The Peripatetic Reviewer

by James B. ConantHarper & Row,$12.50

Time was when some Harvard alumni believed that the presidency of the University was second only to the presidency of the United States in importance, a notion inspired by the eminence of Charles William Eliot and seconded by that of his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell. Now comes the controversial, clearheaded memoir of James Bryant Conant, My Several Lives, to show’ that forty years at Harvard, twenty of them in the presidential chair, can indeed fit a man not only to be “a social inventor,” as the author calls himself, but a national figure of extraordinary versatility and competence.

At the time of his engagement to Patty in 1920, Jim Conant confided that he had three ambitions: first, to become the leading organic chemist in the United States; after that, the president of Harvard, and finally, a Cabinet member, perhaps Secretary of the Interior. When he ventured that aspiration, one world war was behind him: he could not possible foresee that he would be a leading interventionist in the Second, a pioneer in the nuclear era deeply responsible for the atomic bomb, an ambassador to West Germany, and, at an age when others might have relaxed, a daring critic and renovator of our public schools. There was a vast amount of hotheaded humanity involved in those varied assignments, and this lean Calvinist, whose tendency was to expect the worst when dealing with others and who was not the most tactful of men, has kept a record that discloses his motives and changes of mind, moderates his success, and rarely disguises his mistakes.

Both the Bryants and Conants were decently poor, which probably added to young Jim’s self-reliance. His father, a Civil War veteran, bad witnessed the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac, but otherwise was “massively silent,” and it was from his mother that the boy inherited his capacity for dissent. At the Roxbury Latin School he found in Newton Henry Black a teacher who dedicated him to science. At Harvard he early attracted the attention of two professors, Theodore W. Richards, whose daughter he was later to marry, and the organic chemist Elmer Peter Kohler, German-trained and very compulsive, under whom Conant served as research student and teaching assistant. He took his degree in three years, was briefly commissioned in the Chemical Warfare Service, and then after an unhappy fling in industrial chemistry, returned to Harvard to make his bid.

When the time came to find a successor to President Lowell, the Corporation was divided between one of its own number, Grenville Clark, the broad-minded New York lawyer, and someone else. Conant was asked, with other faculty members, to define the needs of the college, and his response was so farsighted that it was as if he had spoken for himself. As president he made up in candor what he lacked in tact: he was a shy, heavy speaker at the outset, but he learned to be a good one, and those in the inner council soon respected his remarkable capacity for assimilation.

Lowell in embracing the tutorial system bad filled the junior ranks with “good men”—good enough for tutorials though not necessarily for tenure. When the Depression made a cutback necessary and the ax fell, Conant had a faculty rebellion on his hands. In the readjustment he made mistakes: his impatience with Bernard DcVoto, who did not want tenure but reassurance, lost the English Department a unique addition, and his mis judgment of Theodore Spencer would have been equally damaging had the war not intervened. On the other hand he was adamant in recommending J. Kenneth Galbraith for a full professorship at a time when the conservative Overseers were suspicious of any Keynesian economist.

It was in his support of the graduate schools, quite as much as in innovations, that Conant was at his best. He labored long to revitalize the Harvard School of Education, first with Dean Spaulding and alter the war with that brilliant young man he had watched in Washington, Francis Keppel. His persuasion that brought back Donald David from industry to be dean of the Harvard Business School was as masterly as his selection, first, of Archibald MacLeish and, then, of Louis Lyons to be the Curator ol the Xieman Fellows (the Fellowships in Journalism being, in fact, Conant’s definition of a vague hut generous bequest). His initiation of the National Scholarships, a nationwide injection of top-ranking boys from public schools, broke forever the prep-school sovereignty at Harvard; that and the University Professorships which he projected in the Depression were as invigorating as the blueprint for General Studies he put in motion through a brilliant committee during the war.

One would expect Jim Conant to be a defender of academic freedom and a leading interventionist as France began to crumble and Britain stood alone. With his scientific prestige and proven leadership he was the perfect choice to gain the confidence of British scientists and to serve as Dr. Vanncvar Bush’s deputy in the swift and awesome decisions leading up to the atomic bomb. When Conant became the -wheelhorse for Bernard Baruch’s commission to produce synthetic rubber, Baruch’s opening remark was, “Well, you’re not much to look at—that’s certain.”Maybe not; but a bold planner in this nation’s interest and the most influential educator of our time. Each of his hooks on public education brought down wrath on him, from the parochial schools, from parents in favor of busing, from teachers with a vested interest, but in each, Conant was challenging complacency and offering practical solutions for an institution grown lax.

by Joanna OstrowKnopf, $5.95

It is a pitiable story and one that a new writer, Joanna Ostrow, has made the most of in her contemporarv, well-peopled, and indignant novel ... In the Highlands Since Time Immemorial. Simon Johnston, the hero, is a voting discard of the Second World War, the abandoned son of a Belfast prostitute and a black sailor. Simon is likable and intelligent: he has pulled himsell up by Ins bootstraps, found a loyal Scottish wife in Jenny, and is settling clown to study for his scholarship in Edinburgh when he gets a troubled letter from the North. The Scots couple, his foster parents really, who had taken him to their crolt from the orphanage and for whom he had toiled during his boyhood, now have their backs to the wall. Galium, the husband, has lost the use of his legs and is in hospital recovering from the amputation, and Mary cannot care for the sheep and cattle and battle the elements alone. For Simon, locally decides: he gets a leave of absence from the university, sublets their apartment, and bundles up Jenny and their two children for the hard winter in the Highlands, which he knows only too well.

The stone house at Croichan is colder even than Simon remembered. “At Croichan, they were all sensitive to degrees of cold and light, because the house was not a shelter; it was a target, a center of wind and bad weather, and the house was often colder than the hill, as if it had been turned inside out.” It says much for Miss Ostrow’s ability that she can make this remote, decrepit croft which only the dour Scot could tolerate a place of such warm, inaudible loyalty.

Mary, the farmer’s wife, is Gaelic by tradition and in her silences. The bleak Christmas, which fortunately the children are too young to notice, is followed by the formality ol New Year’s, when calls are made after midnight and the whiskey is lasted neat. Jenny, Simon’s attractive wile, can see no future in am of this, but loves him too much to say so, and when Simon himself becomes for one day and a night a participant in the coursing of the salukis and deerhounds, field trials followed by drinks, followed In a banquet, followed by more drinks, the young rebel has the chance to speak his mind to the laird, who happens to be the host of the meet and the owner of the farm which Simon is struggling to preserve. This clash between the black man and the Scot is the high point, and when the laird in his defense expostulates that the Gaelic peasantry has always been “the most degenerate cultural group in Europe simply impossible to revive,” Simon in passion nails the responsibility where ii belongs. Misery loves company, and one cannot read this book without taking sides; to finish it is to have lived through a hard but very human experience.

by Phillip Kniglitley and Colin SimpsonMcGraw-Hill, $7.95

T. E. Lawrence was the most glamorous figure to emerge from the First World War, because of the daring raids he led against the Turks, because he was thought to personify the Arabs’ yearning tor independence, and because in Seven Pillars of Wisdom he embellished that legend and lus own exploits in a work of literature that will last. Lawrence’s campaigning in the desert, so well publicized by Lowell Thomas, and the mystery he exuded were romantic: to a generation who had lost so much in the Flanders mud, and it is not the British alone who have developed a curious passion for this short rugged figure, no taller than Nelson. The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia reveals the history behind the legend, and some ol it is less than ideal.

The book is a remarkable mosaic, its most important sources being the secret state documents released in 1968; the unpublished letters of Lawrence in the Bodleian Library, the most telling of which were written to Charlotte Shaw, the wife of G.B.S.; and a network of interviews with the Arabs, archaeologists, and .soldiers who touched T.E., the most surprising being that with John Bruce, whose relationship helped to release Lawrence’s twisted emotions at the close of his life.

What emerges from all this are the indisputable facts that Lawrence was a British agent from his earliest days at Carchemish; that he had been indoctrinated with his dreams of Empire by Dr. D. G. Hogarth; that he despised the French, resented their claims on Syria, and used Arab independence as a ruse for cutting Britain into the largest plausible slice of the Ottoman Empire. The secret treaties for the dismemberment of the Middle East, of which T. E. was aware, gave him a hard time with Feisal when they were published by the Communists in 1917, but Lawrence’s courage and some double talk from the Foreign Office kept the flame alight.

This book makes Lawrence something less than the Robin Hood of the Desert, and it explains the degradation which he suffered at the peace conference when the Arabs, at last disillusioned by the sordid deals, wounded him with their accusation of treachery; it explains why Lawrence had no place to go but into anonymity, and why the lust for speed, in small boats or motorcycles, was the temptation that stilled him.

by Alec WaughFarrar, Straus Re Giroux, S5.95

Alec Waugh’s new novel is a teaser for those who like their erotica explicit but without coarse language; to his “deeply missed friend, Vyvyan Holland, the younger son of Oscar Wilde,” Mr. Waugh dedicates what he calls “this indelicate story that contains no indelicate words.”

The beginning is innocent enough: through the insinuation of a gossip, Myra Trail, the wife of a Treasury official, becomes suspicious of Victor, her ultraconservative husband. They are in their first decade of marriage, with two young children and every aspect of comfortable respectability; now suddenly she suspects that he is keeping a mistress in the purlieus. Sent abroad by the family physician to quiet her nerves, Myra first attracts the attention of a South African salesman, who wants to go to bed with her, and then of a German lesbian, who does. She returns to London determined to recapture Victor, and is in the act of so doing when she finds herself most professionally blackmailed. At this point the author moves away from the sex manual and into the skulduggery ol a drug ring. I suppose this will appeal to those who wonder how the other half behaves in bed.