” asked the interviewer. Thornton’s reply is a classic. “I think all are unfavorable to the writer. If by day you handle the English language either in the conventional forms which are journalism and advertising, or in the analysis which is teaching English in school or college, you will have a double, a quadruple difficulty in finding your English language at night and on Sundays. It is proverbial that every newspaper reporter has a half-finished novel in his bureau drawer. Reporting — which can be admirable in itself — is poles apart from shaping concepts into imagined actions and requires a totally different ordering of mind and language. When I had to earn my living for many years, I taught French. I should have taught mathematics. By teaching math or biology or physics, you come refreshed to writing.”

In The Emma McChesney Stories, EDNA FERBER staked out her claim as a delineator of American character; and in Show Boat she gave us one of the most appealing romances of the stage. Thereafter, in novels like Cimarron and Giant, she has written of the big operator, the limitless and often unscrupulous development of our natural resources, and the corrupting effect of power and wealth upon the individual. In ICE PALACE (Doubleday, $4-50) she has moved her setting to Alaska, our last frontier, and again she is writing about big strapping men: Thor Storm and Czar Kennedy (the very names spell strength), Thor with his Norwegian heritage and Henry George philosophy, Czar with his Yankee shrewdness and his greed to own the whole place. They came over on the same boat, pioneered together, and for fifty years have rivaled each other. Now, as Miss Ferber puts it, they are waging “a silent persistent battle for the welfare — as they saw it — of the girl Christine.” Chris is their solitary grandchild, born in the carcass of a caribou in a howling blizzard; she is twenty-five when the story opens, unmarried, black-eyed, golden-haired, hard to curb. The question is, Who will do it?

This reads to me like an old Morality. Czar’s associates from Outside, the boys from Seattle — Dave Husack, Sid Kleet, and Cass Baldwin are the very embodiment of those predatory commercial interests which have been trying to monopolize Alaska for the past half century. For reasons of profit they oppose statehood, and for the same reasons they would suppress every local spokesman with the courage to oppose their schemes. The history of Seward’s Purchase, the story of the early reckless days, of the potential locked in these vast northlands have been carefully built into the novel, but the pity of it is that by her process of overenlargement, Miss Ferber makes the picture seem less than believable.

Part of the trouble is traceable to her extravagant phrasing. I am prepared to believe that everything in Alaska is larger than life, except human nature, which I suspect must be pretty much the same there as it is here. Yet in phrases like these the author does less than justice to her people: “Oscar’s little eyes narrowed to slits”; “A little cold white flame of dislike shot from beneath Czar Kennedy’s eyelids”; “he ruffled the silver plumes of his hair”; “tossing the amber stuff down their throats with one quick backward jerk of the head”; “Sid Kleet’s steely voice cut the tension”; “Her hatless head was like a golden torch ‘; “His lethal gaze searched the crowd, passionless and coldly menacing as the eye of a Colt .38.” Phrases like these are as subtle as brass knuckles. Apart from such theatricality, the virtue of this book is the fact that Miss Ferber cares deeply about the future both of Alaska and of mankind. As she makes clear in Thor’s last statement to Chris: “What a lovely world. The loveliest. We’ve had it, a gift, for a million million years, and now we’re throwing it away. A pity. Alaska, the arsenal. It should be free.”