The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

FROM THE LAND OF LOST CONTENT
by Noel Barber
Houghton Mifflin, $5.95

When I was a beginning editor, there were still inaccessible kingdoms, and one of the most inaccessible was Tibet with its GodKing, the Dalai Lama. He lived in what was then called the Forbidden City of Lhasa, 12,000 feet above sea level, in the white and russet Potala, a castle towering high above the Plain of Milk, a castle of a thousand rooms, where he was guarded by an army of Buddhist monks who through the centuries had accumulated a vast treasure of gold dust, jewels, and silver. Any Occidental, like the English explorer Sir Francis Edward Younghusband, who in 1902 succeeded in gaining entrance to Lhasa and in actually talking to the Dalai Lama, was read and quoted as if he had made a round trip to the Middle Ages.

All that, of course, was in the days before the Chinese Communists, who in October, 1950, forced their way into Lhasa with machine guns. For nearly nine years there was an uneasy truce while the Dalai Lama and his cabinet held the invaders at arm’s length and the Tibetans from armed rebellion, and while across the mountain trails leading to the Sikkim frontier a train of yaks carried a portion of the gold bars and silver, just in case. How this came about and what manner of man was this GodKing—he was just twenty-three when he faced his crisis—have been told in a fascinating book, From the Land of Lost Content: The Dalai Lama’s Fight for Tibet, written by Noel Barber, an English student of the East who won the confidence of the Dalai Lama in exile. Mr. Barber has traveled far to interview the survivors of the Court and the Army, spread as they are from India to Switzerland.

The book begins like an old tapestry showing bow the Dalai Lama was “found" at the age of two—he represents the fourteenth incarnation of Chenrezi, a Living Buddha; of what it was like to be educated in that upper suite of rooms under the golden eaves of the Potala; how the young celibate was solemnly preparing for his final examinations toward his doctorate of metaphysics before an audience of 5000 monks at the very time the Chinese general was planning his abduction; and with what plaintive happiness he moved to the peaceful beauty of the Summer Palace twenty-four hours before the shooting began. The trust reposed in the author and the accuracy of his judgments are reflected in these vivid pages.

When Tibet’s appeals to the great powers and the UN were ignored— Nehru brushed aside the report of trouble as “bazaar rumours"—the young ruler, grounded as he had been in nonviolence, bad to choose between flight or giving himself up, knowing that “if he perished the life of Tibet would come to an end.”His decision was complicated by those Tibetans who had turned quislings and were feeding Peking propaganda; he knew that massacre would follow armed rebellion, and that, as the author well says, the moment was approaching when, “As in East Berlin, as in Budapest, as in Prague . . . death and defeat were preferable to inaction.”One’s pity and admiration are stirred as one reads of the monks and the women fortifying the Cathedral, and later, of the Dalai Lama’s incredible flight through the 17,000-foot passes on the way to sanctuary. Mr. Barber’s selection of eyewitnesses, the courtiers, bodyguards, the Dalai Lama’s mother, the ten-year-old daughter of a Tibetan noble, a hunchbacked policeman add individuality to a book which will be hard to beat, whether as travel or as a true story of escape.

DONOVAN OF OSS
by Corey Ford
Little, Brown, $8.50

“Wild Bill” Donovan was an aggressive American of Irish heritage: energetic, dauntless, and obdurate. The nickname, won on the Mexican Border, fitted him like a glove, and he was probably the best-known young officer in the Rainbow Division, where he commanded a battalion in that Irish regiment, the Fighting 69th. Donovan made Oliver Ames, Jr., his adjutant, and Ames, who was just twenty, wrote to his mother, “It is the greatest honor I’ve ever had; it couldn’t be so great with any other major but Dili Donovan, for he is the ‘livest’ officer in the American Ex. Forces.” In the Aisne-Marne offensive Ames was killed instantly by a sniper’s bullet as the two men were lying half-concealed in a dry creek, and Bill always declared that the bullet was meant for him. When later he was awarded the Medal of Honor, he wore the ribbon but transferred the medal to the Regiment in memory of the men he had lost.

Donovan’s proudest moment was when he led the Fighting 69th on its victory parade up Fifth Avenue, and the feeling on Manhattan was quizzically expressed by Will Rogers when he suggested, “If they really want to honor the boys, why don’t they let them sit in the stands and have the people march by?”

In Donovan of OSS, Corey Ford, who was in the historical branch of the OSS, has written a biography of the man he served under in World War II and a history of that audacious agency for intelligence and espionage which Donovan invented and inspired. The biography is the better half; in it we see a man ambitious for public service and successful as a lawyer who had the prescience to anticipate danger. When Bill and His wife were enjoying a long-deferred honeymoon in Japan in 1919, he was suddenly asked by the State Department to proceed to Siberia and evaluate whether the United States should aid Admiral Kolchak. Donovan was disgusted with what he saw of the White Russians, their corruption and cruelty, and his Siberian diary ended with these significant words: “We can prevent a shooting war only if we take the initiative to win the subversive war. And to succeed—is to win the peace that the world so badly needs.”

When Hitler took over Germany, Donovan hurried abroad to size up the Nazi regime. He interviewed Mussolini and by candor and cajolery won permission to inspect the Empire that Marshal Badoglio was setting up in Abyssinia. Months later he was touring the Loyalist front in Spain, making careful note of the German equipment that Hitler had sent Franco. In Britain he was shown things no other American had seen: the British newly invented radar, their new interceptor planes, their coastal defense. He joined forces with that resourceful British agent, William Stephenson, and when at last he had gained FDR’s confidence, he was encouraged to project an American organization of paratroopers, commandos, linguists, code breakers, scientists, sappers—who were prepared to work with the Underground everywhere in resisting Hitler and the Japanese.

Donovan insisted that the Office of Strategic Services should not be subservient to Army Intelligence. “I wish you would give Bill Donovan a little elbow room to operate in,” said Roosevelt to General Marshall, and when this was granted, the agency moved into its headquarters at 25th and E Streets with “fifty professors, twenty monkeys, ten goats, twelve guinea pigs and a staff of Jewish scribbfers,” as the Nazi propagandists described it, and the wheels began to hum.

The men on whom Donovan relied at the outset were William L. Langer, professor of history at Harvard and a master of analysis and research, and Otto C. Doering, Jr., his law partner, and it is from them that Mr. Ford drew his source material about the incomparable timing and forethought of the OSS. It is a pity that Whitney Shepardson, who was head of the Secret Intelligence Branch, and Colonel Russell B. Livermore. who directed the Operation Groups, did not survive. The omission of all reference to them is a serious error, and their advice had they survived would have screened the naïveté, especially in the accounts of the rescue of American airmen and of the harassment of the Germans which are breathtaking, seemingly incredible, and often embellished as Mr. Ford retells them. But facts speak for themselves, and of the eightytwo Americans on the first Jedburgh teams parachuted into France to work with the Maquis, fifty-three were decorated, some posthumously.

What stands clear are the dimensions of General Donovan, his inexhaustible energy and courage, his casualness about organization and top secrecy despite the fact that he had made secrecy his business. He worked around the clock, and on one anxious night before the invasion of North Africa, he took the plans down to the men’s lavatory for a last review as he sat on the throne. And there they were found the next morning by the janitor. A calm-voiced, spirited, lovable warrior.

A BIRD IN THE HOUSE
by Margaret Laurence
Knopf, $5.95

In 1922 when the Abbey Players performed in Boston in Lennox Robinson’s masterpiece The Whiteheaded Boy, it seemed to me that the actors must have walked in right off the street and gone on stage without makeup or costume. Their naturalness was wonderful to behold, so too their fits of jealousy of the Whiteheaded boy and their sudden burst of adulation when they shared in his good luck. I think now as I thought then that it takes genius, a cpiiet sort of genius, to write a play, or a novel, about what at first glance seems to be the commonplace.

Margaret Laurence, the novelist, is so gifted, and in her new book, A Bird in the House, the reader is projected into the midst of a likable American family who are going about the business of life with the little grudges and groans, the laughter and the heartache which taken together keep us sane. The lact that the action occurs in a small town in Manitoba during the Depression makes not the slightest difference, for what happens to these people could happen in any American household at a time when there was too much work and too little money.

The special thing about A Bird in the House is that the narrative comes to us through the mind and senses of the only daughter, Vanessa MacLeod, who is ten when the story begins and twenty when it ends. There is nothing cute about Vanessa; she is old for her years, intuitive in what she pieces together about her elders, and very partisan in her sympathies.

Her father is a doctor, the hardpressed general practitioner who when he is paid, it he is paid, is more likely to receive a side of bacon or a leathery chicken than a good hard dollar or two. Vanessa is passionately on his side; she knows he is having a hard time and is being unfairly maligned by her grandmother, and she is right. Vanessa rebels against the dominance of age; she watches her Grandfather Connor, a big strong-willed man, who demands that life he ordered to suit him: she watches him intimidate her mother, she watches him drive away the suitors for her unmarried Aunt Edna; and her rage at times is such that she would gladly kick him.

Her mother sire adores, and by eavesdropping and by inference she knows more about her mother than she can reasonably explain. She objects to being endowed with a younger brother, and when Baby Roderick is born, Vanessa is torn between jealousy and pity for the depleted woman she loves. Vanessa has an impudent affection for her Uncle Dan, who drinks more than is good for him, and when he reels in unexpectedly for a bit of their sanctimonious Sunday night supper, and begins to quarrel with Grandfather, she is all ears. It takes great skill to keep this story within the expanding horizon of this young girl and yet make it so revealing of the adult world.

Margaret Laurence, the author of this book, is a Canadian, and good writers in Canada have been few and far between, perhaps because the Dominion has been so long linked to the Victorian tradition. But there is nothing parochial about Mrs. Laurence; she has lived with her civil engineer husband in Ghana and Somaliland, and one of the best of her early books, The To-morrow-Tamer, is evidence of her attachment to West Africa. Her country is the country of the heart. Now in A Bird in the House she comes home to the continent and the people she knows best.