The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

EVER since 1963 the demonstrations in behalf of Negro rights have rocked the cities in the North — Rochester, New York, Detroit — spasmodically if not as violently as the smaller communities in the Deep South; and now for the first time, the entire nation has had to face the local difficulties of granting Negro Americans the full measure of citizenship. Though the struggle originally centered in education, it soon spread to voting, to travel and accommodations, to employment and housing, and to the churches. As television has shown, every demonstration has called out more sympathy among the twenty-year-olds than among those over fifty; the restraint of the Negroes despite the brutal handling in Alabama and Mississippi has been admirable, and if proof were needed, Selma has given it that neither the Negro nor the white demonstrators have a monopoly on courage. We are all in this, for even the diehards admit that change is coming, and the scope of what needs to be done is so big as to be staggering. Our hope is that the young are committed to the doing and that as the Negro secures the vote, he will demand and respect the opportunity for development so long denied.

Truth has no color line: it is just as imperative to listen to the evidence and explanation of Ralph McGill as it is to that of James Baldwin — a fact which the South recognizes, as witness the extraordinary sale of McGill’s book The South and the Southerner from Atlanta to New Orleans. There will be many seeking to testify in this crucial year, and the first, in whom I have a special interest, JOHN A. WILLIAMS, is the author of THIS IS MY COUNTRY TOO (New American Library, $4.50).

A Negro novelist and poet, Mr. Williams was born in Jackson, Mississippi, forty years ago. His parents soon moved to Syracuse, New York, and there during the Depression he grew up. The dream of America had begun to taste sour in his mouth before he matriculated at Syracuse University, and his biggest battles during the war were not against the Japanese, but against the segregation in the U.S. Navy, which cost him three hitches in the brig. This Is My Country Too grew out of an assignment from Holiday: the editor wanted Mr. Williams’ impressions of America, and both knew that the most disagreeable part of the exposure would be in the South.

At Detroit he picked up a new white beach wagon, loaded aboard his bags, typewriter, sleeping bag, road maps, and a Travel guide listing places in America where a Negro can stay without insult, and for safety’s sake he drove under California license plates. Old friends he had alerted along the way, and for each stop he had a list of newspapermen, Negro leaders, undergraduates, or the braver citizens who would give him the word.

He travels fast and writes breezily, is thinskinned in his emotional reactions and very concise in his findings. In Detroit his old boyhood friend John Clair tells him, “The Negroes feel that their bloc of votes put Mayor Cavanagh in office. . . . White people move to the suburbs to get away front us, but leave the voting power in our hands.” He learns about Louisville from an attractive schoolteacher who says that the responsible newspapers have been pressing for integration for twenty-five years, and that the town has been “blessed with good mayors.” And she adds in a burst of confidence after dinner, “You know what all this has brought on? Colored men and white women. Oh, they’ve always been ducking and slipping around, but now they’ve brought it into the open.” At the Meharry Medical College in Nashville, he gets a flick of anti-Semitism, Negro medical students worrying about “the Jewish doctors” they would have to compete against.

The further south he drives, the more he dreads the roads by night. In Jackson, his birthplace, he asks an old friend who had been born in the North how he could bear to live and teach in Mississippi, and the answer comes back, “We have this house, I have my doctorate. I make good money. . . . I’ve got security, Johnny.” This is confirmed by another friend at Alabama State College who tells him that where there is resistance to integration on the part of Negroes, it is often for reasons of self-preservation. A professor of sociology whom he does not name says curtly, “Governor Wallace pays my salary; I have nothing to say to you. Excuse me, I have a class to get to.”

Mr. Williams gets his best material from Negro sources. In his interchange with white liberal newspapermen who have been taking the punishment in the South, men like Seigenthaler of the Nashville Tennesseean and McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Williams was too much on the defensive, failed to ask the right questions, and his findings are negligible. I also had the feeling that he was overplaying his dread of Southern violence, but after all, he was reporting his reaction, not mine. Not all the book is concerned with the struggle. His picture of Vermont is dreamy; his relief on reaching Chicago, infectious; his reunion with his mother and brother, Joe, in California, touching.

As one of the leaders of the Fugitives, ROBERT PENN WARREN was concerned about segregation as far back as the early thirties. He too is Southern-born, having grown up in Kentucky and Tennessee, and when he set forth on his big inquiry, WHO SPEAKS FOR THE NEGRO? (Random House, $5.95), he cast a wider net than Johnny Williams; he listened with sympathetic patience to what people had to say, frequently taking down their testimony with a tape recorder. Thus he lias had a meeting of minds with the men and women in the many movements and in the dangerous communities, and with the skill of a novelist he has pointed up what they stand for and how they have borne the battle. His interviews in some of the Louisiana parishes and in Mississippi placed him in jeopardy, but he writes without repugnance, and his book is a comprehensive case study, vivid, searching, and compassionate.

Here is the Reverend Joe Carter’s narrative of how at the age of fifty-five he tried to register; of how he was falsely arrested, stripped of his clothes, forced into a uniform, and eventually released — without the registration blank; of how he organized a school to study voters’ rights; and of how the next fall he led twenty-three Negroes down to the courthouse and this time he was registered. We hear from Lolis Elie, a practicing Negro lawyer in New Orleans, who got his degree with G. I. money after Korea and who believes that the desegregation of the armed forces is “one of the most significant things that has happened in this country.” Elie admits that the Southern judges are prejudiced against a Negro lawyer and that this drives away his clients, but he finds hope in the fact that there are today twenty-five Negro lawyers in New Orleans when a decade ago there were two. Mr. Warren has a fascinating session with Clarice Harvey of Jackson, the manager of a successful business combine and the founder of Woman Power Unlimited, in the course of which she remarks that Martin Luther King’s nonviolence “is really an aggressive force which speaks to the conscience of the wrong doer.” Or he seeks out Dr. Aaron Henry of Clarksdale, Mississippi, whose house has been bombed and shot into and whose store windows have been repeatedly knocked out; whose daughter Rebecca has grown so used to the abusive phone calls that when the anonymous voice says, “I just shot your daddy,” she replies, “Aw, fellow, are you kidding?” Dr. Henry lives with an armed guard, but what arms his spirit is knowing “that the United States sanctions what we are doing.”

This is at times a shocking book and, thanks to Mr. Warren’s probing, an edifying one. His long talk with Ralph Ellison, the Negro novelist, is the most profound of any in the book. Ellison’s words are charged with affirmation: “Another factor is that Negroes, despite what some of our spokesmen say, do not dislike being Negro — no matter how inconvenient it frequently is. I like being a Negro. ... I have no desire to escape the struggle, because I’m just too interested in how it’s going to work out, and I want to impose my will upon the outcome to the extent that I can.” In their talk Ellison insists, over and over again, on the Negro’s will, even under slavery, to develop discipline and achieve individuality. His prophecy of what the South will be is eminently sane, and when he says that “Negroes are forcing the confrontation between the nation’s conduct and its ideal, and they are most American in that they are doing so,” one is prompted to reply Amen! An interchange such as this is tonic for any reader and blessedly free from sociological molasses.

LADY VIOLET BONHAM CARTER is uniquely qualified to tell us of the formative and stormy years of Winston Churchill, and my, how well she has done it! She was nineteen and he was thirty-two when they first met at a dinner party in the summer of 1906, and she was fascinated by the “torrent of magnificent language” in which he railed against the brief mortality of man, ending with the words, “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glowworm.” She listened to him spellbound, as she was to do many times thereafter. She sparked his interest in poetry and introduced him to Keats’s odes, which he promptly learned by heart. His world, she writes, was built and fashioned on heroic lines, and throughout their friendship she was an intuitive and bracing force in his development.

As the daughter and confidante of Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister who first brought Churchill into the Cabinet, she knew better than any other woman how Winston was being judged by his seniors, where he excelled and where he was vulnerable.

In her devoted and discerning book, WINSTON CHURCHILL: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT (Harcourt, Brace & World, SB.50), she illuminates many aspects of his character: his immense power of concentration, the careful memorization of what he was to say in the House of Commons, his passion to vindicate his father, who had been dismissed as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his spurring belief that he would die young and must accomplish his life’s work by forty. She tells us of his brave, rambunctious career as a war correspondent, and of how after the Boer War he earned $50,000 in five months of writing and lecturing, money which was to finance his early career in Parliament.

From her seat in the spectators’ gallery. Lady Violet watched Winston’s sunrise: she thrilled at the brilliance of his debating, was amazed that in eight weeks he could absorb the knowledge of economics which he had to have in his passionate support of free trade, and her spirit soared when Winston broke with the Conservatives and crossed the floor to serve with the Liberals under her father. She saw how Winston was played upon and mesmerized by Lloyd George, and she did not like it and told him so. She catches the tension of the crisis over Agadir, when her father and the Cabinet stood up against the German threat, and she shows how this led to Winston’s appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, an office he held for four of the happiest years of his life. She describes the extraordinary foresight with which he prepared the Fleet for the eventual showdown, the courage with which he committed the Dreadnoughts to the 15-inch gun, and in vivid detail she writes of his plans for the Dardanelles expedition, “perhaps the most imaginative strategic concept” of the First World War, which were frustrated by a “monolithic soldier,” Lord Kitchener, and a “megalomaniac sailor,” Lord Fisher.

Her words throughout are fresh and beautifully selected; not the smallest detail escapes her, as, for instance, his love for butterflies and the idea of devoting part of his Eightieth Birthday Fund to the “creation of butterflies.” And in her summing up I prize this sentence: “He makes his own climate and lives in it and those who love him share it.” An endearing book, worthy of its subject.

From the Calvin Coolidge Administration until his death in an airplane crash in 1935, Will Rogers was our national humorist. In that shrewd, drawling way of his, he cut through bluff and hypocrisy, and we accepted his criticism, however stringent, whether of the President or of our national failings, because of the affection we felt for him.

On Will’s death, Fred Allen moved into the top billing. He was beyond question the funniest man in radio and at times the most caustic. But because of the limitation of the industry, Fred was not given anything like the liberty which the Times gave Rogers.

Fred Allen had always wanted to write, but in the heyday of Allen’s Alley he was so absorbed in his show, so busy with his staff writers (Herman Wouk was one of them), so embroiled with Jack Benny or the professor in the box, or with caricaturing the little people for example, that awful family of father, mother, and destructive Junior on their first visit to the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows— that he had small time for FDR and the foibles of the New Deal. In the midst of all this, his letters became a kind of literary consolation, and at last, thanks to his friend Joe McCarthy, they have been collected in an engaging volume, FRED ALLEN’S LETTERS (Doubleday, $4.95).

Fred never used capitals; he preferred to write in a lower case patois reminiscent of Don Marquis. Like all American humorists, he is at his best when exaggerating and complaining. Fred never in all his life found a resort which he and Portland could enjoy. His one visit to Bermuda, where the water felt like warm sarsaparilla, ended in three days, and the nearest thing he could come to a holiday was at Old Orchard Beach, where he tramped around the golf course caddying for his friends. His best letters are naturally to those in show business, to Groucho Marx, Mark Leddy, and Jack Donahue, a great comedian-dancer whom he adored and for whom he had written comedy skits. This book should be read in snatches, with the eye skipping over personal paragraphs in quest of the satire and fantasy. It is spoken prose, and in listening to it one hears again that dry, rasping voice which was beloved in so many American households.