The Peripatetic Reviewer

You can tell that you are in the Cotswolds by the look of the native stone. “Wold” means “hilly country,” and “cot,” of course, is short for “cottage,” and the cottages hereabouts, in the soft folds of the hills or side by side in the market towns, are of limestone, square cut, well fitted, of pale ocher weathered to soft grays and greens. Small dwellings invite the mind, and these cozy homes, with their windows of the right height for a stranger peering in, make one wonder what it would feel like to live here.

There are those who travel for places, places like Stratford on Avon, which they want to see, photograph, and store away; and there are others, I among them, who travel for people, people whose different way of life I try to measure by my own. For instance, it was second nature for me to pause in Bibury and hang over the parapet of the bridge to watch a fly fisherman repeatedly tossing his big dry fly under the arch of the bridge, only to have it drift unmolestedly out into the open stream. “He’ll not stir that big brown trout there,”I thought to myself, “until dark, and perhaps not then with a fly as big as that.” Further downstream was a second Englishman, kneeling as he worked over a fish, and behind him, as a backdrop, were the gabled, stone-tiled almshouses known as Arlington Row. Then the River Coln curved into a green tunnel, where the grass and trees of emerald were dappled by the slanting, fading sunlight. Robert Henriques, the English novelist, has a stretch of the Coln running through his estate not far from here, and “What would it be like,” I thought, “to live so close to such beauty? What a diary one could keep of the river’s moods.”

I am sure that a river goes with heaven, and so it does with Bourton-on-the-Water, where the tiny Windrush, clear and grass-green, runs like a (clean) Delft canal through the main street. The village church is an attractive one, standing foursquare on the foundation of a Roman temple, but I had eyes only for the river. Whose idea was it originally to contain it and to span it with the low, gently arched bridges? Whatever prompted the local Evelyn, he has left us a charming design, and as a hater of pollution, I liked it the more for being kept clean.

When the time came for a stirrup cup, we paused in the pub in Moreton-in-Marsh. As a cycling undergraduate I once spent a wakeful night in a village pub, overhearing through the thinnest of partitions the young wife desperately trying to persuade her husband to sell the place; and ever since, I have had a curious interest in the saloon business. The pub we now stopped in faced a wide stone street which once echoed to the clang of the Roman legions. (Kipling’s young centurion Pertinax, in Puck of Pook’s Hill, could have led his men by this very spot.) Rome is even more omnipresent in Cirencester, which was the second largest city in Roman Britain. In fine weather, my saturation point in a museum is about seventeen minutes, and after a nod at the Roman relics I walked over to the yellow ivory cathedral with its airy, lacy interior, as compact and as beautiful a small church as you will find in England. Spring flowers were on the altar, the organist was ruminating, and the ancient wineglass pulpit and the battle flags caught the eye.

Then it was but a short drive to Cromwell’s country and to Stow-on-the-Wold, where on March 21, 1646, the Cavaliers made their last stand in defense of Charles I. The Foot — or as we would say, the infantry — was under the command of Major General Sir Jacob Astley. It was he who before the Battle of Edgehill made that touching prayer: “O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me. March on, boys!” And then, on the outskirts of Stow, as the resistance caved in, he was captured. Sitting on a drum, his white hair blowing in the March wind, he said to the Roundheads, “You have now done your work and you may go play, unless you will fall out amongst yourselves.” Valiance like that won the respect of both sides.

I saw Sir Jacob’s portrait in the little museum just off the market square. The portraits here of the leaders in England’s greatest civil war, though most of them are copies, hold a special vitality in this now tranquil village. I noticed that most of them had been collected and donated by a local antiquarian, Captain C., and I thought to myself, how much we owe to the vigilance of a solitary enthusiast like this, imbued with a sense of history. There were pikes and long-barreled muskets, iron hats and cuirasses, one exquisite long roweled spur, and, hanging close to it, a small modern painting of the Ironsides, Cromwell’s cavalry. He held his horsemen in reserve at Stow, as in most of his victories, until the last crushing moment, and here in this painting are the men sitting their horses: you feel their tension and their banter; two of the riders are conversing, and one, bareheaded, is gazing reflectively into his helmet. This is how men wait.

The next morning we drove out of the Cotswolds and on into the flat, far-stretching hedgerows of Cambridgeshire. A mist was falling, and the wind was from the east, typical weather for the Fens country, with what the Times euphemistically calls “occasional bright periods.” So we came to the beginning of Madingley Woods and to the ridge at Caxton Gibbett, where stands the only American military cemetery of World War II in the British Isles, the work of Boston architects, Perry, Shaw, Hepburn & Dean.

The land, some thirty acres, was given by Cambridge University, and there are other evidences of the gratitude the English felt for our men in service. A small plaque on the wall of the Visitors’ Building says it all: “To these gallant American airmen who on August 12, 1944, sacrificed their lives to prevent their aircraft from crashing on our homes, the residents of Cheshunt and Waltham Cross in the County of Hertfordshire dedicate this plaque in grateful memory,” and the names of the personnel, names like Second Lieutenant John D. Ellis, Sergeant Clare W. Hultengren, Sergeant Janjowsky, Sergeant William C. McGinley, Sergeant Jack O. Shaeffer, and Second Lieutenant Robert B. Cox, all of the 577th Bomb Squadron, are typical of this vast silent community.

I remembered how they looked in July of 1943 as they came out of their hatches after their raids on Hamburg — stiff-kneed, their faces flushed and sweaty from the oxygen masks, their hair damp and curly, their eyes looking fixedly at something you could not see. So they came back to earth.

At the high point of the ridge is a platform with a seventy-two-foot flagpole, and at its base the lines by John McCrae: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch — be yours to hold it high.” Across the valley is the vague outline of Ely Cathedral, and to the south, the towers of the college. Closer to hand, down the slope, rank after rank, stand the three-foot white crosses, 3808 of them, and since this was Memorial Day, the terraces were dotted with bouquets of spring flowers sent with love by those in the States.

To the south and west of the platform runs a lagoon leading to the chapel. The reflecting pools are bordered by polyantha roses and are contained by a long stone wall inscribed with the names of the five thousand missing — the aviators, infantry lost in the landing craft, naval officers sunk without trace. Among them I noticed the name of Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. The names are spaced between four statues: a soldier, a sailor, an airman, and a coastguardman, in uniform, carved in sandstone by English craftsmen.

The memorial is at once a war room and a chapel. A vast map of the United Kingdom indicates every place where an American battalion or squadron was situated. Thin metal rods arrow the costly bombing runs made by the British, the Canadians, and ourselves. A series of small maps records the gradual conquest of Hitler’s Reich, beginning with December 7, 1941, when he had so much of the world in his grasp, and showing successively the relentless encirclement of Germany. The mosaics in the ceiling by Francis Scott Bradford are a memorial to those who gave their lives in the air force, and in the tiny chapel the same artist has depicted the archangel with arm raised, sounding his trumpet, and with these compassionate words: “He restoreth my soul — He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.”

The mist was thickening as we left the chapel and descended the path beside the graves. I paused before the headstone of a boy I had known. Here they lie in silence and dedication. These are lives into which no stranger can peer, their hopes dashed and extinguished before they could have ever known the full beauty of this earth.

In 1939, Geoffrey Household published first in the Atlantic and then in book form his short novel Rogue Male, a story about an English sportsman who with a long-range rifle tried to bring down Hitler at Berchtesgaden. That novel today ranks beside John Buchan’s Thirty-nine Steps as one of the classics of pursuit and escape. Such stories of late have taken the form of doom-sounders: On the Beach by Nevil Shute was just such, and now comes J. B. PRIESTLEY with SATURN OVER THE WATER (Doubleday, $4.50). This is the adventure of a young English painter, Tim Bedford, aged thirty-seven and doing quite well with his canvases, who accepts on a rather flimsy pretext the mission of discovering what has become of his cousin’s husband, a Cambridge biochemist who has vanished in Southern Chile. Tim takes a deathbed vow to find Joe Farne; and what follows is his more or less plausible encounters with the countess, who tries to seduce him; with the scientists, German and Russian, who try to drug him or otherwise impede his search; and with the foursquare, desirable Rosalia, granddaughter of the mysterious and wealthy Dr. Arnaldos. She begins by hating Tim and ends, as you might expect, in his arms and in his bed.

Mr. Priestley says that writing Saturn Over the Water was “a piece of sheer self-indulgence. I decided to write the kind of story I love to read but that nobody writes for me.” Indeed, there is zest in the writing, and, apart from the mystery, which a reviewer should not disclose, other facets of this book appealed to me: Mr. Priestley’s ability to tell the story in a painter’s prose and the warning of the nuclear conspiracy which could occur if men as power-mad as Hitler decided that our small world was ripe for the taking.

After the triumph of her big book. The Nun’s Story, it was natural that KATHRYN HULME should look for an American theme, and one which would take her away from Europe back to her home place, San Francisco. The theme she found was her grandfather, Captain John Cavarly, who ran off to sea from New London at the age of fourteen and who rose to be captain of his own clipper at the age of twenty-six. As captain of the Anglo-Saxon, he had the luck to fall in love with one of his passengers, a delicate but strong piece of Dresden china. Despite the family’s misgivings, little Annie Bolles and the captain were married on the deck of his clipper with a week to spare before he had to sail back to England.

He was a disciplinarian, the captain, a man of oak, and an exacting navigator who was to lose only one ship of the more than a score which he commanded, and that one only because, while still in sail, the ship was run down and captured by a Confederate ironclad. Miss Hulme first proposed to tell the captain’s story omnisciently, but I was later able to persuade her to tell it through the eyes of his wife. And so it became ANNIE’S CAPTAIN (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $5.00), an interpretative biography of a woman’s life aboard ship and, in the long absences, ashore, of the honeymoon in San Francisco, the miscarriage at sea, the visits to London and Hawaii, the rearing of the children, who stood in such awe of their brusque father, and the joyous homecomings, in which the captain, by gifts and in his exuberant way, tried to make up for the time they could never share.

As the editor of this book, I cannot possibly review it objectively; I can only say that it is a family chronicle which showed me a seafaring life and a home life which I could not have imagined and which impressed me with the hardihood and resourcefulness of a Yankee skipper who began in sail and who ended in steam.

In THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT (Atheneum, $6.95), THEODORE H. WHITE has written a book which should be enormously informative to the American electorate. Here is a detailed, highly personal account of the seven men who strove for the presidency, of the intimates they teamed together in their campaigns, and of how their strategy paid off— the vital story of inside politics.

Mr. White is a trained observer with a keen ear for what is true and false, and with a determination to be, as far as possible, neutral. His description of the traditional rivalries between the political bosses and the citizen volunteers and his description of the primary, of why the primary is at once so desirable and so hazardous, freshen our understanding. His evaluation of the candidates is close up and fascinating: of Humphrey, with so little money and so much idealism; of Symington and Johnson, who planned for the deadlock; of Stevenson, who “would not act or connive or deal” ; and of Rockefeller, the thoroughgoing liberal who realized that he could not buck his party. The characterization in action of the two finalists both before and after the conventions is highly exciting and gives a truer picture of the efficiency and devotion of the Kennedy team (“They could not be recruited by money and were indeed worth more than money”) than we have had elsewhere.

There are very large imponderables here: the growth of Catholic power, and how much of that power has crossed over into the Republican Party; the northward migration of the Negro vote; the new alliance with conservative Republicanism in the Deep South. There are occasional excesses —the overuse of “in-group” and of “gut,” a word of peculiar attraction to the author — and rare misjudgments, as when he says that Robert La Follette “dominated” the Republican Party of Coolidge and Hoover — plagued, certainly, but not dominated. But, by and large, this is an exciting and edifying book.