Reader's Choice

A couple of sentences at the beginning of ALDOUS HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED (Harper, $3.00) tidily sum up its thesis: “The Prophecies made in 1931 (in Brave New World) are coming true much sooner than I thought they would.

. . . The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century after Ford, [is] just around the corner.”

Mr. Huxley’s book, a collection of essays written for a Long Island newspaper, displays little if any of his customary stylistic luster, and it makes a somewhat tame postscript to its memorable predecessor. Huxley argues that two great impersonal forces inhospitable to individual freedom — overpopulation and overorganization— are propelling mankind toward totalitarianism. Personal forces are accelerating this trend; for democracy can only be made to work if rationality is encouraged, and politicians, producers of goods, and propagandists are systematically appealing to ignorance and irrationality. The totalitarian society of the future, Huxley believes, will resemble that of Brave New World rather than that of Orwell’s 1984, because nowadays men can be made to love orthodoxy more effectively by persuasion and material rewards than by terrorism. (Huxley bypasses the question of what another major economic depression might do to the shape of things to come.)

Astonishing advances have been made, since 1931, in the domain of the techniques used in the Brave New World to achieve universal orthodoxy and contentment. In this connection Huxley discusses the immense power of mass communications, lately reinforced by the sinister potentialities of subliminal suggestion; the successful use of sleepteaching in a California penal camp; the new pills — tranquilizers, stimulants, and vision producers — which perform some of the functions of the Brave New World’s happiness-drug, soma; and the extent to which television and other mindless distractions are serving as “the opium of the people.”

Huxley finds that the Controllers of his Brave New World already have their counterparts in what C. Wright Mills has called “the power élite”; that their propaganda experts are paralleled by the “hidden persuaders,” who manipulate men’s minds through research into their fears and fantasies; and that the conformity of the Brave New World is reflected in the ethos of the overadjusted Organization Man. What is worse, a recent poll of American teen-agers showed that these voters of tomorrow “have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to censorship of unpopular ideas . . . and would be perfectly content . . . to be ruled by an oligarchy of experts.” A “what can be done” chapter, which also cites reasons why it won’t be done, concludes Huxley’s discouraging prognosis.

A good deal of what Huxley says is now the common coin of social critics. The Victorian dogma that science and technology would assuredly make the future rosier than the present gave place, some time back, to the nagging belief that science and technology, besides threatening us with extinction, are causing life to become regimented and dehumanized. In this context, Huxley’s thesis by and large appears eminently plausible. But history has shown that the human desire for freedom is a singularly fierce and durable passion. And is it not significant and reassuring that the trend charted by Huxley is being vigorously criticized and resisted by a sizable and highly articulate minority, which has succeeded in making “conformity” so bad a word that even the apostles of conformity don’t dare to use it? Is it not conceivable that the present pessimism about the human cost of scientific progress is no more reliable a perspective from which to assess the future than was the robust optimism of the Victorians? Mr. Huxley has confined himself to marshaling the evidence that supports his thesis. His book would be a lot more interesting it he had also reached out for and examined some of the indications that we may, just possibly, not succumb to creeping totalitarianism.

THE MEMOIRS OF FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY (World. $6.00) brings us the portrait and the credo of a type which, according to David Riesman, is vanishing from our society: the “inner-directed" man. Indeed, the theme of Montgomery’s autobiography is: “Throughout my life . . . my criterion has been . . . my inward convictions. ... I have never been afraid to say what I believed to be right and to stand firm in that belief. This has often got me into trouble.”

It is plain that Montgomery must have been a difficult, often an exasperating, man to work with if one did not share his views. It is equally clear from his memoir that he is a man of great humanity, whose profound concern for his troops shaped his doctrine of leadership. There is a personal warmth in him, too, which one might not suspect from the publicity given to his austerity and rigid self-discipline. He speaks with unembarrassed emotion about the “great happiness [of] my ten short years of married life" and of his despair when his wife died, and one gathers that he has lavished on his only son the love of a doting father.

Montgomery has written “every word” of his memoirs himself; and his prose style, though lucid, is awkward and repetitious—it has a schoolboyish ring. This is a pity, because in certain respects his autobiography deserves to become one of the classics of military experience. The mismanagement and waste of life which he witnessed in World War I convinced Montgomery that generalship should be a life study and that it called for brain power of a high order — “absolute mental fitness.” All of the great captains of our time have turned in their stories, and I cannot think of any which contains so systematic and so incandescent a philosophy of training and command as that which Montgomery, having brilliantly proved its worth in battle, now sets forth in his memoirs.

Montgomery’s discussion of the controversies in which he has been involved is outspoken but devoid of rancor or harsh words, which is remarkable considering how roughly he has been handled by critics with an ax to grind and professors of war like Ernest Hemingway. One of the major charges against him has been that, in the operations around Caen, his leadership of the British troops was too “defensive.” Montgomery argues that Eisenhower and his colleagues at SHAEF failed to grasp his basic strategy, which was to get the enemy to deploy his main strength on the British front, to keep wearing him down there, and to launch the breakout on the American flank. His plan, he asserts, cast the British in an unglamorous role, but one that made a crucial contribution to what eventually proved a great military achievement.

Of his differences with Eisenhower — “that great and good man, who is now one of my closest friends” — Montgomery writes: “Ike and I were poles apart when it came to the conduct of war. My military doctrine was based on unbalancing the enemy [making him commit his reserves on a wide front], while keepingbalanced myself. . . . Eisenhower’s creed [which Bedell Smith compared to that of a football coach] appeared to be that . . . everybody must attack all the time.” Thus whereas Eisenhower was for driving toward Germany on several fronts, Montgomery wished to channel the maximum strength available into a single, powerful punch at Belgium and the Rhine. He claims that if the Normandy break-through had been followed by a concentrated blow of this kind — mistakenly referred to, he says, by Eisenhower as a “pencil-like thrust” — enemy resistance would have collapsed, and the Allies would have been in Berlin well ahead of the Russians and with far less loss of life than the strategy adopted cost them. This issue will be debated for a long time to come, but the military records of the Germans have tended to support Montgomery’s thesis; and we certainly know how right he was in opposing the naïve dogma that concern about the Russians must not be allowed to influence Allied plans for winning the war.

MNRLBOROUGIUS DUCHESS (Knopf, $-5.75) by Louis KRONENBERGER is a biography of the kind I happen to find most attractive. Mr. Kronenberger abhors pedantry as much as he does popularization; and he works on the civilized principle that the challenge to a biographer lies in being discerningly selective rather than relentlessly encyclopedic. In this case, the challenge is a formidable one, since the life of Sarah Churchill, first Duchess of Marlborough (1660 -1744), spans six reigns, and that of her husband, one of the greatest soldiers in English history, has filled four spacious volumes by his descendant, Sir Winston Churchill. While Sarah is his primary subject, Mr. Kronenberger has achieved an arresting dual portrait of the duchess and her duke. He has firmly outlined the intricate politics and the wars of the period; has brought to life the moral climate of a brilliant, disputatious age (the age of Swift, Defoe, Pope, Newton, and Wren); and has sketched in telling strokes the leading protagonists in the great world through which the Marlboroughs moved. All this in 300 pages, written with grace and spirit and packed with lapidary anecdote.

Mr. Kronenberger suggests that the unity of his narrative, subtitled “A Study in Worldliness,” rests in “the worldly nature of everything that attracted and affected the Marlboroughs.” Ironically, the beautiful Sarah Jennings and the dashing John Churchill, though both had their sights set on money and power, married for the unworldliest of reasons — love — and remained forever after passionately devoted to each . other. What is so astonishing about their lifelong love story is that, while they shared the same vaulting ambition (and the same indecent stinginess), they stood at opposite poles in their manners and their methods. John Churchill’s manners were irresistible; he was the suavest of diplomats and politically something of a trimmer. Though a staunch Protestant, he owed his early rise to a Catholic patron who in due course became James II. He deserted James in the revolution that brought William of Orange to the throne, but later kept up a questionable if not treasonable correspondence with the exiled King. It was an age of twofaced allegiance, of hedging one’s bets, and John Churchill was everywhere considered “the courtliest man of the age.” His wife, though she had the arrogance and authority of a grande dame, had the temper and manners of a barbarian. Compulsively quarrelsome, she was, in the jargon of psychiatry, a raging “’injustice collector.” In the pithier idiom of her day, she was once described as that “B. [for bloody] B.B.B. old B.”

As the favorite of that dull, dowdy dumpling, Princess Anne, Sarah wielded immense power when her mistress became Queen. At the same time her husband’s lustrous victories in the war against France brought him a dukedom, properties, and a large income. But Sarah’s bullying partisanship (for the Whigs), her vituperative nagging, and her displays of bored disdain turned the Queen’s adoration into deepening hostility. And Sarah’s eventual downfall at court swept Marlborough into limbo under the advent of George I.

From middle age on, Sarah’s life was an orgy of warfare: she railed against the Tories, the Whig Prime Minister Walpole, the architect who was building Blenheim castle, George I, George II and his Queen, and her own children. She made and kept, however, the friendship of some of the leading spirits of her time — Lord Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope who relished her quick mind, her intemperate courage, and her brio. So capably did she manage her business affairs that she became “possibly the richest woman alive in any country.” The historian C. V. Wedgwood has aptly summed her up as “impossible but also incomparable.” She made an imprint on English history just by being inextinguishably herself.

The novella which gives its title to TRUMAN CAPOTE’S new book, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (Random House, S3.75)—three short stories are also included — is the portrait of a Manhattan playgirl; and offhand I can’t recall one so freshly conceived and so artfully executed. Mr. Capote has unerringly fastened upon the sugar and spice and thingsnot-so-nice which the playgirl type is made of, and he has created out of them a unique and startling specimen of the species: Holly Golightly.

Capote’s narrator is a young, unpublished writer who is living in an apartment in a Manhattan brownstone. There he meets a new tenant, a girl of nineteen who has just arrived in New York and has landed on her feet in the gossip columns. Fascinated by her chaotic modus vivendt and her nonchalant confessions, he is gradually drawn, as a platonic friend, into her crazy mixedup existence, and here are some of the things he discovers: she is conscientiously mercenary (“I simply trained myself to like older men”; “Any man with the slightest chic will give you fifty . . . for a taxi”), is brazen in her sex talk but has an unto-thyself-be-true kind of honesty. Her staple reading, other than the tabloids, is astrological charts. On Thursdays, for a “honorarium” of a hundred dollars, she visits a racketeer in Sing Sing, apparently just to cheer him up; she sometimes cries in her sleep and sometimes says her prayers and is devoted to cats; when she gets an attack of Angst, which she calls “the mean reds,” her remedy is to take a walk around Tiffany’s; she was the child bride of a Texan horse doctor, whom she has not bothered to divorce, and now she plans to marry a Brazilian diplomat. Insofar as plotting is concerned, Capote has a trick up his sleeve, and it produces a surprising climax.

The looks, clothes, and habits that Capote has given Holly conjure up a precise image, and he has equipped her with an idiom of her own which, in its often gamy way, is extremely amusing. The character he has created is outré, funny, touching — and real.

THE CAUTIOUS HEART (Reynal, S3.50) by WILLIAM SANSOM is a trim novel pinpointed on a harassed love affair. The narrator, a pianist in a night club, and a girl called Mary O’Hara fall in love. But there is a sore in their relationship: Mary’s devotion to an old friend, Colin, a good-for-nothing who is a kleptomaniac and a drunk. Handsome, charming, imperturbable, Colin sponges off his girl friend, Eileen, cadges handouts, and counts onMary to keep rescuing him from trouble. Mary’s inordinate concern for this wastrel infuriates and torments the narrator. But for her sake he joins in helping Colin (who persists in going from bad to worse), and he finally comes to the realization that not Mary but he has been at fault — he has been lacking in charity.

It might be said of this book, as of Sansom’s A Bed of Roses, that it is a good novel which ends by registering a bad point, or at least a dubious one. At the climax of A Bed of Roses, a young woman abandons an admirable fiancé to return to a lover who is a sadistic cad and has made her life hell; and Sansom presents this not as a wretched surrender to masochism but as the triumph of true love. The moral of The Cautious Heart is that real charity Consists not in trying to help a person to put things right but in accepting his failings as “incurable” and lightening his distress: “what is, is.” By this token, the charitable thing is not to encourage an alcoholic to join AA but to see that he is not distressed by lack of booze. In any event, Colin, as portrayed by Sansom, is the subtlest form of tyrant, the one whose power derives from moral blackmail (“You can’t let me down”). And it seems to me that when the narrator (who is going to marry Mary) accepts the idea of being saddled with Colin’s troubles for life, Sansom is again misrepresenting a surrender to masochism as a victory of the heart. Except for this questionable ending, the novel is a most accomplished piece of work. Colin is a marvelous characterization of the jaunty sponger, and Eileen — the tough, slightly zany cutie who is his “regular”— is a delightfully humorous figure. Sansom’s handling of the love affair is sensitive and intimate. And the writing and storytelling are deft and ingratiating.

THE BELL (Viking, $4.50) by IRIS MURDOCH, perhaps the most original of the English writers who have made a reputation in the nineteen fifties, is much longer and more complex than her three earlier books, and I might as well start off by confessing I found it a rather puzzlingaffair. The setting is an Anglican lay community attached to an abbey on one of the great estates of England. It was founded a year before the story opens with the idea of creating a haven for those “unhappy souls whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary world, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely.” The members of this community and its temporary residents are on the whole an odd, and certainly an oddly assorted, bunch. And their highminded leader is a homosexual who was once involved in a scandal that ended his plans for entering the church.

The story concerns itself with the relationships between various members of this hothouse world, with the arrival of a new bell for the abbey and the simultaneous discovery in the lake of the lost fourteenth-century bell about which there is a sinister legend. The climax is an eruption of scandal and disaster with resonant overtones of the grotesque, and a broad vein of satire runs through the book. But if Miss Murdoch is out to satirize the whole idea of “hallway" communities like Imber Court— if she is trying to say that for the most part they attract neurotics and queers — then why does she write perfectly seriously about the community’s aspirations, religious practices, and a good many other matters? There is certainly no halfway house in satire, and part of the time Miss Murdoch appears to be playing it straight. But in spite of a certain bewilderment, I found the peculiar atmosphere and goings on in this book fairly entertaining. Miss Murdoch’s characterizations are highly individual, and her writing is always witty and assured.

ROGER VAILLAND’S novel, THE LAW (Knopf, &3.95), won the Priz Goncourt in its native France, was a Book Society choice in England, and is now a selection of the Book-of-theMonth Club. This triple endorsement led me to hope for larger qualities than I was able to detect. The operative word for M. Vailland’s novel is “expert,” not distinguished.

The setting is a small coastal town in the southwest of Italy, and the title and theme are derived from a sadistic game played throughout the region. When cards or dice have determined who is to be “chief,” the winner proceeds, with the support of an appointed deputy, to “dictate the law” to the other players: he is free to question, praise, blame, insult, slander — there is no limit to the verbal outrage in which he may indulge — and the losers must submit to everything without a sound. M. Vailland’s chronicle of Porto Manacore is animated by the notion that life is just like the game: the naturally dominant people dictate the law to their inferiors. This is simply the nineteenth-century doctrine that Adolf Hitler found so titillating, and M. Vailland, too, seems to be entranced by it.

But when Vailland’s dingy philosophy is not in evidence — and most of the time it is not — his book is highly entertaining. The story carries us through a vivid world of intrigue, amorous and otherwise, and peoples it with a fine array of figures: Brigante, the racketeer who controls everything, including cuckoldry; old Don Cesare, the lord of the area and the historian of its antiquity, once an insatiable seducer of virgins and still a man of fearsome spirit; Marietta, a beautiful young serving girl, as shrewd and tough as Brigante himself; and a dozen others. The whole performance has power, a high charge of irony, and a strong feel of place—of a harsh, primitive land, still on the outskirts of the modern world.

GRAHAM GREENE’S most recent book, OUR MAN IN HAVANA (Viking, $3.50), is another of those superior thrillers of his, which are among the best reading matter on the middle ground between escapist entertainment and the serious novel. In this instance, the plot is startling for a thriller in that it hinges on a situation which Evelyn Waugh might have devised for a burlesque of the cloak-and-dagger business; and it is one from which Greene extracts wry comedy that is often very funny.

The novel’s hero, Wormold, is an English salesman of vacuum cleaners in Havana — one of those dim, emotionally scarred men ("he believed in nothing”) whom Greene draws so well. Though his wife has deserted him, he has kept his promise to her that their daughter Milly would be brought up as a Catholic; and now this pious and lovely girl of seventeen is the only thing he cares about. To earn some extra money for her future, he lets himself be shanghaied into the British Secret Service by a somewhat preposterous compatriot. He has no intention of engaging in espionage, and when London calls for action, he embarks on an elaborate game of make-believe: he names real people whom he has recruited as subagents; he cooks up intelligence reports; he makes sketches of the parts of his “Atomic Pile” vacuum cleaner and sends them in as drawings of the mysterious new military installations in a remote forest.

At this point, readers who expect the spying in a thriller to be the genuine article may feel, as I did, that they are being annoyingly swindled. But Wormold’s play-acting, which has so impressed his superiors that they reinforce him with a secretary and a radio operator, has impressed the opposition no less; and he and his unwitting subagents become the targets of a murderous man hunt. From here on Greene delivers suspense, romance (with the secretary), and a satisfying and delightfully ironic climax.

It has been said of Graham Greene that he reduces theology to melodrama and raises melodrama to theology. Wormold’s lack of compunction about swindling the Secret Service — his derisive conviction that its activities are “unreal” —reflects Greene’s doctrine that human goals are irremediably sordid and pointless; that man is saved by grace alone. Milly is a symbol of grace, and Wormold, for all his “invincible ignorance” of God, is touched by it. He is spared from what, in terms of Greene’s Jansenist theology, is the criminal innocence of “the quiet American,” which consisted in not comprehending that those who work hardest at serving strictly human ideals are likely to do the greatest amount of evil. Greene’s contemptuous satire of the British Secret Service should make it clear that he is not anti-American in the customary political sense: he is opposed to the humanist belief, which happens to loom large in the American credo, that man can help himself through his own efforts.

After a four-year absence, RAYMOND CHANDLER’S memorable private eye, Philip Marlowe, is back on the job in PLAYBACK (Houghton Mifflin, S3.00). His assignment is to meet the Super Chief in Los Angeles, identify among the passengers a shapely redhead named Eleanor King, tail her until she checks in somewhere, and simply report her address to his client, a famous attorney. Marlowe has no idea of what’s behind this, and he is even more puzzled when he finds that the girl, whose real name is not King, is being pursued by a blackmailer, who is being shadowed by another private eye, who in turn has somebody’s hired gunman on his trail. I’m afraid this plot is a bit too puzzling for its own good-what a mystery story is about should not be so much of a mystery. I missed, too, in Playback the climate of malevolence and danger, the exotic characterizations, the driving pace and imaginative mayhem that made Chandler’s earlier books masterpieces of that kind. And the language — though it occasionally runs to a sentence like: “I’ve got friends who could cut you down so small you’d need a stepladder to put your shoes on” — isn’t as electrifying as it used to be. But even though Chandler is nowhere near the top of his form, Playback is certainly several cuts above the run-ofthe-mill thriller.

MORE IN SORROW (Holt, $4.00) by the late WOLCOTT GIBBS is a collection of what he considered the best of his large output for the New Yorker. It contains brilliant parodies (of Huxley, Hemingway, Pegler, Sinclair Lewis, Saroyan, and, most memorable of all, Luce); profiles (of Woollcott, Benchley, Thomas Dewey — the latter a hatchet job which spares nothing but Dewey’s mustache, “a dream ... an italicized swearword in a dull sentence”); reportorial pieces, one of which — an account of a visit to Lucius Beebe in his fairy-tale-like railway coach— surely belongs among the masterpieces of humorous journalism; short stories; theater reviews; and a couple of book reviews which are awesome examples of Gibbs’s powers of elegant annihilation. His talent was a highly limited one in the sense that there was only a single key in which he was fully at home — the key of cool derision. But within it he was a virtuoso.

I’m sure it is safe to say that ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE is the first man to have traveled around the world carrying the world’s history in his head. The result of his leisurely journey is a collection of seventythree essays, EAST TO WEST (Oxford University Press, $4.50), which demonstrate how much the mind can broaden travel by adding side trips into the past. Professor Toynbee has omitted from his book most of the heavily touristed areas and has given prominence to the remote, strange places which he made a special point of getting to (“I have ridden up one of Iran’s hidden valleys on a donkeyback; I have threaded my way through the Syk at Petra on foot”). Toynbee is a graceful writer when he is not enmeshed in the categories of his historical system, and here, happily, he is in his most informal mood.