Reader's Choice

BY WILLIAM BARRETT

Nothing succeeds like success, except perhaps its repetition. In The Making of the President - 1960THEODORE H. WHITE had almost a classical plot with a single action and single hero. The story of that year was John Kennedy’s determined drive for the nomination and his eventual hairbreadth victory in the election. By comparison, 1964 presented a more diffuse and less focused drama. Yet THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1964 (Atheneum, $6.95) is in many ways a more exciting book, if only because his earlier triumph has sharpened Mr. White’s skill at a style of reporting that he seems to have made all his own.

The style is that of the newsreel in depth. Events are brought before our eyes in vivid flashes, at the very tempo at which they unrolled, but they arc also surrounded by voluminous and probing comment (including much detailed information on the political infighting) that fills out their meaning. It is a difficult style to carry off, but Mr. White is entirely successful, and without journalistic vulgarity. Only in a few spots does this newsreel intensity pall, mainly in the first chapter, describing President Kennedy’s funeral: most of us saw it all, step by step, on television, and the repetition in prose seems gratuitous.

Mr. White feels deeply and sympathetically for most figures in public life, even when he disagrees violently with their ideas, as in the case of Barry Goldwater. His politicians, consequently, emerge as three-dimensional characters in a way not usual in political reporting. The fact that he is willing to go a long mile to understand the other fellow may explain why he is able to get people to talk openly and freely to him. Certainly, something besides his own indefatigable gifts as a reporter must explain his amazing access to information. He even knows that Bobby Kennedy “gulped” when Mr. Johnson told him in private that he would not be the vice-presidential candidate!

The most interesting events occurred before and during the conventions. After the nominations the result of the election was foregone, and the campaigns were dull to live through, though they are not at all dull in this retelling. In fact, 1964 may prove one of the more significant campaigns in our history, since basic issues were at stake, and the people’s decision at the polls indicated that some changes in our society since 1932 were henceforth and forever beyond question.

It is a rare thing for a history to make fresh and interesting those events that battered our eyes and ears day in and out through all the media of communication. Mr, White seems to have had a hundred eyes and ears of his own, been everywhere, and missed nothing. Yet the vast amount of information is unified by an intelligence that makes this book an extraordinarily illuminating comment on the whole anomalous electoral process that is, in fac t, the heartheat of our democracy.

While Mr. White enthusiastically identifies himself with the making of one President, R. G. TUGWELL’S HOW THEY BECAME PRESIDENT (Simon and Schuster, $8.95) casts a cold and jaundiced eye on the various mancuverings that made thirty-five of them.

His general thesis is that the process has been so haphazard that America’s social life seems to have been shaped by blind forces. Yet when he comes to positive suggestions for improvement, he is much less specific than in his debunking profiles of the various Presidents. The blind forces may be a little more organic and directed than Mr. Tugwell allows; and at times he does acknowledge that even a mediocre President and, God knows, we have had them — might fit in with his times very well. Perhaps the processes of democracy must always seem unduly disorganized, at least to an administrator’s tidy mind.

Mr. Tugwell is blunt and unscathing in his judgments of most of our Presidents. Only George Washington emerges as a thoroughly heroic figure; the admiration of Lincoln and Jefferson is highly qualified, and the view of Truman seems to me outrageously unbalanced. Yet it is precisely its hardhitting, controversial, and incisive tone that makes this very readable book both valuable and stimulating.

Some works of art apparently aspire to bring about the destruction of their own form, as Ravel’s La Valse, one of the most beautiful of waltzes, is said to celebrate the death of the waltz. JOHN LE CARRÉ’S THE LOOKING GLASS WAR (CowardMcCann, $4.95) almost consummates the demise of the spy novel, at least in its traditional cloak-anddagger style.

Mr. Le Carré, it seems to me, has made more headway than Graham Greene in bringing the spy thriller into serious literature because his stories turn on characterization, the heart of the novel itself, while Greene depends on spellbinding rhetoric. It is time we recognized that die detective story and the spy story are more serious forms than snobbish readers will admit. The majority of thrillers are more competent in characterization, more fertile in plot, and more effectively written than the bulk of current novels that claim to be serious representations of life. The sheer fact of the competitive market has brought about this competence; the great number of thriller addicts, with their insatiable appetite, exact a higher level of proficiency from the writer if they are going to be able to find escape in his books.

Mr. Le Carré’s characters, deprived of the traditional heroics of espionage, are mostly seedy and querulous civil servants, burdened by nagging wives and able to keep themselves going only by the illusory image of themselves as still carrying on their brave work of World War II. In fact, however, the cold war has changed all the rules of the game. In this looking-glass war our side begins to reflect the other; the corrupt means of the Communists engenders corruption in our attempts to meet it. The spy becomes merely a pawn of the bureaucracy, and therefore, just like the ordinary citizen in our society, a victim of excessive organization.

The victim here is Reiser, a wonderfully portrayed Middle European, the little man par exeelienee, a bit ridiculous in Ins small vanities and always humbly eager to be admired. All the suspense of the story gathers grimly around him as he is sent into East Germany on a foredoomed and fatal mission, which is promptly abandoned for political reasons by his superiors. It is his figure paradoxical and human - that turns this superior thriller into a real and moving novel of pointless defeat.

It is a nice question whether ILYA EHRENBURG’S talents for survival are matched by his gifts as a writer, but certainly the two have always worked in frictionless cooperation. THE WAR: 1941-1945 (World, $5.95) is less interesting than the previous four volumes of his autobiography because during these years Ehrenburg was operating, with his usual almost inexhaustible energy, as a one-man propaganda factory for the soldiers at the front and had no time to work up his literary memoirs or even to report the ebb and flow of battle itself. Yet the book is fascinating as a revelation of the man as well as of Russian attitudes during the years that were to prepare for the cold war.

Ehrenburg rides the crosscurrents of history with the sure foot of a skilled surfer. He is sufficiently antiStalinist to have fit in with the Khrushchev period, but not so emphatically that he would be singled out as a target by the thousands of entrenched Stalinists if they were in a position again to make their weight felt. In one matter, however, he never varies: he is always die passionate partisan of the Soviet regime, whoever its temporary leaders are. Thus time and again he speaks, as if reporting simple fact, of the British and Americans rejoicing at Soviet losses and deliberately postponing a second front in order to bleed Russia white. He also cites one damning conversation with Alexander Worth, who shared this view — which may help to explain the coloration of the latter’s monumental Russia at War.

All in all, one has to take Ehrenburg seriously as a literary archetype of our times. If not exactly a Tolstoy, he is surely at least the Mikoyan of Russian letters — the clever, even brilliant, adaptable man who was always able to make himself indispensable in a pinch.

Not since Muriel Spark’s Memento Mon have the petty cruelty and blind obstinacy of older people been depicted with such authority as in WILLIAM TREVOR’S THE HOARDING MOUSE (Viking, $4.50). But while Miss Spark crossed the border into poetry, Mr. Trevor relieves his tawdry material with comedy as biting as the early Evelyn Waugh.

The eccentrics here assembled live in a boardinghouse in a London suburb. The owner, Mr. Bird, who had collected them by careful screening, dies on the first page, but his spirit continues to haunt the boarders throughout, as if he were God presiding over their fortunes. What moved Mr. Bird to collect these people in the first place, and why, finally, did he will the boardinghouse to the two inmates most likely to disagree and bring ruin on the whole establishment? The answer is suggested to the wavering mind of one boarder, an unhappy Nigerian law clerk named Mr. Obd, who remembers that Mr. Bird once remarked to him that the solitary man is a bitter man and bitterness begets cruelty.

We usually think of English eccentrics as endearing old nannies. Mr. Trevor reveals the darker side. Eccentricity, after all, is a means in the struggle to preserve our identity, and when the world threatens too much, the struggle can become as ferociously self-centered as a rat’s to remain alive in his trap. When the eccentric belongs to the world of the shabby genteel, like Mr. Bird’s boarders, he has to be even more stubbornly selfish and petty to carry on the pretense of standards. The English novelist thus has an edge over his American confrere, since the eccentric egotist is a sharply defined character.

The shabby genteel have almost disappeared from our affluent society, and we tend to become either the faceless poor or the hearty and undifferentiated members of the middle class. Between the Atlantic and the Pacific one is not likely to find a boardinghouse to match Mr. Trevor’s gallery of very odd but very real people.

Though only his second novel, the zany, gruesome, but also pathetic humor of this story establishes William Trevor as one of the most notable of the younger English writers.

The triumphs of modern medicine have proceeded from elaborate organization and painstaking research, qualities that would seem to exclude the more capricious intrigues and excitements of storytelling. Yet BURTON ROUECHÉ, on the trail of assorted bacilli and viruses, is quite as fascinating as a fictional sleuth. In A MAN NAMED HOFFMAV (Little, Brown, $4.95) the cases are not of such sensational and epidemic proportions as in his earlier works, but the detective work is just as thorough, and the reporting just as graceful and controlled.

The charm of the old-fashioned detective story was the reassurance it gave us that the world was orderly, that the sequence from effect to cause was inevitable if we but put the clues together properly, and that Sherlock Holmes at the end of the trail would collar the criminal, Mr. Roueche inspires us with the same sense of order. From clue to clue the path winds backward for doctors, health commissioners, and epidemiologists, until at last they come upon the villain cowering at the bottom of a test tube. A few individuals may have died in the process, but man himself has triumphed: he has found an order where more primitive minds would have seen only the inexplicable whim of the gods.

Mr. Roueché even knows how to build suspense by saving the last piece in the jigsaw for the end. In the title piece, the disease is anthrax, common enough among animals but now rare among humans. Hoffman, the afflicted man, was not a farmer working with animals but an industrial employee whose job was insulation. How could he have contracted this unlikely disease? By tracing the ingredients in one sample of fell, the doctors finally isolated some imported goat hair that carried the anthrax bacillus. The medical details were now complete, but why was it that Hoffman’s assistant had not been infected? It turned out that Hoffman had been the one who actually handled the contaminated felt, lugging it around on his shoulder. Still, one mystery remained: Why was the focus of infection so low on his neck? Mr. Roueché holds this final detail of the solution to the last sentence.

In one case here, however the sad tale of the American elm disease — man does not master, but has to accept the inevitability of nature. True, the criminal agent is known, but our scientific police cannot bring it into custody. We can slow up the process by killing the insects that carry the dread virus, but in the end we shall have to bow to the extinction of the noblest of our native trees.

Ever since French painters discovered Japanese prints toward the end of the nineteenth century, the art of Japan has had a growing influence upon Western taste. Though at times we have been superficially beguiled by the prettiness of cherry blossoms and flowered kimonos, we have gradually come to understand that the heart of the Japanese feeling for beauty lies in an austere simplicity that seeks not to dominate but to be united with nature. In no other book that I know is this impression brought out more strongly than in FORMS JAPAN (East-West Center Press, $15.00), with photographs by Yukio Futagawa and text by Yuichiro Kojiro, a noted Japanese architectural critic.

The forms illustrated here run the gamut from natural objects (rocks and trees), to utensils (rakes, ropes, baskets), to more ambitious works of art (buildings and paintings). For the Japanese mind, no gulf separates the useful from the beautiful, the natural from the artificial. All forms are part of a vast natural language, whose inner and intricate grammar the text tries to spell out for us. One’s eye turns again and again to these pages to be exhilarated and refreshed, the imagination to be freed from its habitual clutter. Now that Western technology has achieved such magnificent mastery of our environment that we shall all soon be living in the air-conditioned nightmare, it is good to have a reminder of an older culture that once sought only to make man live at exquisite peace with nature.

Though OSCAR LEVANT is the spiritual father of the sick comedians, he has somehow managed, unlike his tiresome offspring, to remain likable. Perhaps, despite his appalling medical history, he is not so ill as he lets on; at any rate, there persists a quite healthy streak of self-depreciation.

If you can get through the first doleful self-absorbed chapter, which narrates his illnesses and symptoms in detail, THE MEMOIRS OF AN AMNESIAC (Putnam’s, $5.95) turns out to be a very lively, if rambling, account of life along Tin Pan Alley in the twenties and early thirties, and thereafter of the jungles of Hollywood, radio, and television. Levant seems to have known everyone musicians, actors, rising stars before they had risen (Bing Crosby), as well as hoods and gangsters like Joe Adonis and Frank Costello. One of the saddest of the many anecdotes tells how Costello was under such strain in becoming respectable that I he had to consult a psychoanalyst. There are also some very revealing amusing but respectful — portraits of Schonberg, under whom Levant studied composition, and Toscanini, under whom he played as soloist.

The closest and most serious friendship was with George Gershwin, who achieved the success as a popular and serious composer that Levant wanted but could not reach. Perhaps he turned to performing as a public wit in compensation; or it may be that the incessant How of talk drained off the musical inspiration.

The wit, indeed, is original, and there are enough gags and mots here to be quoted for years to come. Sometimes the wit is merely clever, as if he were mechanically turning on the tap. When he first met F.P.A. and could not stop talking, the noted columnist finally exclaimed, “He’s reading!” But there is also genuine wit, the wayward but simple truth rising irrepressibly to the lips lie could never keep buttoned.

When he first saw Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, he observed, “It’s a right step in the wrong direction.” That is cleverness. Years later, however, after remorse and reconsideration, he could not suppress the bare truth, and therefore the genuinely witty remark, about his best friend’s work, “I now think it a glorious paean to American Jewish music.”

Anybody that honest can’t bo all bad — or all that sick either.