The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE turning and falling of ihc leaves make me a calculator of time as I never am in spendthrift June. I get the signal from two maples in my Beverly woods: one is a soft, red maple, at the entrance to my neighbor’s drive, almost perfect in its symmetry, as it shades perceptibly from green to maroon to scarlet; the other has the rugged irregularity of the hard wind-beaten veteran, and like a man of sixty it clings tenaciously to its summer’s green while the top branches turn to canary and saffron. They change, these maples, by a little every day; I resent it when rain and wind bare them; to me they are autumn’s clock.

My work load is heavy in the fall, and I must travel hard, so I try to hold back time by returning to the country for the last open weekends. In the clear squares of the Phillips Brooks calendar, I write cryptic notes which mean sunset drifting on Beaver Pond, casting a moth (artificial) among the half-blackened water lilies, and retrieving, if not a bass, one of the last pink flowers; or taking an Indian summer voyage with Franc and Martha along the breakwater at the mouth of the Ipswich River and out to the shoals, as Malcolm Hudson guides us to where the school stripers will be boiling at change of tide.

There is so much one longs to do before the frost sinks into the ground and our porous little cottage becomes uninhabitable. Some of the best of the doing is contemplative, here within the confines of our three-acre moraine. As I sit at my big work table by the east window, I can see other toilers — the gray squirrel, more often on the ground now than in the high trapeze of the oaks; the hairy woodpecker, flitting and beaking what he wants from the beech. An editor should take note, for in his work, too, there must be a season for putting in as well as one for putting out. The gold-edged days of late autumn are a time for reading and reverie; a time for relishing the Concord grape, the Seckcl pear, and the crisp Mclntosh; a time for looking toward and beyond winter. Just as the yellow ash leaves are the first to fall, so the bronzed oak are the last, and some of them will hold on until spring. One feels the urgency of this season, and something more, for to be expectant is to be with hope, and oblivious to the fact that one more year is passing.

This year, when we drove north to see the blaze of foliage, we took our favorite back road winding inland from Concord to West Townsend to New Ipswich, Peterborough, Dublin, Harrisville, and Nelson Township, where we spent a very happy evening with NEWTON TOLMAN. I had with me, for him to sign, a copy of his new book, NORTH OF MONADNOCK (Atlantic—Little, Brown, $4.50), a number of chapters of which have already appeared in the Atlantic. Newt, who is eighthgeneration New Hampshire, writes with a wry, shrewd, discerning sense of humor which goes straight to the foibles of human nature. His love for the uplands, for the partridge, the bird dog, the unmolested country, and all that goes into a New England fall makes this a timely book.

Our next great stride was to Brandon, Vermont, where I was to fish with Doug Burden in his beautiful High Pond, and this we took slowly, still favoring the back roads and following whenever possible the invitation extended by the GREEN MOUNTAIN TREASURY (Harper, $7.95), that anthology of color pages and halftones drawn from Vermont Life and edited so knowledgeably by WALTER HARD, JR. Picture books, I know, are hard to accommodate on shelves that arc already crowded, but each year I like to set aside two or three of them in our roomy kitchen to be dipped into before and after supper, to keep the mind alight for the spring. This year, I shall take home Green Mountain Treasury and EXPLORING OUR NATIONAL PARKS AND MONUMENTS by DEVEREUX BUTCHER (Houghton, Mifflin, $6.50), which has just appeared in a revised printing.

BRUCE CATTON left Oberlin to enter journalism, and after more than twenty years of newspapering, he went into government service. In Washington, during World War II, he embarked on the long reading and research which were to make him in time an authority on — indeed, almost a proprietor of—the Civil War. He has never lost his editorial acumen, as witness his extraordinary success as the senior editor of American Heritage, and, year by year, his writing as a historian has gained in force and in power of characterization. He has always had a good eye for detail.

THE COMING FURY (Doubleday, $7.50) is the first volume in The Centennial History of the Civil War and a recent selection of the Book-of-theMonth Club. It is the story of the long, almost unbearable tension which began with the opening of the Democratic Convention in Charleston in April, 1860; which reached the boiling point with the election of Lincoln in November; and which finally exploded in the battle of Bull Run. In the long prelude to the battle, a period of anguish and indecision, the leaders, both Northern and Southern, behaved as if mesmerized. The extremists, like Yancey of Alabama, Rhett of South Carolina, and Ruffin of Virginia, knew what they wanted, and that was to make the Southland independent; the Abolitionists knew what they wanted; and the majority of the nation, as Mr. Catton well illustrates, sensed that slavery was an institution which we had outgrown. But President Buchanan was weak and indecisive, and, lacking any lead from the Executive, the politicians, “Instead of hunting for a solution . . . had worked for a crisis. This they would presently get, and when they got it they would find it a catastrophe.”

This book brings out in a most human way the incapacity of each side to see where its actions were leading. South Carolinians, save for old Petigru, could not see that secession would inevitably lead to war, any more than Seward or Horace Greeley could see that if the Southerners were cornered, they would fight. The incongruities in this fateful year seem to us preposterous. Congress, in 1860, voted a total appropriation for the Army of $16 million, with 183 of the 198 companies of regulars on duty on the Western frontier; Thomas L. Drayton of South Carolina openly purchased surplus Army muskets from the U.S. Secretary of War. South Carolina bristled with immense pride as it proclaimed itself “A great, free and prosperous people . . . . We ask you to join us in forming a Confederacy of Slave-holding States.” That there was any paradox in the use of the words “free” and “Slave-holding” in that appeal to the South never was clear to the men who wrote it.

This is the democratic process in a volatile state, and seeing how few men there were who could think as straight as Stephen Douglas or Abraham Lincoln, one begins to reflect, as Walter Lippmann did in The Public Philosophy, on how extraordinarily difficult it is in times of crisis for the American politician to sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of the situation. “The political system,” says Mr. Catton, “was being strained beyond its limit” in 1860. We who are facing a different kind of war must make doubly sure that it is not to be so strained again.

I lunched with an old friend. Eric Hodgins, at the University Club shortly after Pearl Harbor, and I remember his saying, as we crossed the threshold, “On this very spot there should be a plaque reading, ‘Here, the evening of December 6, 1941, an American admiral proclaimed that the Japanese could never take us by surprise.’ ” The overconfidence of American fighting men and the inadequacy of their weapons have seldom been better illustrated than in SAVO: THE INCREDIBLE NAVAL DEBACLE OFF GUADALCANAL, by RICHARD F. NEWCOMB (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $4.95). It seems hard to believe that eight months after Pearl Harbor, on August 9, 1942, so many commanders and so many ships could have been caught asleep, warned as they had been that an enemy task force was approaching. “In human suffering,” writes Mr. Newcomb, “the cost of the Battle of Savo Island was high; in terms of experience gained it was cheap. In one night the United States Navy had been blasted from a distant and romantic past to a harsh and violent present.”

From our own and Japanese sources, the author has set the scene with the vivid detail and mounting tension which Walter Lord employed so successfully in A Night to Remember. Our force was composed of American and Australian cruisers, carriers, destroyers, and transports, and the divided command led to some curious lapses in communication. Thus, Rear Admiral Victor A. C. Grutchley, RN, a hero of Zeebrugge, never bothered to confer with his cruiser captains during their four days at Koro. The air detection was poor, and such aircraft warning as came in was either misinterpreted or relayed to the fleet in a most roundabout way. There were no torpedo tubes on the American cruisers, and as for the torpedoes themselves, the Japanese Long Lance at that period outranged and outdemolished any torpedoes we had. One watches this inevitable collision with something of the bated breath of the Japanese commander himself; even when the searchlights suddenly silhouetted the American targets and the firing began, our officers could not believe that this was the enemy at point-blank range.

In the aftermath, there were bitter accusations against Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, who pulled his carriers out of range the night before the battle, but one feels that he had a right to be wary. Indeed, it was the tight-lipped and severe Admiral King who, after the Hepburn Report, pronounced the final word of consolation. These men, he said, were almost none of them battle-tested. “Granting that the immediate cause of our losses was the surprise attack, the question is whether or not any officer should be held accountable for failing to anticipate it . . . . the answer . . . in my judgment must be in the negative. They simply had not learned how and when to stay on the alert.” Mr. Newcomb’s thesis is that this defeat, more than any other in World War II, highlighted our weakness and overconfidence.

Mrs. Ross, the heroine of ROBERT NICOLSON’S short novel, THE WHISPERERS (Knopf, $2.95), is an old girl in her seventies living on dole in a Glasgow slum, one of those eccentrics that George Belcher used to draw for us in Punch. By her own account, Margaret Ross was Comtesse de la Bruyere and Lady of the Manor of Great d’Arcy, now fallen on evil times; depending on her mood, she described her father as a bishop, a professor, an admiral, or a lord. At all events, he was dead, and now deserted by her husband and son, the fairhaired Charlie (rarely out of jail), she lived a life of illusion, roaming the streets, badgering the National Assistance Board for a new pair of shoes, and repeatedly warning the police of the whispering conspiracy of her neighbors. In a quite extraordinary way, this short novel holds the warmth of human existence, the simple pleasure in fish and chips, the companionship of a musty reading room, the consolation of talking and living to oneself in a mare’s-nest.

Mr. Conrad, the welfare worker, has had Mrs. Ross on His conscience for so long that when she is laid low by pneumonia, he not only has her hospitalized but manages to bring back into her life the husband of her youth. The rescue has, for a time, a subduing effect on them both; then, when Archie, who is no beauty, reverts to his old ways, Mrs. Ross returns to that realm of elderly meandering which she has made so peculiarly and delightfully her own.