A Writer's Eye Part 2

This looks like the unholy work of only one man. Reader, S. J. Perelman has struck again. 22 ''Great, fatuous b.o.o.by that I was"these are the words of Perelman himself"I imagined advertising would be destroyed from me outside. It won't; it's going to bubble and heave and finally expire in the arms of two nuns, like Oscar Wilde." Not if S. J. Perelman can help it, it won't. In fact, here lies the body before us now, with a sign left pinned to its jacket saying Crazy Like a Fox.

Advertising is not the only victim of this man. With his Dyak-like tread he has crept up on the movies, on Corn, on Jitterbugging, Bee-keeping, Fas.h.i.+on, then Chichi, and with a maniacal glitter in his eye has done his deadly work.23 Read these random notes, torn secretly from the mordant evidence at hand. "I don't know much about medicine but I know what I like." . . . "A Schrafft hostess, well over nine feet tall, with ice mantling her summit, waved me toward the door marked 'Credentials.'" . . . "He caught my arm in a vise-like grip but with a blow I sent him groveling. In ten minutes he was back with a basket of appetizing, fresh-picked grovels. We squeezed them and drank the piquant juice thirstily." . . . "I had gone into the Corn Exchange Bank to exchange some corn." The clues are unmistakable. These are the notations of the Fox.

Page 31 Even innocent Clifford Odets has not been allowed to escape. 24 He has been dealt with callously. The Fox has down here notes for a play called "Waiting for Santy" and bitingly leaves word that "the parts of Rankin, Panken, Rivken, Riskin, Ruskin, Briskin and Praskin are interchangeable, and may be secured directly from your dealer or the factory." Has anyone seen Clifford Odets lately?

There are other victims, even more innocent than Odets. "Take a small boy smeared with honey," we find here, "and lower him between the walls. The bees will fasten themselves to him by the hundreds and can be sc.r.a.ped off after he is pulled up, after which the boy can be thrown away. If no small boy smeared with honey can be found, it may be necessary to take an ordinary small boy and smear him, which should be a pleasure."

The strange pan is, Perelman refers to his deeds as "prose." But Perelman's "prose" was never a simple thing, like mother love, or even like other prose. It is highly complex, deviously organizedthe work of some master brain being undoubtedly behind itand is more like jiu-jitsu than any prose most of us have ever seen.

There is, for instance, that sudden materializing of figures of speech, calculated to throw the bystander, or reader, over the head of the sentence and press a little nerve at the back of his ear. "Mr. Mifflin, in a porous-knit union suit from Franklin Simon's street floor, is stretched out by the fire like a great, tawny cat. Inasmuch as there is a great, tawny cat stretched out alongside him, also wearing a porous-knit union suit, it is not immediately apparent which is Mifflin." (Mrs. Mifflin's presence on the scene does not help anyshe "is seated at the console of her Wurlitzer, softly wurlitzing to herself.") By Perelman's evil plot every too-familiar name of this world is going to get caught in an insidious tangle from which it is doubtful, now, that any will ever become extricated. "In one corner [of Schrafft's] Nick Kenny, Jack Benny, James Rennie, Sonja Henie and E. R. Penney, the chain store magnet, were gaily comparing pocketbooks to see who had the most money." All about, trade and advertising cliches are shooting through the air like bullets. "It's a h.e.l.lerAltman's, of course?" asks a lady other daughter Giselle who is in her wedding dress, and Giselle sputters, "Yes, and available in nineteen different shadesamong them wine, russet, beige, peach, grackle, stone, liver, lover, blubber, blabber and clabber.''

Every reader is ent.i.tled to his own moment for collapse, but this reviewer Page 32 takes hers during a very short play of the advertising underworld when a lady enters on the line, "Don't mind us, Verna, we just dropped in to sneer at your towels."

There are those who think that Perelman no longer slays with the old abandon. They declare that some of that fine early madness is missing, and that one day the Fox may be caught. These are optimists. There is both old and new evidence in the forty-eight pieces here collectedand though Perelman may not scatter the red herrings to which we have become accustomed, something mighty like a herring, and mighty frisky, goes scampering across all 269 pages with every $ 2.50 purchase of the book, according to the steadier witnesses. Or perhaps it is not a red herring but that which, or whom, Perelman calls "Pandemonium, the upstairs girl."

Page 33 Artist at War By George Biddle Tatters and Fragments of War:

[Reviewed under the Pseudonym Michael Ravenna]:

New York Times Book Review 16 July 1944: 3, 24

"To obtain a pictorial record of the war in all its phases" was the general a.s.signment given forty-two artists by the War Department. 25 One of these was George Biddle, the brother of Attorney General Francis Biddle, who was to organize and act as chairman of the Art Advisory Committee and to go himself to the Mediterranean and draw. This bookfifty-five drawings and maps and an expository text in diary formcame out of Tunis and the Sicilian and early Italian fronts.

Mr. Biddle, after endless red tape in Algiers to "get permission to accomplish my a.s.signment," finally flung himself in a jeep with a driver from Alexandria, La., and was soon where he wanted to bewhere he could see. "At the front no one asks for pa.s.ses." Before he returned to America, he had found himself in desert bivouacs and on maneuvers in Africa; in the first jeep entering Messina and receiving the grapes, morning-glories and hot bearded kisses of the Sicilians; on the captain's bridge of the Boise on D-day at Taranto, giving orders in Italian to Italian craft. He was in the first wave of our men crossing the Volturno. Although he went as an "eye," simply to see and draw what went on, he was by necessity an arm too, with a gun in hand, and on occasion took over a prisoner or dressed a wound or interpreted a conversation. All this time, a veteran of the first World War, he was Page 34 a man the young boys shook their heads over, as being one of "you old men," that ought to stay home.

George Biddle is, of course, right when he declares in his book that an artist's eye is needed in war in order to tell the truth about it. Art is both more pa.s.sionate and more dispa.s.sionate than reporting, and hence more true. 26 By being selective it can record the essentials better than a photograph which, however official, is indiscriminate, and also carefully censored for horror.

In the midst of this turmoil of battle, Mr. Biddle has made drawings of a strange abjection. It is the incongruities of life that tell the story, he saysthe almost surrealist mixture of human bodies, animal bodies, broken columns, scattered fruits, dismembered trees, walls that have shed their plaster "like icing off a cake," the tatters and fragments of war.

All this is true enough, yet the lack of organization in the sketches themselves succeed in giving an impression of feebleness. Of course the drawings were made hurriedly, on the scene. For this they have a value they could not have worked up in another state, but it is to be regretted that they somehow fail in immediate impact, simply through the style thereby achieved. It should be said that this artist has pity, but I think this abjectness is not pity but an artistic conception. Otherwise, of course, it would be bad art, which is different from sad art.

Oddly enough, more of what Mr. Biddle saw comes through in his textwhich is interesting in itself.

Biddle himself, quite naturally, mentions the name of Goya more than once in speaking of his tasktheir intentions are kin; and so it would not be unfair to make one comparison.27 Where Goya drew disaster in the actfalling bodies, the thrust of violence in its present momentGeorge Biddle draws the aftermath of disaster, the sprawling pattern in its wake.28 His bodies in fatigue, in sleep, in resigned pain and in death are quiet, as if they had become simply a reflection of the horror that has just pa.s.sed over them.

Perhaps that inertness is valid too, as a part of this war, with its speed of destruction, its wholesale dealing out of ruin and pa.s.sing on, before the victim has had time to a.s.similate it, or even quite to believe in it. Goya often showed human beings at the moment they met death, but at that moment they were supremely alive, awarethe very pa.s.sion of his feeling for war's horror seemed to dictate this moment to him for its translation into art.

Mr. Biddle pursues his point of view: Page 35 When I picture a battle scene it is not violence, dynamics, or heroism. I see weighted feet, slouching shoulders, and the vacant, expressionless stare of automata. . . . Let us be honest. Our soldiers want to win the war so they can get home, home, home; and never leave it. . . . One reason why our Army does not know [exactly why they are fighting] is because the people at home do not know what is happening to our soldiers.

The artist makes his book a case against censors.h.i.+p and the deleting of the evils and horrors of war. He asks how, as long as the people are ignorant of what our men really do and endure, they can contribute that essential support which is so needed both at home and at the front.

In spite of Mr. Biddle's purpose in showing us waste and ruin lying inert before us, his drawings give a curious feeling of indirectness and lack of eloquencewhich does not emanate at all from the artist's verbal descriptions of the scene. Here he has been a competent artist but a good writer, and when he writes in Africa that "the evening star is the size of a walnut," or that Giraud's eyebrows are like a young girl's, and notes that "When soldiers rest they fall back on their packs and lie looking up at you as if from an armchair," we see through his eyes better at such times than we do when we examine his drawings. And he gives a picture of the people simply by telling of that cry for candy, "'Caramelli! Caramelli!' For hundreds of years we shall be known in Sicily as the Caramelli soldiers."

In drawing and text Mr. Biddle has honestly tried to omit nothing for us. His equable humor and usually sanguine spirit contribute to the validity of what he tells, as does his use of the diary form, for all this gives a matter-of-fact, believable character to his notations. He has an eye out for the absurdities that make life even on the front bearable from one minute to the next. The time when he sketched some Italian prisoners only to find that they, from their corner, were sketching him, remarking, "He laughs best who laughs last," is the telling kind of entertainment he finds and pa.s.ses on to us.

No matter where he goes Mr. Biddle sees the human being. It is the individual Arab that he despises for his cringing and his trickery and filth, and the individual Sicilian that he loves for his bounty of spirits and his adoration of the beautiful, even in pain or despair. He tells of drawing the wounded civilians in a hospital in Nicosiaas a task of morale of some kindand how they would lift from their cot or litter to exclaim, "What beautiful drawing!"

Mr. Biddle says from time to time that the man in action feels a certain Page 36 satisfaction or dignity in having his drawing madein being "immortalized," so to speak, out of his daily anonymity of fighting. This is interesting, and one wonders if the fighting man would agree, or if he does not feel his inner dignity intact in spite of everythingloneliness includedand if he does not hold so still for Mr. Biddle mostly because he is tired. As he draws, Mr. Biddlequite rightlythinks of the future and of preserving a record. But even while he poses, the fighting man who lives in the present every moment could scarcely be expected, just now, to appreciate this longrange view, however honest and kind.

As simply a story of an artist at the front this book has a special interest. When before in any of the wars of the world did a government send artists in with their fighting men to tell the people at home what the wars were like? Our Congress, it is true, rather abruptly withdrew this sanction along with the allotted funds, and the work had to continue under a magazine's backing. Nevertheless that the idea occurred at all is rather an interesting and hopeful example of a new, a human and subjective att.i.tude of a country toward war, that may be a sign in itself that we can never tolerate another one.

It would be interesting to see the work of the other artists who have gone overseas on this a.s.signment. 29 The a.s.sembled work should present a picture which attains in the whole what it might lack through any individual. Mr. Biddle's work will certainly rank high in the a.s.semblage. His sincerity of work and his undoubted courage in carrying his project through make him an example for the other artists at war.

Page 37 The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales By H. F. Heard Animal, Vegetable, Mineral Ghosts:

New York Times Book Review 3 September 1944: 5

These are good supernatural stories of science and idea. The ghosts are mold cultures and polar hysteria and the like of that. They raise only the intellectual hair, not the pulling kind, and since it is difficult for us to be really frightened intellectually, they do not have the homely charms of the ghost stories of M. R. James, for instance, which also have their professorial air with little black devils all covered with hair, besides. Neither have they the buoyant enthusiasm of the early Wells stories. 30 But they have their special fascinations.

Mr. Heard's stock of odd knowledge is extraordinary, an exotic cupboard where you can make real finds in puzzling facts about vertigo and balance in the semi-circular ca.n.a.ls, about fungi, hypnosis, Gregorian chants, and the tracks on the flagstones of English churches, of the fertility dances from pagan springs. Chemistry, weather, the primeval energies, and the mutations of animal life are not really ghosts; yet their reality, or potentiality, is effectively used by Mr. Heard to make us as uneasy as possible.

Generally, as in "Wingless Victory"a very long story of penguins in a superior Penguin Eden at the South Polestartling ideas are developed with the serenity and exacting fullness of an essay, but not quite with the spark we like in a story, no matter how satisfied we are by its strange facts. Perhaps the imagination of Mr. Heard seems too orderly, too ascetically Page 38 scientific. He always takes his time, a thing we don't like about story writers, and when his Penguins talk they round off their paragraphs as deliberately as scholars.

But there is pleasure in reading these. That faint twinkle that often s.h.i.+nes through pedantry lights up a story like "The Swap," when two irritable old professors, of the kind generally known as "codgers," place themselves heart against heart and stare eye into eye, after reading of a Sufi practice, thereby suddenly exchanging souls, only to find themselves thoroughly outraged by each other's bridgework.

Some of the tales, like "The Cat, I Am," are given a rational ending and by losing their supernatural standing are not as effective to this reader as the out-and-out weird tales. "The Great Fog," while notable and interesting, is a moral, and Mr. Heard seems always rumbling a little, morally, underneath. Why is it that the moral and the supernatural don't mix? Perhaps we never can s.h.i.+ver while we are being cautioned about our shortcomings.

The two extremes in the book are "The Crayfish," almost a straight detective story, which turns up a devilish means of murder, by the way, and "Dromenon." "Dromenon" is a narrative astonis.h.i.+ng in originality and in pure power of mood. Along with its erudition it has a content of feeling, strange, ardent feeling, which transcends the cold science of the other stories and makes their telling seem by contrast almost old-maidish. ''Dromenon," which is actually the story of a gentlemanly antiquarian's investigation of an out-of-the-way church, is a wild excursion into supersensory music, pagan dance, Gothic architecture, and the rhythms of the blood, and in a strange, compelling fas.h.i.+on it is made into a tale of mounting suspense.

It is interesting to note that H. F. Heard is really Gerald Heard, an English author and lecturer who worked with Horace Plunkett during the Irish rebellion and is living now in Laguna Beach, Calif., where he came in 1937 with his friend Aldous Huxley. He is the author of The Third Morality, Pain, s.e.x and Time, A Dialogue in the Desert and other books, as well as two mystery novels, A Taste for Honey and Reply Paid, also written under these initials.

Page 39 Sleep No More Edited by August Derleth Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales By Henry S. Whitehead Ghoulies Ghosties and Jumbees:

New York Times Book Review 24 September 1944: 5, 21

Readers to whom the name M. P. s.h.i.+el is a pa.s.sword to a delirious and astounding world will only need to be told that Sleep No More contains a fine s.h.i.+el of good vintage. "The House of Sounds," which Mr. Derleth has winnowed out of England, where it has lain for fifty years, is as wild and gorgeous a tale as "Purple Cloud" devotees could hanker for. s.h.i.+el is probably a kind of genius. None of the other writers represented in this collection are, or nearly so, but to have even one genius up an anthology's sleeve is very fine. August Derleth, who tirelessly gathers horrors for readers who have by this time certainly become connoisseurs, has done a careful job with Sleep No More, and if you read the book straight through and end with ''The Rats in the Wall," by old master H. P. Lovecraft, the potion may work and you may sure enough never sleep again.

Good, dependable horror conjurers here include Prof. M. R. James, the Rev. Henry S. Whitehead, Messrs. John Collier, Algernon Blackwood, H. R. Wakefield and others. What makes this collection different from a great many representing more or less the same authors is that the stories here chosen are not the familiar ones. As the editor points out in a foreword, only three of them are in print elsewhere, and only one of the three in Page 40 America. When Mr. Derleth asks to be commended for not including once more "The Upper Berth," "Seaton's Aunt," "The Beckoning Fair One," ''The Wendigo," etc., we can commend him some, for the stories here, while unfamiliar, are also good. In all of them some strange, intriguing idea has come to the author, but somewhere in the course of his mapping out a story to accommodate it the idea has got thinned out or wasted, or has degenerated into cliche. There are too many things called "The Thing." The idea is not developed, and here is where the old favorites are inevitably superior. Nevertheless, these stories are fun. This reviewer liked the one where the man puts on the wrong overcoat in the New York Public Library and turns into a s...o...b..ring Black Druid while riding home in the subway, and this changes the expressions on the faces of the other pa.s.sengers.

The Rev. Henry S. Whitehead belongs to what Mr. Barlow in his preface calls "the serious Weird Tales group." 31 The stories in Jumbee all take place in the Virgin Islands, except for the last one, which suddenly switches to Jackson, Miss.32 If there is such a thing as the comfort horror tale, this is the kind the Rev. Whitehead writes. It is hard to cla.s.sify otherwise such gentle, matter-of-fact, rather fatherly stories which produce some of the most point-blank ghosts that have jumped at us anywhere.

The variety of ghosts is fresh and interesting. There is Armand Dubois, who immediately after death pays a visit to a lady he owed $ 300 to, arriving in the form of a little goat who trots around her night table, first to the left, then to the right, looking at her out of green eyes. And the head of a voodoo bull victim materializes over the mantelpiece in a lady's drawing room, with a bullet hole in his forehead, down which blood slowly runs at tea-time every afternoon.

Mr. Whitehead is careful to give exact facts in his stories. A Martinique fish-Zombi is ten feet tall, with a pumpkin-shaped head, has purple scales and a beak like a scythe, and comes up from behind to take youas a wasp might take a fly. A Jumbee, on the other hand, stands but a few inches off the groundperhaps because he hasn't any feet. He comes by families and hangs in a cl.u.s.ter in a tree by the roadside at dawn.33 The Rev. Mr. Whitehead, who was born in Elizabeth, N.J., and was ordained an Episcopal minister, had a pastorate in the Virgin Islands. It is a fact that these little stories have charmperhaps it is the gentleness of the author's personality pervading their horrifying content that makes them piquant.

Page 41 Enjoy Your House Plants By Dorothy H. Jenkins and Helen Van Pelt Wilson For The Window-Box Farmer:

[Reviewed above the initials E. W.]:

New York Times Book Review 1 October 1944: 24

This book will prove st.u.r.dy, it is hoped, for it's the kind that will be consulted every day by those who cultivate their gardens in a window. It is written to fill exactly this use, providing practical information as well as that encouragement that's needed to take a little plant and raise it in the soot of the city. The authors, opening with a description of their own window as dazzling as a flower show, to lure the timid apartment dweller into the boldness of gardening, then proceed to show how easy it isproviding their commonsense directions are heeded. 34 The book is well arranged, brisk and clear with its information. At the start there is a cla.s.sification of plants as to their needs of light and sun, so that gardeners will know exactly what they can attempt in their windows. Only the healthy plant is decorative, say the authors. Their doctoring advice ranges from botanical facts down to hints, sometimes dark, out of their own lively experience.

Plants and bulbs are taken up by variety and fully discussed in terms of the window shelf. For instance, if you crave an African violet you can learn within a few pages where to buy a healthy plant, how to cultivate, divide, repot, water and rest it over, and how to grow it afresh from a cutting.

Both common and exotic plants are discussed. You'll have your cyclamens for Christmas, but you'll be tempted to grow a camellia too, if you're not Page 42 careful, and before you know it you'll plant your next avocado seed and have a little glossy-leaved tree in your kitchen in two months' time.

In addition to helpful advice on keeping the ordinary plants healthy, warnings or challenges are given you about plants difficult to grow. There is a calendar of monthly duties, a ready-reference glossary, an index, and a useful list of dependable growers for ordering purposes. Excellent ill.u.s.trations include diagrams to follow in your digging and potting procedures, and photographs of the authors' own very attractive and successful window gardens.

Page 43 Of Men and Battle Pictures by David Fredenthal, Text by Richard Wilc.o.x One-Man Show:

[Reviewed above the initials E. W.]:

New York Times Book Review 15 October 1944: 24

This one-man show by David Fredenthal bears the catch-tide Of Men and Battle. David Fredenthal, an artist familiar to gallery-goers, who has worked under Guggenheim and Museum of Moderm Art fellows.h.i.+ps and later as an Army war artist and for Life, made these sketches for the picture magazine during the attack on Arawa, New Britain, December, 1943.

The pictures quite capably tell the story they set out to tell, and admirers of Fredenthal's work will find its characteristics as fully evident in these battle-done sketches as in his studio paintings. Here to the number of about sixty they give the slap of ma.s.sed impact, but the general effect is of a rather messy and incoherent form, out of which a certain admirable brute force and occasional delicacy of line show up to relieve the monotony of their disorganization. 35 Page 44 G. I. Sketch Book Edited by Aimee Crane Drawn at First-Hand:

New York Times Book Review 29 October 1944: 20

Penguin has here published, in a neat little book opening the long way, 138 pageseight in colorof sketches made by American service men in this country and overseas. 36 They have been studiously and well chosen by Aimee Crane, who writes a foreword, and are reproduced to good effect in spite of their modest dimensions.

The sketches, which the jacket describes as "informal," were done in water-color, pencil, or sometimes oil paint applied to s.h.i.+p's canvas. "Informal" is a loose and euphemistic word for a sketch made in a foxhole, on the deck of a burning s.h.i.+p, inside a transport plane, on the cot of a field hospital, in the shadow of a tree in a sniper-filled jungle, or in a traveling LST. It is from such vantage points that these artists' eyes have seen their present world. Though behind part of the work is a background of more or less professional painting experience, the technique is still a technique of convenience, speed and whatever compulsion made some of these artists draw for the first time in their lives.

The GI's painting here are men born in Cleveland, Denmark, Armenia, Council Bluffs, Brooklyn, Knoxville, Mexico, Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., and Stoke-on-Trent, England. They range in age from the 54 of Lieutenant Commander Coale, USNR, to the 19 of Pvt. Harry Andrew Jackson, USMC. Their backgrounds in art vary, too. Captain Vidar of the Ski Troops studied at Beaux-Arts, Top Sergeant Wexler invented and produced the comic strip "Vic Jordan," Sergeant Rounds ill.u.s.trated children's books.

Page 45 Chief Specialist Thomas won the 1938 Pulitzer Art Prize, but Lieutenant Donahue is an ex-drummer with a swing orchestra.

Some of the pictures were done with a definite aim: T/Sgt. Olin Dows, USA, is one of twelve men chosen to make a pictorial record of the war theatres. On the other hand, Private First Cla.s.s Smith, USMC, forgot all about a little drawing he made until he saw it in Life one day and, when questioned, said: "I drew this picture sitting on a foxhole along a river in Guadalca.n.a.l after a big drive. It was drawn on the cardboard top of a 37-mm. ammunition case." A remarkable sc.r.a.p it is, too, setting down the tenacious and straining forms of a stretcher party moving through a tenacious h.e.l.l of hindering jungle vines.

In fact, the work is almost without exception interesting. The watercolors of Sergeant Loudermilk, USMC, of Comancho, Tex.who studied under Ba.r.s.e Miller, was a defense worker before the war and took a prize in the South Pacific art contest at New Caledonia [] are fresh and spirited. The beautiful work of Lieutenant Di Benedetto, USAwho studied at Cooper Union and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and was overseas with the First Mapping Squadronis represented by two fine crayon drawings. Lieutenant Colonel d.i.c.kson, USMC, who never studied painting anywhere, but while with the first regiment to land and occupy Henderson Field made a series of convincing sketches of these events, produced the now well-known figure of the battle-weary Marine, "Too Many, Too Close, Too Long."

Captain Pleissner, AAF, who has exhibited nationally here, made some stark sketches in the Aleutians he flew over. Lieutenant (j.g.) Jamieson, USNRof the Abbott School of Fine Arts and the invasion of Sicilyis represented by a greater number of pieces than any other artist in this collection, and it is not too great a portion, for he shows unvaryingly good line, interesting composition and fine dramatic feeling.

It all proves, as an Air Corps man in the India-China-Burma theatre recently wrote home to his wifethe letter quoted by Miss Crane"The desire for the fine and esthetic is not a shallow, meek appendage to the lives of humans, but a forceful necessity of life."

Page 46 Six Novels of the Supernatural Edited by Edward Wagenknecht Hand-Picked Spooks:

New York Times Book Review 10 December 1944: 6