The Peripatetic Reviewer
by Edward Weeks
NOBEL LECTURE by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $4.00 (cloth );$ 1.00 (paper); bilingual edition
The response by the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature has assumed more significance in the last twenty-five years as nations have grown closer, more vulnerable, and more worried. The most profound utterance by an American was that of William Faulkner in 1949, when the development of the hydrogen bomb had submerged people everywhere in the depths of fearful thinking. “Our tragedy today,” Faulkner said, “is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it,” and he went on to denounce the pervasive influence of fear in our daily living and, more seriously, in our literature. He demanded that writers return to their rightful concern, “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself,” and he concluded with those brave words: “I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.”
The most eloquent response in the long history of the Prizes was written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Prize winner, after his expulsion from the Moscow Writers Union, written, not spoken, because he dared not attend the ceremony in Stockholm for fear that he would be denied reentry to his native land. He begins by considering Art and how in our self-confidence we seek to re-form it today; then he turns to his master: “Dostoevsky,” he writes, “once enigmatically let drop the phrase: ‘Beauty will save the world.’ What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes; but whom has it saved?” At that point, as if over the strings and woodwinds of a great orchestra, Solzhenitsyn states his first theme. “To reach this chair from which the Nobel Lecture is delivered—a chair by no means offered to every writer and offered only once in a lifetime—I have mounted not three or four temporary steps but hundreds or even thousands, fixed, steep, covered with ice, out of the dark and the cold where I was fated to survive, but others, perhaps more talented, stronger than I, perished. I myself met but few of them in the Gulag [the state prison-camp] Archipelago, a multitude of scattered island fragments. Indeed, under the millstone of surveillance and mistrust, I did not talk to just any man; of some I only heard; and of others I only guessed. Those with a name in literature who vanished into that abyss are, at least, known; but how many were unrecognized, never once publicly mentioned? And so very few, almost no one ever managed to return. A whole national literature is there, buried without a coffin, without even underwear, naked, a number tagged on its toe. Not for a moment did Russian literature cease, yet from outside it seemed a wasteland. Where a harmonious forest could have grown, there were left, after all the cutting, two or three trees accidentally overlooked.” No man living has ever condemned censorship with such feeling.
He expresses his gratitude to the “protective wall put forward by prominent writers of the world” which saved him from worse persecution; to the Norwegian writers who promised him hospitality were he exiled, and to Francois Mauriac, who, with his colleagues, nominated Solzhenitsyn for the Prize. Then with powerful conviction he moves to his major statement, that literature is no longer a matter of internal affairs: literature, which he calls one of the most sensitive and responsive tools of human existence, “has been the first to pick up, adopt, and assimilate this sense of the growing unity of mankind.” Writers and artists can vanquish lies, and without lying, naked violence cannot survive. One must read Solzhenitsyn’s lecture to feel the full force of his argument and the fortitude which prompted it.
HOUR OF GOLD, HOUR OF LEAD by Anne Morrow Lindbergh Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $7.95
I well remember how stirred the American people were by Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. His courtship of and subsequent marriage to Anne Morrow, the daughter of our Ambassador to Mexico, were a reward in keeping. The emergence of this shy, gifted Smith graduate, a poet in being, as his copilot in a flight that broke the transcontinental record and then in more hazardous flights to the Orient by way of Alaska, continued a romance which we followed with vicarious pride in Anne’s books, so candid in their description of the fear she conquered, the discipline she learned, the exhilaration she experienced with her husband. “To be deeply in love,” she writes in her introduction to this volume, “is, of course, a great liberating force. . . . The loved one is the liberator.” With Charles at her side Anne developed a new confidence. “I always feel like standing up straight when he is behind me.” But she too was the liberator, bringing him into the expansive warmth of a devoted, cultivated family, adding to his superb confidence in a technical world her world of poetry and deep feeling. Then came the kidnapping and killing, and in the aftermath it was Anne who became the shield and the solace. Such is the story of happiness, daring, and sorrow revealed in these letters and journals.
How the lovers were hounded! En route from Mexico to Cleveland, Anne wrote, “This morning I woke up to a little boy’s voice. He had traveled all night alone. He got off very proudly and his first words to his family were ‘Lindbergh’s fiancée is on my train!’” Before their marriage, when Charles flew down to see her in Mexico City, their only chance to escape from the crowd was to take a picnic lunch and fly away to some open prairie. On their return from one jaunt, Charles saw that they had lost a wheel on takeoff. He put Anne in the seat behind, braced her with pillows, and told her to open the window so that if they rolled over she could get out. He flew the plane back to the airfield and around until the gasoline was exhausted, landed on one wheel, and, when the axle grounded and they flopped, he emerged with a dislocated shoulder, asking the crowd not to take souvenirs.
He would not bring her with him on the long flights until Anne had become a pilot familiar with the radio code. For her, flying “provided time alone, peace to sink down into oneself, to think, to learn poetry.” She was equal to any emergency. At Aklavik the self-starter on their seaplane broke down; Charles had to crank it by hand while she sat in the front cockpit and switched the ignition on and off. Once the engine had started, she had to crawl out and back along the wing into her seat while Charles jumped into the cockpit, all while the plane was taxiing across the water. And when their plane turned over in the treacherous Yangtze and Charles shouted to her to jump, she did so, “thinking calmly as I went under, I am jumping up-current and the ship is falling over in that direction. I’ll probably get hit.’ ”
The Lindberghs’ sympathy for those who faced the terrific sternness of life at Point Barrow and for the millions who were homeless and starving at Nanking is put with feeling. Her own sense of loss is written in words one can hardly bear to read aloud: “Night— so long to live forgetting that baby— with the picture getting dimmer and dimmer. The ghost of a little boy whom I can’t even see in my waking mind. Then, as though something in me denied this, I dreamed heavily about him. Under the crust of consciousness lay another consciousness that held the image of him securely. Only I could not bring it back with me when I woke early in the morning and cursed the birds and could not get to sleep again.” This book is an awakening of a gallant, sensitive, and expressive woman.
WELLINGTON: PILLAR OF STATE by Elizabeth Longford Harper & Row, $10.00
In her preceding volume. Wellington: The Years of the Sword, Lady Longford described the growth and the tempering of her Irish-born hero, Arthur Wellesley, from the early campaigns in India which founded his fortune to the five hard years on the Peninsula, where he mastered the tactics that were to destroy Napoleon at Waterloo. As the foremost commander in Europe, adored by his countrymen as only Nelson before him had been, the Duke did what Nelson could never have done: he became the representative of Britain in foreign affairs and the voice of common sense, whose judgment was deferred to in crisis after crisis on the home front. How he did this and at what cost to his home life, how he maintained his freedom of action, and his hold on the men and women who loved him, is the substance of Lady Longford’s new book, a volume so lively, so sound, and, thanks to Wellington, so quotable that I read it with every bit as much enjoyment as I did the first.
After Waterloo, the Duke’s first concern was for the wounded, his second the destination of Napoleon, who had fled to the South of France and was bargaining unsuccessfully for safe passage to America. With Bonaparte’s removal to St. Helena, Wellington addressed himself to the conference table as the spokesman for England and the commander of the Allied Army of Occupation. He accepted the material honors, the £60,000 prize money from Waterloo and the £200,000 grant from Parliament, but not the title, “Prince of Waterloo.” He had small use for the restored monarch, Louis XVIII, but much respect for Madame de Staël, who never hesitated to spur him. “You must become the greatest man, not of our time, but of all times,” she wrote him, “and give us back France.”
In England, Stratfield Saye became the beloved home for his Duchess, the shortsighted, impulsive Kitty, who could not help being jealous of her hero. In his long sojourns in France and in London, the Duke preferred to live apart from her. The truth is he had outgrown Kitty, and, as Lady Longford well says, “the women with whom he could have been happy ... attracted him by their beauty, wit, grasp of politics and social graces rather than by their domesticity.” That he had his loves is certain, but he walked a tightrope. The scandal sheets prattled, there were libel suits, and more often than not damages were paid.
The history of British politics is not everyone’s meat, but what keeps one threading one’s way through the alarms and excursions is Wellington’s response to tumult. His most fervent admirers, as the biographer points out, had agreed that he was totally lacking in political imagination: ‘’Battlefield imagination, yes; it was his forte. A favourite carriage-game often played with Croker as they bowled along the English roads together was to guess what kind of terrain lay ‘on the other side of the hill.’ ” But his conservatism was set by the time he entered political life and when he became the target of the Radical revolutionaries he had to barricade himself in Apsley House. It was his pressure which brought about the police force—the bobbies, named after Robert Peel—to take over the protection formerly provided by the Guards; and it was his common sense, in or out of the Cabinet, which often resulted in the moderate compromise. In this full-length portrait the reader is captivated by Wellington’s integrity, his capacity for the telling phrase, his ludicrous tendency to put buckshot in his friends rather than in the grouse, his relations with his two sons, his outbursts against Kitty, his half-concealed friendships with the most attractive women of his day.
SURFACING by Margaret Atwood Simon and Schuster, $6.95
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, one of the best, and this is a poet’s novel. The story takes place on an island two miles long in the wilderness of northern Quebec, on the last rim of marginal civilization. Miss Atwood’s sense of the place, of the lake in its various moods, of the animal life retreating before the intruder, is beautifully conveyed. In the most intense passages of the book her writing reminds me of Iris Murdoch.
To the abandoned cabin on the island come two young couples from Toronto, guided there by the heroine, whose father is missing and presumed dead. She knows what a recluse he had been; this was her home before her mother’s death, and she must find him if he still lives. She brings with her for companionship’s sake Joe, her lover, and their friends David and Anna, a married couple who have never experienced the wilderness before.
It is fashionable these days to write about the inept, the rejected, and these four characters of Miss Atwood’s—only one of them, David, over thirty—certainly qualify. The reaction of three of them to the raw, silent North is predictable; in their cheap way they are bewildered and derisive. It is the heroine who does all the cooking, keeps them afloat, cleans the fish, and, using every pretext, begins to search for her missing father. The cabin is as he left it, well provisioned; his maps, his books, his drawings in place, even the photograph albums which tell of her rude schooling and unhappy girlhood in this remote spot. Her past reawakens her: her suppressed admiration for her botanist father, with his woodslore and his craving for isolation; her pity for her ailing mother, her anger at the persecution she received from the French Canadian children, her mother’s driving away of the bear that had been ravaging their supplies—all this is vital and in sharp contrast to the zany photography and amorous dawdling of her companions.
But when she took refuge in the city after her mother’s death, the heroine entered a long cold corridor: her abortion, her broken marriage, her shallow work as an illustrator brought her to dead center. But in retracing this deadening progression the novelist jeopardizes first our sympathy for, and then our interest in, the character who alone is holding up the tent of the entire narration.
There are, as I have said, passages of fine writing in this book, and scenes of considerable power, such as the diving under the cliff and the discovery of the dead heron, identification of sensibilities in this North country which I believe to be true. I think it a pity that at the end, when she hides and strips herself for a fresh start, the heroine’s behavior and her future with Joe are so hard to believe.