HANOVER BROWSING

INASMUCH AS THIS is a monthly magazine, many of my reviews will not be simultaneous with the publication of the books reviewed. This makes it clear that all I can attempt to do is to remind you of some good books that you may have missed, and to say what little I have to say about them. It is impossible, if desirable, to try to compete with the daily reviews of newspapers, or the weekly reviews, which, by the nature of things, can review books even before they are published. This month I have some extremely interesting books for you.

i. Now in November, by Josephine Johnson. Simon and Schuster. N. Y. 1934.

In August, on a visit with Alexander Laing '25, to the Breadloaf writer's school, I asked Hervey Allen, who had just told me what a remarkable book this is, how a girl of twenty-four could write such a mature piece of work. "She has lived the life described and knows it," he replied. An answer which was not at all satisfying. Perhaps the question has no answer. Other discriminating people there praised the book with resounding hosannahs. I, too, sing her praises, though in a slightly lower key. She has great talent; perhaps even genius. Time will tell. She certainly has a genuine lyric gift, and a power of expression amazing in a first novel. See Alexander Laing's letter at the end of this article.

In order to show the beauty of her style, and her sensitiveness toward the beauty in visible objects, I pick a few sentences at random from her novel. "By July half of the corn was dead and flapped in the fields like brittle paper." "The hills were bare then and swept of winter leaves, but the orchards had a living look. They were stained with the red ink of their sap and the bark tight around them as though too small to hold the new life of coming leaves." "The pear trees seemed more beautiful than in all other years, with a strong musk-sweetness on the wind." "There was a fierce sweet smell from the crab trees, and I peered up at the stars through their twisted branches. Everything drops away, comes to be unimportant in the dark. It's like sleep almost." With all lyricists Miss Johnson has a sure perception of the beautiful. Her physical senses are as sharp as an animal's. She can express delicately, and at times profoundly, the very glow of nature and life itself. For three quarters of the book I was exhilarated, carried on a magic carpet of words, for the story seemed to me to be crystally true and as pure as a mountain stream, but the "magnificent and terrible denouement," as the jacket has it, let me down. It was not as if such things could not, and in fact have not many times, happened. But it seemed to me that in order to carry through the tragic and melancholy tone of the book, the author (having read Hardy and Ethan Frome?) half-melodramatically added "passion, insanity and death." And horrible death, too. The book would have been better if the Missouri farm itself, demanding the very life and heart's blood of everyone connected with it, had just gone on demanding it in the years of depression and drouth. That is tragedy enough .... beauty enough for any book, and particularly this book. However, as it stands it is a sad, beautiful and moving story. What more can one want? Only this. A book from Miss Johnson that comes entirely from her mind and heart, free from any influence whatsoever save from the dictates of her own spirit. Such a book as Miss Jewett's The Country of the PointedFirs.

The book, designed by Robert Josephy, is a delight to the eye. Buy it for your posterity as well as for yourself.

2. Robert the Bruce, by Eric Linklater. D. Appleton-Century Co. N. Y. 1934.

If you were brought up as I was on legends of Bruce and the Black Douglas, you will be interested to read the facts that are now known of these two illustrious fighters. Their names are resounding through Scotland today, with that, too, of the truly great William Wallace, executed "with savage circumstance" by the English in 1305. I refer to the National Party of Scotland who desire Home Rule, and who are trying to arouse a timid and sluggish Scottish electorate with the magic names of Bruce and Wallace. "It is not Glory, it is not Riches, neither is it Honour, but it is Liberty alone that we fight and contend for, which no Honest man will lose but with his life." This cry of Brace's is. now being sounded again, and without assuming the toga of a prophet, I daresay that within a few years it will come. How Bruce once won it for Scotland is told in this admirable little book.

These short Appleton biographies are well written, readable studies compiled by generally well-known writers. I can recommend Fortescue's Marlborough, Plomer's Cecil Rhodes, Mackenzie's Prince Charlie, H. St. John Philby's Harun Al Rashid, and Renier's Oscar Wilde from first-hand reading. I daresay the others in the series are as good. Were I a father starting a library for my son I should stock some of these books. One reaches a certain age (let us say at fifteen) when facts about great figures of history should replace the myths and legends of childhood.

3. English Journey, by J. B. Priestley. Harper and Brothers. N. Y. 1934.

This book, in my opinion, which I share incidentally with other reviewers, is the best of Priestley's books. It is "a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933." Hugh Walpole, a friend of Priestley and known for his amiable log rolling, thinks that in time to come men will read this book above all others of these years in order to find out what the common man of England was thinking (and doing) in the years of the "Great Depression." One can, without straining superlatives, say that it is an important book. It is important because it is truthful, and it is important to admirers of Mr. Priestley (of whom I have never been one) because it demonstrates that he can jolly well drop his hearty beef-eating manner and write seriously and soberly of things that a decent man cannot overlook. There is little, if any, of "Ye Olde Dying Swanne" atmosphere in this book. The author starts for Southampton by motor coach, goes to Bristol, where he describes the Gold Flake cigarette barons, the Wills family, and their influence on the town; passes through the lovely Cotswolds for a breath of fresh air; descends into the ugliness of Coventry and Birmingham; see the effects of cheap Japanese labor on the cotton industry in Leicester and Lancashire; visits the potteries of Arnold Bennett's Five Towns, and incidentally tries his own hand at turning a lathe; goes to Newcastle famous for its coal-carrying proclivities, and reports accurately and vividly what he sees and hears. The result is not a pretty picture but is rather more Orozcan in its technique. Mr. Priestley does not shirk the facts. He writes: "We headed the procession when it took what we see now to be the wrong turning, down into the dark bog of greedy industrialism, where money and machines are of more importance than men and women. It is for us to find the way out again, into the sunlight. We may have to risk a great deal, perhaps our very existence. But rather than live on meanly and savagely, I concluded, it would be better to perish as the last of the civilized peoples." This will be a faintly depressing book for those who like to be assured that there is always a silver lining to every dark cloud (which I trust is so, though evidence seems to point very often to opposite conclusions), but it will be solid pleasure to those who like a well-written, honest and provocative book describing conditions that we know all too well still exist there . . . . and, alas, in these United States as well.

4. From This Hill Look Down, by Elliott Merrick. Stephen Daye Press, Brattleboro, Vermont. 1934.

In a handsome format this little book comes out of Vermont. It was written and printed in that state. If our good friend Icky Crane is behind the book, he deserves congratulations.

Anyone who has ever known a northern New England rural winter will swear by the book's veracity. The city slickers who are used to heated apartments around 80 degrees should read it, too, and find out how Vermonters (page Attorney Horan) undergo hardships, poverty, cold, sometimes hunger, and manage to survive and like it. Mr. Merrick is not a native but he is rapidly becoming one. Evidently he likes it, too, for his book is a cheery one, and at the same time, he glosses nothing over. I should hesitate to call this book fiction, though the publisher does so, and perhaps the author means for us to think so, too. Instead Mr. Merrick has written a series of sketches of characters that he came to know in working the land of his abandoned farm. The depression brought him to the land and he finds it, with all its hardships, infinitely better than struggling along in the city on relief funds. I imagine that many others have gone back to the land as did Mr. Merrick, his courageous and sensible wife, and their small child. It seems not a bad idea. We can confidently expect other volumes to appear, and maybe one of them will turn out to be the American Growth of the Soil. This little book (183 pages in large and readable type) has no such pretensions. I liked it, and one wishes the author the best of luck. It is that kind of a book.

5. Strong Man Rules. An Interpretation of Germany Today, by George N. Shuster. D. Appleton-Century Co. N. Y. 1934.

It has lately occurred to me that many people, who once professed a great love for Germany, and now profess a greater dislike than many who were always slightly skeptical of the Teutonic mind and character, are being slightly illogical. For certain attributes of mind that Mr. Shuster finds in Germany today have always been there to a slightly less degree. Ever since Frederick the Great, to speak of modern times, the German has loved the uniform and the shining sword. They have long been crammed full, and often by sentimentalists like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, of Nordic or Teutonic superiority of which there is no scientific basis whatsoever. It was Nietzsche who created the myth of the Superman, and who ranted neoclassically of Siegfried and the Blonde Beast, and who, though he may have been speaking only poetically, wrote persuasively of master morality based on force. Wagner, one of the greatest of modern German musicians (Hitler's favorite musician), wrote music and operas nationalistic to the core. Fichte in his addresses to the German people bade them become echtDeutsch, with the implied corrolary that if they did so they would rule the world. In German philosophy there has always seemed to me to be a messianic tinge, a sort of epiglottal yearning for Valhalla, which must seem, to say the least, slightly mad to the Latin. Heine, who died as recently as 1856, within the memory of living men, suffered so from Jew-baiting that he became a Christian so that he could practice law. Add to these points the Versailles treaty with the war guilt clause, the reactionary political policy of France, reparations, plus economic problems of a most complex sort, and you have Hitler and the Nazi policies. As Mr. Shuster rightly says if Hitler hadn't been it would have been necessary to invent him.

Mr. Shuster, a Notre Dame man of the class of 1915, and now managing editor of The Commonweal, writes from the Catholic point of view. He writes, however, with as little bias as any man could, and his book is the more valuable because it is written from the classical point of view. Strong Man Rules was written before the "bloody purge" of last summer which killed the jolly and sinister Rohm, von Schleicher and others, and before the assassination of Dollfuss in Vienna.

The Nazi movement is, and has been . from the start, a military one. The "paper hanger" Hitler was simply the head, and mouthpiece, of Germany's "Bonus Army." He promised them the sky and they had confidence in him. The tone of German life today is still militaristic. The Nazi salute is the most common gesture. Men, and boys too, are marching and drilling. This unquestionably takes their minds off the fact that they haven't got a job, and it also gives them the puerile satisfaction that they are miniature Siegfrieds now winning back their self-respect which had been deflated by the loss of the war. Many say that Nazism is a return to barbarism but I should prefer to call it a sign of desperate adolescence. It is dangerous, but it is also childish and silly. Mr. Shuster writes: "For the principal event in Germany (or Italy or Poland) is this: a great many people have struggled for places of advantage in a managed society, and now some have won out in the tussle by reason of sheer force. The Fascist has proved himself essentially a man who grabs and then sits tight, as well as a man who then seeks to establish a new version of the conscience as a tribute to the goddess of might with whose aid his triumph was gained. If this is an acceptable plan of life, the termites possessed the secret of it long ago." Hitler is described as "a windbag and a wire-puller a politician who knows how to capitalize his own emotion and those of others."

Mr. Shuster is particularly good in his analysis of the anti-Jewish Putsch. "The climax," he writes, "was doubtless reached when Herr Darre, after months of patient research, discovered that behind the Mosaic prohibition of pork there lies a natural incompatibility between this meat and the Jew, who is thereby labeled unfit for the 'nobility' which is to arise from the soil. Rarely in the world's history has a minister of agriculture found time to make so remarkable a contribution to anthropology." Has German scholarship descended to this?

This is the best book on contemporary Germany that I have read. It avoids extremes, is written clearly and without too much intensity, and I recommend it to those who wish the German situation further clarified for them.

Read also The Berlin Diaries, edited by Dr. H. Klotz. This was supposedly written by an anonymous German general close to those higher up. The diary covers Berlin from the fall of Bruning to the accession to power of Adolph Hitler. (May 30, 1932-January go, 1933.) It has some pertinent comments on the lately canonized Hindenberg.

6. Lightship, by Archie Binns. Reynal and Hitchcock. N. Y. 1934. Over fifteen years ago Archie Binns lived for nine months on a lightship of Umatilla Reef, near Cape Flattery, Washington. Since that time he has been mulling over in his mind that experience, and subsequent ones gained on the East India run, and now produces a thoughtful and exciting book. I understand that several publishers turned it down, though for what reason I cannot imagine, for it is one of the best American novels that I have read for a long time. The publisher's reader had good judgment.

It is facilely and thoughtfully written, but as yet I would not compare Mr. Binns to Conrad or Melville. He needs a bit more aging in the bark. However, the book rings true in that his characters, for the most part (I am doubtful of Harry in particular), speak naturally. Harry, the cook's assistant, who soliloquizes sympathetically, truthfully, and with genuine charm on the American Indian, is, I feel, reflecting Mr. Binn's wholly admirable views on that subject. (I shall recommend the book to Bob McKennan who probably shares his views.) Ole, the Swede, because of a youthful adventure reminiscent of Masefield's Dauber, does not believe in God. During a storm Ole tells Ben (Mr. Binns?): "There is no power for good up in the sky The only power for good is in the hearts of people doing their duty. That is better than God It is bad to count on God, and then find he isn't there. I was caught that way, once. It takes the guts out of you. A man behaves much better when he knows what to expect." So Ole has made his own bible which contained only pictures. There was, first, a cut-out American flag, then pictures of Robert La Follette, of Roentgen and the first X-ray machine, of a telephone girl who died at her post warning people of a flood, of Count Marconi, etc. People who had done something for humanity were God for the simple Ole. A Comteian conception. In the adventure of Clark and his friend on the Columbia river in his youth, and the nostalgia it always aroused later in his memory, is limned the dreams of us all. In this book we learn the joys and sorrows, the adventures, points of view, the queer quirks of mind, the memories, the joy of simply doing one's duty, of nine men on a lightship. Conrad would have liked them all, and it may be worth recording here that after he became a famous writer he always heartily welcomed sailors, for he felt that the real deep-water men had qualities uncommon in most landsmen. Qualities so simple and direct that they warmed his heart. These men are like that, and one even finds himself sympathetic toward the lunatic cook, mad from loneliness because he has no inner resources, who one dark night, after several threats, finally "goes to the movies." This novel is strongly recommended.

I shall conclude this article by quoting from a letter received from Alex Laing just before he sailed for London, en route to the South Seas, on a Guggenheim Fellowship. "You can say for me," he writes "of Josephine Johnson's book that it is the most heartening novel by a newcomer that I have read in years. After writing a pessimistic book about the fate of our language, I now can have faith once more in its brilliant future. The sensuous exactitude of her prose reminded me of Keatsand I do not know how I could more greatly praise any writing than to say that! I do not know of any American of any age who writes prose more beautifully." I guess you had better read Now in November.