The Peripatetic Reviewer

Autobiography is for some writers a method of squaring accounts, but the best books, beginning with the fragment left by Benjamin Franklin, are less concerned with self-justification than with self-discovery. Hearing a man explain how right he was in situation after situation is not only irritating, it is unbelievable; we would far rather hear him admit that he was occasionally lucky and that he learned from his mistakes, as we all do. An autobiographer who does not honestly acknowledge his failures is not to be trusted. There can be too much disparagement, as I think there is in The Education of Henry Adams— Henry in society was nothing like as abject as he appears to be in print — but I would rather see a writer veer in that direction, leaving the reader to supply the credit, than indulge in complacency. To deal fairly with oneself is a faculty given to few; to deal fairly with one’s critics and opponents calls for an unsparing memory and humility in the face of circumstances.

There is always the temptation to be indiscreet. Casanova and Frank Harris both gloried in indiscretion, and in his more eloquent prose so too does Bertrand Russell. Henry Adams was rigidly discreet about the immediate members of his family, less so about the mediocrities he deplored in Washington. The doctor’s oath imposed a reticence upon Hans Zinsser, and he would never permit his fine book As I Remember Him to be termed an autobiography, but the method he devised of writing about “R.S.,” a scientist who might have passed as his alter ego, permitted him to be delightfully indiscreet in matters of medical practice, literary criticism, middle-age love, indeed whatever appealed to Zinsser’s roving, disciplined mind. He was that rarest of blends, a scientist, classicist, and poet.

Finally there is the temptation to be censorious, to curse fate, or, since Freud, one’s parents, for what befell. Simone de Beauvoir in her heavyhanded way first put the blame on her father in her early autobiography, but as soon as her mother was dead, she too was upbraided; Virgilia Peterson in her life story blames her mother for all that went wrong. Is it because women are so subjective that no first-class autobiography has yet been written by one of them? Perhaps the fact that only in our time have they come to positions of authority, or as partners of authority, in the professions may make a difference, in which case Laura Fermi’s Atoms in the Family: My Life With Enrico Fermi, may be a prototype of what is to come.

WILMARTH SHELDON LEWIS, known as “Lefty” to the world of books, was born in California in 1895, the youngest child of elderly parents, who had the money and the willpower to intimidate the children who had preceded him. But Lefty was, as he tells us, “by instinct against authority and for underdogs,” and while it took him some time to realize that he was himself in that category, when he came to self-realization, which he did at the Thacher School, he broke the natal cord and flew east on wings which grew progressively stronger. Who helped to spring him and who set him on the path to his lifelong adoration of Horace Walpole and the eighteenth century is told in his autobiography, ONE MAN’S EDUCATION (Knopf, $10.00), a book distinguished by its candor and felicity, and by a delightful pride-deflating sense of irony.

Mr. Lewis chooses to write about himself in the third person, as did Henry Adams. During his boyhood in Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco, he refers to himself, as did his classmates, as “Lewie,” but when in his freshman year at Yale, Rosenthal, the New York gambler, was murdered by a killer named “Lefty Louie,” Wilmarth had a nickname which was to signalize him thereafter.

Sherman Day Thacher, his headmaster, taught with a contagious enthusiasm for Yale and its senior societies; he gave Lefty a solid grounding for both, and on the day the boy graduated, this advice: the greatest danger lay in his mother. “You are much too fond of her. Don’t let her keep you at home. You should go to Yale. Go back to her in vacations, but don’t let her lead your life for you.” The truth was so piercing that Lefty burst into tears, but it set him free.

At New Haven with his wit and pleasantry he became an editor of the Lit., a moving spirit in the Elizabethan Club, and at the hallowed moment, was tapped by Keys. But better than these honors was his friendship with Chauncy Brewster Tinker, who, like Mr. Thacher, showed him the way, and when Lefty departed from New Haven for the Army, he was committed to literature.

In the Army he was hospitalized by the arthritis that was to plague him through life, and on his discharge he began searching for a congenial place in print. He worked for the Yale University Press just long enough to earn the friendship of Carl Rollins, the famous typographer, and for Alfred Knopf just long enough for Lefty to know the Algonquin Set and to have the Knopfs accept his first novel. When in the early twenties his parents died and he came into his fortune, Lefty moved up to Farmington, where, in that charming Cranford atmosphere, he was befriended by the famous Mrs. Cowles, TR’s oldest sister, and where he continued to write his semi-Trollope novels and stories modeled on Katherine Mansfield.

He also dabbled at book collecting, buying first editions of John Masefield, the fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe, and a set of Fielding lacking three volumes, and he was humbugged for fair when Bookseller “X” of London palmed off on him a pair of Sheraton chairs supposedly sat in by Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb’s tea caddy, and a sofa pillow “worked by Mrs. Blake for Blake — the lot to be had for $200. (This is one of the funniest scenes in the book.) But in his blundering around, Lefty crossed the trail of Lady Louisa Stuart; she led him to that inimitable letter writer, Horace Walpole, and at this point a small question began to enlarge. “Isn’t Horace Walpole one of the major figures of the eighteenth century?” he asked Tinker. “Yes,” said Tink. “And he is greatly undervalued?” “Yes.”

Chapter XIV, “Horace Walpole Arrives,” traces the beginning of Lefty’s enchantment. The son of a Prime Minister, with a great fortune at his command, Walpole set out to record as accurately as he could the history and manners of his time. The people in his letters included politicians, bluestockings, clerical antiquaries, great ladies, murderers, royalties; and the people at Walpole’s table at Strawberry Hill were there because of their wit and their intellect —or because they were the natural daughters of his father. The infatuation comes to us in words like these: “As Lefty read volume after volume the panorama of the eighteenth century unrolled before him, the sweep of great events, the rise and fall of reputations; the lilacs and nightingales at Strawberry Hill and the mob loose in the streets of London; balls, entertainments, the theater.” And as a measure of Walpole’s ability to write, Lefty quotes his eulogy to his father, the Prime Minister: “He could forever wage war with knaves and malice and preserve his temper; could know men, and yet feel for them; could smile when opposed, and be gentle after triumph. He was steady without being eager, and successful without being vain. He forgot the faults of others and his own merits; and was as incapable of fear as of doing wrong.”

It is arguable that the more Lefty read of Walpole’s work the more felicitous his own writing became, and it is certainly demonstrable that he and his wife, Annie Burr Auchincloss, found their greatest happiness in bringing to Farmington as much as could possibly be collected of Walpole and Strawberry Hill. Walpole’s library —the proliferating correspondence, the portraits, caricatures, and satires of the eighteenth century, the Hogarths and the prints of his lesser contemporaries — the whole collection became the most complete in the world.

As his authority grew Lefty became a power, first in libraries, where his criticism of slovenliness and pedantry were needed; then on the Yale Corporation. He can be critical without hurting, and he cuts through red tape as if it were soft soap.

I could wish that he had made his large book even larger by quoting more liberally from his god, Walpole, and I suspect that the unacquainted reader may find the boyhood at Alameda and the housekeeping at the close a little too meticulous. But Annie Burr’s death is told with beautiful restraint. And the laughter with which he accepts the fruits of his great industry is that of genuine modesty.

MOLLY BERKELEY was born a Lowell of Boston, but she fled the coop at an early age, first in her marriage to a Philadelphian, which didn’t work, and thence to the greener pastures of England and the Continent, where with her good looks and her high spirits she landed on her feet. Her marriage to the eighth and last Earl of Berkeley brought happiness to them both, and the chapter about him in her short memoir, WINKING AT THE BRIM (Houghton Mifflin, $4.95), holds the flavor and the fun and friendships of those unfettered days. His Lordship had survived a sad boyhood: he had been put into the British Navy at the age of twelve, and when in 1916, through a series of deaths, he found himself the heir to Berkeley Square and its surrounding streets, the huge pile of Berkeley Castle and its many acres, he badly needed a gal like Molly to warm his life. It was characteristic that he ended his proposal to her with these words: “I don’t like living without you. Ask your friends to stay with us. I haven’t got any.”

Molly’s self-portrait comes to us in fits and starts: we see that she paints better than an amateur, and we enjoy but too briefly the gregariousness of her friendships with people like Axel Munthe, Alice Longworth, Edward Sheldon, Amy Lowell, Fenella Bowes-Lyon, the Jock Murrays, and Bernard Berenson. It seems to me a pity that her reminiscence is so random, always in such a hurry, and in its haste content to show the surface but not what lies beneath, for with a memory as clear as hers she should have been commanded to slow down and tell us more. Her book, appearing at a time when Abigail Adams Homans’ Education by Uncles is still in fresh memory, suffers by comparison; it lacks the gift for characterization, the Yankee wit, and that unerring sense for the right word which made Abigail’s memoir the cameo it is.

VICTOR WEYBKIGHT served a colorful apprenticeship before he became one of the leaders in the Book Revolution. He spent his boyhood on the ancestral acres in Carroll County, Maryland, where he acquired two robust tastes that were to last him for life: his appetite for good food and for farming. After a year in the Wharton School of Finance, he wanted a wider pasture, and he found it in Chicago at Hull House, where he helped with the printing and promotion for Miss Jane Addams when he was not studying for his courses at the University of Chicago. “Hull House,” he writes in his autobiography, THE MAKING OF A PUBLISHER (Rcynal, $6.75), “was a catalyst. I reveled in all of the banter and serious discussion, the humor and the hard work, in this sophisticated sort of coeducational lay monastery,” and well he might, for in addition to the benign influence of Miss Addams, then in her early sixties, he was in constant touch with Dr. Alice Hamilton, and with Robert Morss Lovett and Howard Mumford Jones, both of whom, like himself, were then residents of Hull House. One could hardly have imagined a more exciting matriculation, especially with guests who spoke their minds, like Frances Perkins, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Charles Beard, John Dewey, Clarence Darrow, and William Allen White. At Hull House he published his first articles and poems, and significantly he became acquainted with Haldeman-Julius, publisher of the Little Blue Books, the five-cent precursor of the paperbound books of today.

Weybright’s experience at Hull House primed him as a social scientist, and in the course of a typical week, in addition to his classes at the university, he might find himself searching for source material in the stockyards, chatting with gangsters at the garage where he kept his Ford, attending a poetry reading at Harriet Monroe’s, visiting the Black and Tan dance halls with Miguel Covarrubias, or playing a role in the Hull House Theater. He never seemed to lack self-confidence.

As the managing editor of the Survey under Paul Kellogg he had the opportunity to exploit some of the triumphs and exposures of the mid-thirties: the development of TVA, the “Stamp Out Syphilis” campaign, the research of Gunnar Myrdal and Ralph Bunche which was to result in that profound volume An American Dilemma, and the labor relations of Henry Ford, which brought him into direct contact with Henry himself and his lieutenant Harry Bennett. Just before Dunkirk he took over from his father the ownership of the old farm in Maryland and completely re-equipped it with tractors and milking machines so that it could withstand the manpower shortage as war approached. In the war years Victor served as an overseas representative of OWI directly under the wing of Ambassador Winant in London. He got on well with Winant, as he did with Brendan Bracken; he liked and understood the British, and despite his busy involvement he found time to further his future plans for publishing, thanks to his friendship with Allen Lane, who was then experimenting with Penguin Books. It became clear to Victor that after the war Penguin Books, Inc., would have the highest potential of any publishing house in America, and he was determined to be its agent. And so it came to pass. He and Lane did not always agree upon what American authors would do well in the American paperbacks. Fhus Lane did not approve of Erskinc Caldwell, but when in 1946 God’s Little Acre became a runaway, he withdrew his opposition; Lane did not approve of James T. Farrell’s vulgar realism any more than he liked William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and The Wild Palms, But Weybright prevailed, and those titles were a success. So were the three plays of George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan, Pygmalion, and Major Barbara, which were issued at twenty-five cents each on the occasion of Shaw’s ninetieth birthday.

Weybright’s service in bombscarred London and the zest with which he flung himself into publishing thereafter make good reading. He was bound to get on his own, and when he did, with capital of less than $5000, he brought to his now famous line, the New American Library, the same uncanny mixture of serious literature and “whizzers” like Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming (both of them Victor’s discoveries), whose skyrocketing sales helped to balance the more serious titles.

The struggle for recognition is always more exciting than the success which follows, and I am bound to say that when the New American Library is sold to the Los Angeles Times Mirror (with Victor’s share amounting to something over $9 million), and when Weybright himself becomes involved in feuding with his partner, the tone of the book is lowered, and it holds interest only for those who were at the ringside. The Making of a Publisher, even though much has been cut from it, is still too corpulent a book, and the closing chapters leave a bitter taste. I value it for the early years with their fresh and friendly enterprise, and I value it for Weybright’s insistence that class as well as vulgarity and violence could be made to pay in the paperback revolution.

I am inclined to think that WALLACE STEGNER’S new novel with its unhandy title, ALL THE LITTLE LIVE THINGS (Viking, $5.75), is one of the very best books he has written. The title is unhandy because it sounds trivial and cannot be appreciated until one is well into the text.

Mr. Stegner was born in Iowa and did his growing in western Canada. At Stanford University, he finds the stimulus to teach and to write, and California with its student rebellions, its beaches of hypnotized “surfers,” and its ranch-type communities, full of retired Easterners, are all the elements he needs for the conflict in this story. Joe Alston in his sixties and his wife, Ruth, have retired to California to lick their wounds after the loss of their only and defiant son, Curt. “He was willful child, sullen boy, prep-school delinquent, army reject, postwar lush. Whose fault?” This is the open sore which they try to keep hidden from their new neighbors.

Joe, a former literary agent, is a tough, vinegar-minded skeptic, capable with his hands, and absorbed in the profuse nature of California, so different from the East. He thinks that all he wants is privacy in which to garden and brood. What he gets are two disturbers of his peace: Marian Catlin, the young blue-eyed wife of a scientist, who is pregnant and fighting off cancer, who defies his skepticism and appeals to him emotionally, and young Jim Peck, whom Joe rechristens “Caliban on a Honda,” who appropriates a portion of the Alston estate, builds himself a tree house, and turns the place into a littered gypsy camp of the hipsters. Joe Alston, the rationalist, would like to fight them, the irrationalists, at every turn, but Jim Peck reminds him too closely of his own son who is dead, and for months while the tension grows they live in armed truce. The two antagonists are well drawn and well matched, and Marian, though given to fey spells, adds the note of compassion which the story needs.