Praise and prejudice

The new books in review by George Dangerfield

GOODBYE, MR. WILDER.—Before passing on to more immediate subjects, I beg you to pause with me for a moment's reverent meditation. Mr. Thornton Wilder has bidden this world farewell.

Behind the unexpected humor of his latest novel, Heaven's My Destination—swell bedtime reading, and I wouldn't have you think otherwise—there lies an allegory of Good and Evil, a slightly cynical ragout of Pilgrim's Progress, which would probably have occasioned some searchings of the heart among the passengers and crew of the Mayflower, but scarcely seems the thing for modern Americans. Ah well, Mr. Wilder never felt at home in this hurrying century, and it is pleasant to think that his good, bewildered spirit is now safe in Bunyan's bosom. Goodbye, Mr. Wilder, goodbye.

A JEWISH FANTASY.—Robert Nathan is another writer who has cared little for this ugly world. His One More Spring, that graceful header into the literary rose-bushes, occasioned a good deal of dewy-eyed delight among critics and customers alike. I confess that its fluent quaintness gave me what Little Orphan Annie calls the wimwams. Thereafter, whenever I thought of Mr. R. Nathan and Mr. A. A. Milne at one and the same time (which I did only on solemn fast-days) I was mournfully reminded of hands across the ocean. Whimsical beauty, I thought, knows no frontiers: it's a tedious international scourge.

But Mr. Nathan's latest tale, Road of Ages (Knopf. $2.50), has thrust me into a mood of profound apology for any mean thoughts I may have harbored about its author. Road of Ages is fantasy of a rare and high order, fantasy which has known the strict discipline of imagination. It tells how the Jewish race is exiled from the western world and driven to find unlikely refuge in the Gobi desert, the wastes where the dinosaurs died; how it travels through Poland, and Russia, and Asia, insulted and set upon by the folk of each country, quarreling with itself. At last it comes within sight of its barren destination. "We must do what history cannot do ... we must pass where storms cannot follow."

Mr. Nathan, always closer to tenderness than to tragedy, does not quite catch up with this noble and tragic dream: but he pursues it with dignity, austerity, devotion and a fine simplicity. Road of Ages is a very beautiful book.

HISTORY A LA RUSSE.—A new Soviet author has appeared in our midst. He bears the cosy name of Anatolii Vinogradov. His semi-fictional narrative, The Black Consul (Viking. $2.50), describes Toussaint L'Ouverture's effort to free Haiti from slavery in the days of the French Revolution and of Napoleon's Consulate. This is history re-examined through the alarming microscope of the Soviet mind.

Heaven preserve me from a wrestling match with dialectical materialism; but it is possibly this Marxist philosophy, so hard on the nice foreheads of our younger communists, which makes Vinogradov's book read like a shifting debate between reaction and progress. And it is possibly this philosophy which accounts for the overvivid contrasts in his book, turning the seagreen, incorruptible Robespierre into an heroic statue, and Napoleon into an idol with feet of clay and a head full of sophistical maggots. This is not put forth as a grumble. For none of the characters in this book has the values either of fiction or of biography: one and all, they are the embodiments of a new faith, they walk in a new light and cast a new shadow.

The Black Consul will take some reading. Its method is confused and laborious. But it is written with a grim, sustained, imaginative passion for truth, and its record of cruelty and perversity and magnificence and self-sacrifice stands out like a sombre rock above this month's literature.