The Peripatetic Reviewer

OUR first formal meeting with the Union of Soviet Writers, who were to be our hosts throughout our stay in Russia, took place in their Moscow headquarters. It is a two-story spacious old dwelling, rather in the style of a Southern plantation, with curving wings, formerly the stables and kitchen quarters, and with six white Doric columns supporting the pediment over the heart of the house. The drive, which enters through big stone gates, encircles a garden of phlox, daisies, and poppies, in the center of which sits the brooding statue of Tolstoi in his old age; and this is appropriate, for Tolstoi is the greatest of all Russian writers and this very house served as his model of the Rostovs’ home in War and Peace.

Our small delegation — Alfred Kazin, Paddy Chayevsky, and myself (we were to be joined later by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.) — had been welcomed by the spokesman of the Union, Alexi Serkov; we had inscribed and presented the copies of our books and magazines, and now we were seated at the conference table with members of the Union, discussing the itinerary for our twenty-five days and listing those Russian authors and editors, playwrights and producers whom we hoped to meet, either in Moscow or in their dachas in the country.

It was evident even on this first day that the Russians are remarkable linguists — and why they have to be. In response to my comment that in our country the use of dialect was disappearing and that writers, whatever their background, were reaching for a language common to all, the chairman replied that in Russia things were very different. “Here,” he proclaimed, almost as if in a public address, “here we are cultivating sixty different literatures from the people in our sixteen republics, many of them at varying stages of development. But sixty in all. Sixty!” The idea was too big to grasp at first, and I am still not sure how much exaggeration there may have been in it. But as we traveled in the days to come, we realized that, in the main, it seemed true. There is a yearly outpouring of novels, plays, folk tales, and poems in Uzbek, just as there is in Georgian, Kirghiz, and Ukrainian. Two thousand new books by Ukrainian authors have been published in the last four years; in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, sixteen publishing houses turn out the books, plays, and periodicals for the eight million citizens of this pastoral Asian republic. Promotion of the native lore and language explains why there is an enormous need for good translators both in the interior of Russia and for visitors.

Marshak was the first Russian author we visited in his home, and our high tea with him in his bookfilled, comfortable apartment underscored the extraordinary prestige of the translator in Russian life. Marshak, kindly, gray-haired, and in frail health, was a protégé of Gorki. It was Gorki who encouraged his poetry when the boy was thirteen, who found a sanatorium for him when, at fifteen, he came down with tuberculosis, and who raised the fund to send him to London on his recovery. In London, Marshak learned English with something of a Scotch burr because he fell in love with Robert Burns. Today his translations of Burns, which one Russian told me are even better than in the original Scotch, are sold out within a fortnight, and the total sales of his editions have passed a half million. He went on to translate William Blake, Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll. The royalties of his own poems would have made him comfortably off; these plus the royalties of his translations have made him a millionaire. His recollections of Gorki and his account of what London meant to him in the years before World War I were endearing. He was there in 1912, at the same time as Robert Frost, and he seemed particularly pleased with Frost’s Collected Poems, which I included with our other books.

The list of writers I had asked to see began with Mikhail Sholokhov, whom the Russians regard as their greatest living writer and with whom I hoped to go fishing on the Don. I knew that Sholokhov was an avid angler — his account of the catching of the giant carp, which occurs early in his big novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, was proof enough — and I took some trout flies for a gift and a bottle of American vodka (bourbon), for which, friends told me, he had a special liking. But the Cossack country is a far cry from Moscow, and as things turned out it was Mr. Khrushchev who went to visit the novelist, not I. Rumor had it that the novel Mr. Sholokhov had just finished, the second volume in his trilogy about the collectivization of the Cossack villages in the 1930s, had a tragic ending, and the speculation in Moscow was that Mr. Khrushchev wanted to see for himself just how tragic the book really was.

This points up another sharp difference between the attitudes prevailing in America and those in the Soviet Union. In Russia it is a canon that one shall write about a “ positive hero,” with only such social criticism as can be said with a grin and with an ending which, if it be not happy, should at least combine glory, patriotism, and achievement. This is a form of censorship, and the question our delegation was constantly prying at was how much the Soviet writers of today dare to defy it. They know that they have been granted more latitude by Mr. Khrushchev than by Stalin (though not precisely how much). And since Russians are blessed with a hearty sense of humor, the way in which they are employing satire, fantasy, and direct analogy, as in Ilya Ehrenburg’s famous essay on Chekhov, as a means of freeing themselves from the more tiresome restrictions is heartening to read.

We drove out to see Mr. Ehrenburg on a perfect August afternoon. His country place, some eighty kilometers from Moscow, is in the district where Chekhov practiced as a young doctor, and the gardens which Ehrenburg tends himself and which are on a wooded slope above a slow winding stream were in full bloom. There we sat on an open porch sipping tea or vodka and listening to him tell of his lifelong friendship with Picasso, whom he had first met in Paris in the Blue Period, of his quarrels and friendship with Hemingway during the Spanish War, and of his veneration for Chekhov.

Later that week we took supper with Konstantin Fedin in his dacha on the fringe of a thick birch forest, where he can keep track of the birds he loves and write the novels which have made him famous. Fedin, who is the new First Secretary of the Writers’ Union, is a gentle man, responsive, approachable, and seems as quietly removed from politics as one could well be. In each case, these were men of cultivation and of purpose, men of substance whose wealth is expressed in the books and gardens and woods and the privacy they enjoy. Each was perfectly aware of what was expected by the state, and each has effected a working compromise between those demands and his own compulsion as an individual artist.

CARL MYDANS, who has been with Life ever since its first issue in 1936, is one of the most expert photo-journalists of our time. At the outset he was a bird dog retrieving for his editors, and a typical day began with his taking pictures of the processing of skunk fur in the garment district of New York. Later that morning he flew to Washington to photograph Congressman Sol Bloom in his Boy Scout uniform, and at noon he was aboard a chartered plane bound for the Bethlehem Steel strike in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. From Johnstown he flew to Waycross, Georgia, to do a story on J. J. Wilder, a beekeeper, and when Mr. Wilder objected, Mydans wired New York “ Wrong season for bees.” In 1939 he fell in love with Shelley Smith, one of the prettier editors, and shortly after their marriage that summer they were the first team that Life sent abroad to cover the war. They have been recording history ever since with a sympathetic understanding which is the keynote of Carl’s book, MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE (Harper, $4.00).

Carl began his reportorial career with courage and humility, qualities which have been an invaluable passport. He pictured the Finns’ valiant resistance to the Russians in the arctic war of 1940, and it was his humility which prompted a Finnish colonel to turn to him in tears to ask why the Americans had never come to their rescue. He felt the humiliation of the French collapse; he photographed the Chinese in Chungking and in their massive ancient forts commanding the Yellow River; and he and Shelley were both captured and imprisoned in Santo Tomas when the Japanese overran the Philippines. His vignettes of the life spark in captivity are just about his best. After two years the Mydanses were exchanged via Shanghai and the Gripsholm, and so were free to return, in time, with the American forces which liberated the very compounds in which they and their friends had suffered. Through his camera view finder, Carl watched the surrender aboard the “Big Mo,” and it was inevitable, authority that he had become, that he should be sent to the East again when the fighting broke out in Korea. Carl and I attended the first performance at the Bolshoi this September, and as we walked back to the hotel together at midnight he confided that his next assignment would probably be Moscow. “ If we are entering a new phase with the Russians,” he said, “it is something I wouldn’t want to miss.”

Early in his career Carl was sent to Texas to take pictures of an old weathered range rider, who looked like something right out of the Indian wars. As he circled the old cowboy with his camera, Carl heard the Texan whisper to a friend, “Ain’t he a bird!” and the friend whisper back, “Wonderful to watch.” Well, that goes for Carl Mydans and his book.

In the great days of radio, when Information, Please was educating several million Americans with its blend of knowledge and humor, we all came to admire JOHN KIERAN, a sports writer with a most lively and incredible range of information. He could not be stumped by anything to do with natural history, and I am sure it was this interest that made him gravitate to Rockport, Massachusetts, where he has easy access to shore and land birds and where he has established himself as a most perceptive and entertaining naturalist.

In NATURAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY (Houghton Mifflin, $5.75), Mr. Kieran turns back to the country of his boyhood, to the parks and pavements, the shore, the marshes, and the skyscrapers where for fifty years he has observed and made notes of the wildlife which still inhabits Greater New York. His book, so delightfully pointed up by the black-and-white illustrations of Henry Bugbee Kane, holds discovery and surprise for every city dweller; if these birds and beasts, these amphibians and flowers and insects abound in Manhattan, so they do in Boston or Buffalo — if you know where to look.

The fun of the book is its fresh inquisitiveness, founded like the city itself on a substratum of solid matter. Mr. Kieran tells of the old town as the Dutch formed it, of its rocky foundation, and of why the skyscrapers have been clustered midtown and downtown. He tells of the hundred different minerals which have been discovered under the city and of the amethysts which are still being chipped; of the water problem, which was finally solved by the Croton Aqueduct (eighty gallons per person per day is the present consumption); of the shad which still battle their way up the polluted Hudson; of the eight-inch brook trout which was found swimming in the gutter on 58th Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison when a water main broke; of the peregrine falcons plunging through the canyons of Wall Street in pursuit of pigeons; of the eighty-eight hawks which he counted soaring over Baker Field as Navy was trimming Columbia; and of the bald eagles which anyone can spot with field glasses when the Hudson is full of ice floes. What Gilbert White did for Selborne, John Kieran has done for New York, and it needed doing.

No American of our time writes so authoritatively about the sea as ADMIRAL SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON. His fourteen-volume history of the Navy in World War II, on which he has been engaged since 1942, is now nearing completion; his power of narration, so well-tempered in this great task, and his rugged honesty as a historian combine to make his new biography, JOHN PALL JONES (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $6.50), an exceptional book.

What Morison does is to make this man live again in all his Scotch contrariness. Here was a boy, son of a gardener, who became a famed sea captain and a prominent figure in the Court of Versailles. Morison depicts his early cruises to the West Indies as an apprentice of thirteen; he shows us John Paul’s flashy temper and tells of how he had to fight for his life against an overpowering sailor and, having killed him, was charged with murder. He fled from Tobago, added Jones to his name, and came to America. Here he entered into lifelong friendships with Hancock, Morris, and Benjamin Franklin, and he deliberately signed on in the Continental Navy instead of taking the bigger money he could have made as a privateer. Morison explores the profits of privateering and makes us understand why Jones fussed so much over his prize money, showing how he had to pay out of his own pocket time and time again to keep his ships in fighting trim.

I particularly like the chapters which tell us of Jones’s audacity on his first cruise in the Providence; of the happy days ashore in Portsmouth when the Ranger was fitting out; of what a Casanova Jones proved to be in Paris; of the pleasure which he must have had serving with the French flagship; of the terror and anger which he inspired in London when he was making his raids off the Scottish coast; and, finally, of his greatest triumph, in the battle between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis. Jones had a hero’s welcome and a golden sword awaiting him when at last he returned to Philadelphia, and he should have been given the chance to put the Navy on a professional basis; instead, Congress casually deprived him of his flagship, refused to promote him to admiral, and finally released him to do his last campaigning under Catherine the Great. Although small in stature, he was not quite as small as Nelson, nor was his heart as great. He was a tough, skillful seaman who played a unique part in the Revolution, and Morison draws him as he was.