The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE ROYAL PALACES
by Philip Howard
Gambit, $10.00

The Royal Palaces by Philip Howard is a most agreeable, most human and witty story of where and how the Kings of England built their homes and of what went on within them in their heyday. The book begins with the latest discovery, a six-acre palace of Roman design as big as any palace of Nero’s Rome, which came to light in 1960 just west of Chichester. Without parallel outside the heart of the Roman world, it was built about 75 A.D., with bright intricate mosaics and Gorgonzola marbles imported from as far away as Greece; built, so the historians deduce, for Rex Cogidubnus, king of the local tribes, who gave the entering Romans a firm base on the south coast for their legions. There are formal gardens, a guest wing with plenty of room for bodyguards, and a bath suite larger than the public baths at Roman Silchester.

During the Dark Ages the palaces were first a fortress, second a prison, and, with the darkness, the cold, and the stinking rushes on the floor, incidentally a home; they are symbolized for us by the Tower of London, “its amenities,” writes Mr. Howard, “as a place to live, never great, were not improved by the grisly and interminable executions.” It was Edward the Confessor who built himself a residence at Westminster and who “introduced the revolutionary idea of having a separate bedroom to sleep in.” But privacy came at a price: Henry I’s ewerer was paid a penny a day for drying the King’s clothes after a journey or hunting, but fourpence on those rare occasions—Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun—when the King took a bath. It was not until the reign of Richard II that the King in 1380 installed hot and cold taps in his bath at Westminster. By then the palace was the seat of government, of the court and the arts, providing 20,000 souls with board and lodging, arms—and boudoirs.

Fire from within was a greater danger than a siege. William the Conqueror, in his hurry to secure the domain, threw up eighty-five castles in twenty years—all of wood and vulnerable to the careless flame. Windsor was his stronghold, and thanks to his great-grandson, Henry II, the wooden stockades were rebuilt of great blocks of stone brought from Bagshot. But what fire could do to even the most durable palace was seen at Westminster in 1834. The Exchequer decided to destroy the vast pile of wooden tallies on which clerks had notched their accounts from time immemorial, and they were shoveled into a stove in the House of Lords, once the bedroom of medieval kings. The red-hot stove set fire to the paneling, and in turn to the House of Lords, St. Stephen’s Chapel, and the Painted Chamber, and all the old palace, with memories and masonry reaching back eight hundred years, went up in smoke!

Among the greatest of the builders were the Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII, and their palaces “proliferate around the banks of the Thames partly because for centuries it was the quickest and most comfortable main road in the kingdom”; Greenwich was their nautical residence, Hampton Court a favorite spot, and upstream in wooded solitude, Richmond. In all, Henry VIII either built or remodeled thirteen palaces, of which the most bizarre was Nonsuch.

The first two Georges disliked Windsor and let it slip into decay; George III, on the other hand, wanted it for his country retreat, but shunning grandeur, remodeled Queen Anne’s “neat house on the Castle Hill,” naming it “Queen’s Lodge,” and lived in it as a royal farmer. As he lapsed into insanity and blindness, the author tells us, he would be taken with spells while driving with the Queen in Great Park, once jumping out of the carriage to shake hands with the branch of an oak tree and engaging in a long cordial conversation. He had the recurring belief that he was no longer married to the Queen, who, as a courtier remarked, had become so fat that she looked as if she were having all her fifteen children simultaneously.

The more modern dwellings are the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, in which the prodigious Prince Regent indulged his Oriental fantasies, and the much more restrained Osborne and Balmoral, where after Albert’s death Victoria was ruled by her Scottish gillie, John Brown. In Mr. Howard’s social history, with its gay touches, we glimpse the decorum, the legends, the fierceness of the rivalry, the passion, and the boredom which composed the life of those great edifices before they became museums.

INSIDE THE THIRD REICH
by Albert Speer
Macmillan, $12.50

That Adolf Hitler in 1925 was making pencil sketches of the enormous arch of triumph to commemorate his military victories to come is one of the many remarkable disclosures in the Memoirs of Albert Speer.

Speer’s father was a prominent architect in Mannheim, and the son had been well trained in the same profession. The family had suffered from the Depression, but young Speer had given no thought to politics until he first heard Hitler speak in 1931. What attracted him was the personality of this man, the blueprints for Germany’s recovery, and the incredible opportunity which fell into his lap when Hitler became Chancellor. Speer was twenty-eight when he was admitted to Hitler’s inner circle; he was thirty-two when he was given the unlimited power to plan the stadiums, the state buildings, and the super cities which were intended to transmit Hitler’s time and spirit to posterity. When war came he was promoted to Minister of Armaments and War Production and for a considerable period was the second most important man in the Reich, a task he administered with great competence, averting his eyes from what he did not want to see. He devoted twelve years to the Führer and after the Nuremberg trials spent twenty years in the Spandau Prison, brooding and writing.

Speer was by far the youngest of Hitler’s lieutenants, which explains why he was so impressionable and why his recollections have been recorded with a vitality the prison could not sap. As he comes on stage he is a well-educated idealist, dismayed by his reading of Spengler and eager to prove himself. Economic conditions had cut off any prospect of commissions in his Mannheim office, but as a new member of the Party he was given the chance to rebuild Goebbels’s ministry; he made a brilliant design for the decorations at a night rally at Tempelhof Field that led to Nuremberg. He was amazed by the intensity of Hitler’s interest and his memory for detail, and he found himself given carte blanche, not with praise, but with the single crisp word, “Agreed.”

His reputation for speed sometimes betrayed him. At the funeral ceremonies for Hindenburg in East Prussia, the towers of Tannenberg and the inner courtyard were draped with black crepe, and even the fresh wooden benches were painted black. Then it rained and rained. Bales of black cloth were flown up from Berlin to cover the seats for the mighty, but the wet paint soaked through.

Speer had misgivings, but he enjoyed being a part of the hero’s worship; he was quite aware that his preference for classic simplicity was being contaminated by Hitler’s love for vast proportions. The colossal plans for the reshaping, the regutting of Berlin have to be read to be believed: fortunately for the book we have reproductions of Speer’s models and Hitler’s drawings. During this period, when Speer was aware of the persecution of the Jews, and later, when he was in command of the slave labor, his attitude is revealed by this admission: “An American historian has said of me that I loved machines more than people. He is not wrong . . . the sight of suffering people influenced only my emotions, but not my conduct.”

The most dramatic chapters are those which follow the landing in Normandy. Speer had already shown his extraordinary capacity as an administrator; now he had to improvise as the bombings dislocated his network of plants and as hard-driven gauleiters simply appropriated what they needed. After Remargen the odds were desperate: Goebbels stepped up his propaganda about secret weapons; there was speculation on the use of poison gas; Hitler insisted on the Ardennes offensive, believing that the Americans would panic, and when Patton stopped it there was no place to go but the bunker under Speer’s once ornate Chancellery in Berlin. At the Nuremberg trials Speer said, “I suppose if Adolf Hitler had ever had a friend, I would have been that friend.” and his closeness to the Führer carried with it the envy, fear, and respect of his elder rivals. No contemporary will ever draw Hess, Goebbels, Himmler, GÖring, and Eva Braun so closely, nor portray so truly the delusions from which all but Eva and Speer suffered at the end.

BRILL AMONG THE RUINS
by Vance Bourjaily
Dial, $6.95

The man to watch in Vance Bourjaily’s new novel is Robert Brill, a strapping, sexy, sandy-haired lawyer who at the age of forty-two has come to the crossroads in the small town of Rosetta, Illinois. He has always been a free-swinger, too outspoken to serve in the legislature for long, a toughminded independent liked and respected by the academics in the nearby University City. Now, with the accumulation of the years, life is closing in on Bob Brill; his legal practice has palled, and he no longer trusts his partner; since her operation, Pat, his wife, has surrendered to alcohol, sipping sherry, reading novels in bed; his son Cal is a conscientious objector serving as a medic in Vietnam; and his cabin in the woods, his hideout for sex or for hunting, is about to be invaded by a gas line.

What offers Brill an out are his connections in University City, where a young archaeologist, Gary Pederson, invites him down to Mexico to visit the dig near Tehuacan. What sparks his trip is his sudden infatuation with a hot-blooded coed, Gabby Light, who comes to his office seeking a divorce, and catching the response in his eye, leads him on. With Gabby as his bed-mate and an ardent one, he runs away from his problems in Rosetta.

The question which the story poses midway is, Will Brill remain among the ruins of ancient Oaxaca, forsaking the ruins he has left at home? Unresolved, he is called back to Illinois to help extricate his partner from a tax scandal, to find himself confronted with Cal, who is home on leave, a sergeant now, and a very changed boy indeed (this confrontation of father and son is one of the very best passages in the book). But the Mexican adventure still beckons, and when he flies back, it is with the thought that there he may find his “Goddamn last chance.” Will he take it?

Mr. Bourjaily’s characterization of Brill is all of a piece, rugged and likable. Unfortunately, in his work on the dig, Brill, partly in insomnia, begins to invent a mythical odyssey of the ancient days in which he himself played a part — and I find it goofy. The parts of this book — and there are many good ones — are better than the whole; one expects it to turn into Dostoevsky, but it never quite does.