The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E
A Page of Features Americana Books and Writers Chatter The Home Front By WILLIAM E, BOHN 2A Refugee CrasMt the Border 'WHEN you saw the news that Dr. Paul Stefan had died, perhaps " all that...
...From Vienna, Prague, Bruenn, Maerisch-Ostrau...
...Then she tried, holding her hand tightly over one ear, to get the foreign station on the tiny set concealed beneath the bedclothes...
...It meant death...
...And in the waning of the middle ages, no one since the beginning of the western schism (the popular belief was) had entered paradise...
...Or, happy prospect...
...The soldier replied that he didnt know, that he felt quit* nervous about the shells frypig overhead...
...He knew that he wasn't doing a bad job...
...One-half of the combine gave its hand sway at Cengreosionr hearings when Major Reuben Fleet used the occasion of attacks on de Lorenzo to demand the revision of the Wagner'' Act in order that "labor should be fixed.'' The Daily Worker ran a long editorial asking removal of d-Lorenzo...
...It is a curious thing about Koestler (who was a Communist until 1937...
...There is the sinister figure of the top leader, a paranoiac who is modeled a little too much after Hitler...
...Everywhere over yonder there were people w ho recognized and appreciated the special accents of the old childhood language which came so natural to him...
...The general idea is a new front to merge the Workers School and the School for Democracy and obtain approval from the State Board of Education to have courses credited towards degrees...
...And our ways of doing things remained even more strange...
...He was not really offering an "explanation" of the Moscow Trials in Darknea* at Noon, His are fables of the political crisis of our time...
...Between 1910 and 1941 Dr...
...To get the flavor one would have to listen...
...Most newspapers carried editorials applauding Eisenhower's action, a few apologized to Pearson...
...the -triangles of his fever were made up by the forces of history, the struggle of classes fcnd nations...
...The mystery always seemed too much for them...
...What hasn't come out yet is that Russia's maximum bargaining program at the Moscow conference, we are "reliably Informed," included a demand for a harbor port on every Sea enclosing Europe: on the Aegean, tiu-ongh Thrace...
...In the future, perhaps, a new order of revolutionary paths of Europe barefoot and in monk's cowl...
...the whole world will be caught up in a new irresistible global mood, "a spiritual springtide like early Christisnity or the Renaissance...
...but in reality he is only a crusader who lost hia.cross, and is in search for another...
...Dilling's line, will seek to make much of the fact that an article of Carlson's once appeared in Septet Russia Today, about a decade back...
...He could speak more deliberately^ reasonably, effectively...
...but discovered to his horror that he was trapped in the dark corner of a church...
...2-00...
...Dress yourself . . . and hurry up about it!' "She let them do with her as they would...
...Many fine men of his age group— uprotted like him and, like him, desperately trying to get a toe-hold in the new land—have quietly faded out...
...Of course the real hash hash staff went vmtsfmt until the central figures are dead about fifty years But elread* the full and detailed stories of the Tunisian and Sicily campaigns have bean written and placed ia the War Department's archives., whereas they are still trying to reconstruct the details of the Argonne and Chateau Thierry campaigns of twenty-five years ago...
...Or, who knows...
...In Brown's novel a curious twist in the personal tragi-comedy of America's would-be dictator (here the author seems to have been inspired by certain rumors about Hitler's descent) eventually brings about the collapse of that particular "Crusade" in Los Angeles—when the movement is killed both by the ridicule attached to it and by the intervention of the FBI...
...Plenty of testimony came to prove that...
...the ruffian at the head of the would-be storm troopers...
...and, presto, he will conclude that the evil will be smashed if only the book should get a large enough audience...
...Munro is battling the big growers and packers in the interests of the small farmer and cooperatives...
...It covers all the baaic aspects of present-day American fascism: the characters of the leading elite, the psychology of the following, and the lingo of the movement...
...L. M. Birkhead, Walter Wmchell, Russell Davenport, etc Wheeler, following Mrs...
...Thank heaven for that...
...I can give you only the gist of the thing...
...Inside and Out By MURRAY EVERETT P Pnm o.teriobJe, AarhoHfwfrvo, Aathawtte Soerca EVERY newspaper man in town has another story to toll...
...Quietly, clearly, almost soberly his voice came through the air from the mysterious distance...
...He had been building a mansion for man...
...Among those who will be cuJlod are Rev...
...Demaree Bess, Saturday Evening rtat correspondent who was in Sicily when the incident secured, bat is now here, also filled in some details...
...Where would you have gone, dear lady?' snearingly asked the maid-servant from the door—holding her mistress in the circle of a flashlight...
...A statement from Alhed headquarters in Algiers denied that Patton had been replaced from the commend af the American 7th army, and most papers slanted these stories into a smear against Pearson...
...All this is convincing enough evidence of Koestler's rare talent, but to my own mind tokens also of his own distraction...
...is a novel written in the form of confessions of a publiefty agent of one of the fascist groups active in California...
...Centuries later the Vail came from Seneca...
...Even if that particular person didn't hear him, he knew that there were many, many who listened with painful eagerness to his familiar voice...
...It isn't true,' she shrieked, into the night and into the darkness of the house...
...It was to her that he told everything, everything that was important to the oppressed people over there...
...Then the story continues: "At first he was all excited about this business...
...There is a matter of fact no future at all—"the-one great vision of the age was dead," Slavek-Koestler observes, "and there was nothing to replace it...
...A nationwide campaign to install "incentive pay" plans has been started by the George S. Msy engineering companies, with full nag* ads in the Wall Street Journal and various trade magssinee...
...The next day Army press relations stated that Patton matt not been dressed down...
...De Arayan and "X-Ray" were named in the Washington Grand Jury indictments as subversive...
...Stefan had published a long series of distinguished volumes on musical personalities and problems...
...What Marx was saying was that the Revolution could net draw its poetry from the past, bat only from the* future...
...Nor ewer the olyd times so bed...
...I know one among you^who became resigned...
...Stefan did the broadcasting from Paris to the people of Austria, and this sketch grew out of his experience...
...One only wishes there were a cooler and more critical awareness of what our'vital problems were...
...What is Koestler looking for...
...There is such massive anguish in the world—such multitudes have been starved and beaten and shot—that there is hardly an ounce of sympathy available for them...
...He came here at the age of 61 and died last week at the'age of 63...
...MocmiUon...
...The "poetry of the future" has soured...
...A progressive labor leadership can prevent such sa outcome only if through militant mass pressure, centering around higher wsges and job security, it chooses to win the allegiance of the underpaid and the unemployed by appealing to their immediate economic needs rather than to 'their political judgment which is only too often well-nigh incurably beclouded by the meanest aad meat stupid peejedissi...
...He must listen, then answer on the spot...
...There is here, as in all of Koestler's writings, a good deal of intellectual by-play, which is attractive and often stimulating...
...It was—really—he—he himself...
...His emotions dropped away...
...from Berlin or Vienna how you have to point up a critique or a story to get it into an American publication...
...American correspondents in Sicily end Italy, who knew of the incident since last August when it occurred, but through voluntary censorship had not cabled it, begaa sanding out some of the details...
...There he was...
...poetry, even for Aristotle, was but a •beginning for the largest inquiry...
...The facts as they unfold are these: The young soldier had twice refused to leave the front lines, although under Sre, but was finally shipped back...
...They wanted, above all, to know that the arts and sciences which they had cultivated at home had here some devotees with whom they could take up the old strands of life...
...but surely it is his dignity to move beyond lament...
...And we just happened to tag along to join the party,' added one of the two Nasi guards with flat faces...
...The American Labor Conference on International Affairs will shortly sponsor a quarterly journal devoted to international poet-war problems...
...And there is the always effective gospel of hate against Jews and Negroes that alas, sounds so sweet to the ears of the underdog...
...The teletype was bringing it in sections...
...PM, as usual, blew its top with s complete front page splash demanding a eourtmartial of Patton, • aad devoting three pages to the incident...
...Thereupon Patton flew into a rage and struct...
...And it is remarkable that Koestler's story is laid out precisely in terms of "The Present, The Past, The Future...
...For a few brief moments the writer of this review almost felt that way after he finished reading Lewis Browne's "Set...
...and not, Mr...
...Both Kaiser and R. J. Thomas have praised de Lorenzo...
...From the beginning he had spoken to her...
...But there was no way of finding out whether she knew...
...The last elections have shown that, regardless of the attitude of their unions, enormous masses of organized workers either remain indifferent to the political issues or...
...A novel by Arthur Komtier...
...How often I have sat here and listened while the young newspapermen en our staff have tried to explain to a distinguished writer...
...Thus Kroek last week disclosed that the international cooperation plank af the Moscow conference was drafted in the State Department—even Sumner Welles had a hand in that—and was accepted in Moscow with only one change...
...In ancient Egypt the cry went up that the ''Sun was turning away from men," that "the country was utterly lost, and people were laughing with an unwholesome laugh," that "everyone seeks unknown words, expressed in new language free of all repetition of the usual formulas, and removed from the traditions left by our ancestors...
...Don't compromise like this woman ¦"hom I have mentioned.' "At this point she lost her self-control...
...A progressive leadership bent upon the preservation of political liberties and of the civilised forms of life will have to find another way to keep the masses from turning to the American would-be Fuhrers...
...the crooked business manager of the outfit...
...Neither to cry nor to laugh, but to understand...
...First she turned on another set, a larger one, which raucously started to blat out to all the world the message from some Nazi station...
...But our language remained strange to the end...
...In Arthur Koestler's new dialogue with history (the Arrival and Departure*of a European revolutionary in "Lisbon"), young Peterjaiavek, broken and confused, makes one pitiful entry in his diary— "When the dead are left to bury the dead, the living remain alone...
...The quest is by turns for a force, for a formula, for a faith...
...Kaiser states that the recent production sport at Brewster has seen due to the fine labor relations established...
...It will probably take two years to finish," Koestler recently announced, "but I have started writing a book on philosophy...
...Lift rati ami Otherwise PM's JIMMY WECHSLER has been burning the midnight oil writing a book on John L. Lewis...
...Koestler, true if interesting...
...That was the Viennese way of taking things...
...Painters and musicians could go on with their arts...
...William J. Grace and Earl Southard, sponsor of the National Republican Revival Committee under whose auspices Bene tor Gerald Nye spoke recently on the right of Germans to choose Hitler, were contributors to William Dudley Pelley's "ReU-CaiL" Pelley is now ;n jail for sedition...
...I^OESTLER'S voyage here, as in Scum of the Earth (of which this novel seems almost to be an imagined sequel), is a quest for a community and a brotherhood...
...Is Propaganda a Remedy...
...1 best-seller—or any other book of this kind, for that matter— could contribute materially to stemming the progress of our native fascism which is the great threat to post-war America...
...He camejhere with a great reputation...
...and he must know of the breaking of the Sun-State, the shattered hope of Aristoni-cus and his world, and how "under Roman rule there was no further place for dreams...
...There is also the rank and file of fools and ruffians, ready to resort to violence against a defenseless minority, but usually quite cowardly when confronted by the police or any armed force...
...We are the last descendants of Renaissance-Man," Peter Slavek cries, "the end and not the beginning...
...You women can ntht the oppressor best of all...
...Scientists could enter our universities...
...The quiet voice speaking the soft...
...She forgot all precaution, turned off the set receiving the official station...
...On the political field, the innovation of pipe-line jooi uslmm"tms enabled Demaree Base to give the full details of the North Africsr campaign, while Arthur Knock from time to time is given some interesting tidbits to publish...
...Carlson Is today—and has been since he started his* work—vehemently anti-Communist in his convictions...
...And a poetry, as I understand it, whose rhythm is still the Revolution...
...The Woman Who Listened *"/\VER there among the 'enemies' she had finally decided to find ^^out for herself...
...What happy days, full of purpose and activity...
...To be sore, as the plot develops these sections emerge as categories of the agonised 'personal history of the refugee—his physical exhaustion and psychological destruction by the Nazis...
...Broadcasts to the Enemy P)R aome time I have had one of Dr...
...What I Mean...
...But with a difference...
...Paul Stefan had died, perhaps " all that you remembered was that he used to write music reviews for The New Leader...
...The article appeared ia an Armenian journal and was lifted without permission...
...He spoke politics when he felt religion, and talks escbatology today when he feels most of all the worldly discordance...
...We all wanted to publish it, but there is no room in The New Leader for stories...
...By MAX NOMAD SEE WHAT I MEAN...
...Ia have come...
...Those who are inclined to listen sympathetically to the outpourings of the various fascist outfits m»it.h»r buy or read books...
...By this time, however...
...Koestler is not writing about the tragedy of exiles in a port of refuge (Malcolm * Cowley foolishly reproved him for failing this theme...
...Koestler once wrote a book about "the gladiators...
...So they came seeking persons who could apeak their language...
...In this column X may be able to sneak over to "you something that could not be accepted for any other spot...
...Such men naturally nocked to The New Leader office...
...He represented, in particular, the tragic heroism of many who are forced, comparatively kte in life, to adapt themselves to the American temperament and American techniques of living...
...Some had been translated into English and had had considerable sales in this country...
...Arrival and Departure has a powerful episode in psychoanalysis (in which Slavek is purged of his maddening guilt-complex), some fine conversations of a Nazi intellectual ("You are left alone in no-man's land, rubbing your eyes searching in vain for your old, deserted trenches which the wind has covered with quicksand and rubble"), and two captivating exercises (Slavek is a writer, too) with a-stpry-within-a-story device...
...So . . . come along now...
...No summary, no translation could reproduce the unspeakable vulgarity of this fellow's German—or convey the smell of its gutter humor, the quality of its peculiar barnyard turns and twists...
...more often than not prefer to go their own reactionary way which eventually leads to fascism...
...a Nazi agent...
...is a duty, not a mission—and {or dead illusions there was no resurrection In this war there were no trumpets to make walls crumble, and if a battle was fought the sun stood not still...
...Do not imitate her...
...He was the exemplar of the great migration of culture, of the thousands of scholarly talented refugees who have come to America in successive waves...
...But no matter how safe they felt here, the world was strange and the people seemed cold...
...AN optimist will read a good book in which some evil tendency is thoroughly exposed...
...If you had called clearly enough, I'd have done anything, left everything...
...Centers of learning have much in common the world over...
...The militant labor leader is a thorn ia their sides...
...But never—never once—came the least signal that she was listening in...
...One can't begrudge any man his search for the spirit's refuge...
...Once toe had all . . .. and the Empire "went laughing to its death...
...he is snti-Communist and constantly showing up their anti-labor line...
...Random House...
...thus seeking, in an off-h altos i manner, to discre-dit the story...
...at the moment I think the whole and the parts are identical, but not altogether relevant to each other...
...The manager was timid— didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, even Hitler's...
...Marx has apparently had his chance at "changing the world...
...down...
...The servant girl, who had done nothing more than her plain duty, helped her on with her elothes...
...It may not be the destiny of man to move "beyond tragedy...
...245 pages...
...Or: the end of "darkness" in Europe, and *.he rise of a new human climate: "I wish the time for laughter had come...
...the no less crooked and cynical Goebbels of the organization (it is he who writes the confession...
...In the immediate present, "oases," as he wrote the other day in the Times, for "a fraternity of pessimists...
...And so much of the energy which might make for liberation is diverted to subtle despair and its dubious consolation that our crisis is unique, in the world's history...
...Of coarse they all deal with the meeting of the "Big 3" tat each tune it's a different place...
...The author opens with a rather dry and restrained description of the French broadcasting station...
...Suddenly his secretary burst into the narrow ; oom...
...she bid it carefully in the soft down quilt...
...History these days, though, is being written as fast as it is being made...
...Fighting this War, Slavek-Koestler feels...
...188 pace...
...They take the existence and the privileges of their traditional "betters" for granted, and their' indignation and homicidal fury are most easily aroused against poor devils of another color or faith who happen to be within their reach...
...THERE is a phrase in the "Eighteenth fcruAaire" in Which Mar* speaks of the Revolution "letting the dead bury their Head...
...Carl H. Mote, powerful figure in the Indiana Republican Patty and midwest utilities executive, contributes an article to -die Nov...
...on the Baltic Sea through Latvia, and even m the North Sea through either Biomon or Hamburg...
...There...
...Now he need not give so much of himself...
...He Who Gets Stopped IT proved to be an interesting sequence of events, this Draw * Pearson story on General Patton...
...But the journalists, in addition to the language difficulty, had to learn a completely new method of approach...
...Then Koestler is writing poetry...
...South German dialect rolled quietly out over the border, over the Danube, to every hamlet in the Austrian hills...
...a businessman out after the scalp of his Jewish competitors...
...Was he really the short-wave broadcaster...
...Yes, she said, it probably won't be so bad...
...The little receiving-set she took with her...
...a liaison agent, so to speak, from the Ceughlinites...
...Oa the flight-Win* Axis CSNATOR WHEELER'S publicity men have thought of the *^ cute idea of handing out subpoenas for his investigation of "Under Cover" on December 7. (Not to commemorate the day isolationism fell, however...
...They are as inaccessible to logical or factual reasoning as are professional gangsters to any preachments about the sacredness of human life...
...Had they been telling her the truth—her friends and the underground people...
...She went to bed...
...For a couple of years Dr...
...A diagnosis later showed that in addition to the extreme fatigue condition the soldier also had malaria and a high fever...
...His story of the episode wherein the three-starred general struck a hospitalised soldier and of General Eisenhower's rebuke drew prominent place in the Monday papers...
...20th issue of Leon de Arayan't "X-Ray" in which he says that while Americans may detest some of Hitler's practices they cannot withhold approval of the way he drove the "irrrnmstirnsl bankers" across the border...
...A happy ending which a book of this kind apparently needs to round out its effectiveness A good story and a clever piece of propaganda, Browne's book is apt to give rise to optimistic expectations...
...And the mistake of Stalinism has become for him not a mere error which time would died, but a kind of original sin...
...The De Lorenzo Case REACTIONARIES and Communists have joined ua'niflii smear Tom de Lorenzo, militant head of Brewster Local MS, UAW...
...ci\•'¦la atmosyw rp ran the United Press story bat inserted an editorial pa;, ttiesi* -taring that President Roosevelt had ease called Pearson a "ehomc liar...
...The plight of the journalists was especially painful...
...However, on second thought, this reviewer doubts whether this novel, even if it achieved the success of a No...
...Stefan's manuscripts in my drawer...
...Secret messages came across...
...The Fuehrer was unexpectedly delivering one of his harangues...
...Molotov with a straight face inserted the adjective "peace-loving" in front of the word "nations...
...his helpless, speechless political distraction in the total collapse of Old Europe...
...He was always thinking of one particular listener, a woman...
...Again and again I have .seen a learned and talented man go away shaking his head in a mood of near-despair...
...She was the one he sought to convince...
...This voice seemed now to speak directly to her: 'Women of the enslaved lands, never give in...
...Friends heard and recognised his voice in Paris, in England, in Switzerland...
...But of all this nonsense she 'Was unconscious...
...His works are dramas of belief, and his anxiety a world without passion or faith or real conviction...
...Do not be surprised if the leasing defense figure in the Nye probe of the movies two years ago appears to oppose Wheeler in this investigation...
...He knew that his home folks were hearing him...
...We were proud to print his comments oa what happened at the Metropolitan Opera or in Carnegie Hall, Bat to all of us on the staff he was much more than an expert contributor...
...his self-immolation on the guilt-ridden altar of personal conscience...
...Philip Rahv, one of Partisan Review's Editors, has taken over the managing editorship of the Contemporary Jewish Record . . . CIO War Relief is moving its national headquarters from Washington to New York...
...Patton came into the hospital before any diagnosis had been made and asked the soldier who apparently had no wounds, what was the matter...
...From the other station came the satne old speech of the Fuehrer for the tenth time—with the announcer fairly swooning in ecstacy...
...All this the broadcaster thought of while he was preparing his script...
...To grasp and dominate what is happening to us in these times calls for renewed and experimental efforts of the mind and the imagination...
...a few hysterical she-hyenas—in short a grotesque assortment of what the author calls cranks, crooks and "croonks" (a combination of the first two categories), and what—with a few modifications—seems to be the nucleus of all the totalitarian movements, whether their slogans be ultra-reactionary or ultra-revolutionary...
...And potentially they constitute the majority of the population . . . Hence it would seem that it is not good literature or even the right sort of propaganda that will be able to prevent the upsurge ef fascism when'the end of the war brings in its wake wide unemployment and discontent...
...Cemm-e losno-i/p A FELLOW-TRAVELLING group headed by Fredrick Vander-*• bilt Field, wealthy New Masses editor, is seeking to bay the Henry George School building on East 29th Street to create a "Marxist Institute...
...Its offices will be in the General Motors building, 1T76 Broadway...
...I might as well go on to mention the pretty romance with Odette, and the effective account of Hitler's "nixed transport," with its cars of Jews ("Useless") and gypsies ("to be sterilized") and young girls for Wehrmacht brothels...
...The sound of the short-wave message spread through the little house...
...They came more for friendship than for economic help...
...Coincidence or net,' the connection is, I think, important and revealing...
...One learned sociologist from Vienna said to me: «t would'rather be a janitor in America than a king in Europe...
...It was a dangerous thing to do...
...Koestler: Dialogue With History ' By ME Lf HI J. LASKY ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE...
...They loved America as a land of hope...
...By Leu-is Browne...
...with religion...
...The time has once again come for "interpreting it...
...Many of them had gone on into numerous editions...
...My impression is that his books (including Dialogue With Death and Scum of the Earth) are neither novels nor historical documentaries "Poetry is a more philosophical and a more excellent thing than history," Aristotle said, "for poetry is chiefly conversant about general truth, history about particular...
...Sometimes one feels that the whole of the novel is greater than the parts, and sometimes just the reverse...
...As soon as Hit-• ler's gutterals ended, the man in the control room gave his signal...
...In all the great epochs of western civilisation there has been a distinctive, tragic self-consciousness...
...He became a voice...
...Detective and astrology magazines, as a supplement to the education given them by the tabloid or the Hearst press, are the high points of their intellectual diet...
...Interesting, if true...
...Like Zarathustra he has come down from the mountain where God was dead...
...T TVifj/ V, us, which has been trying to create an army vs...
...So gradually this one woman faded out of his mind, and he thought only of the masses whom he was to influence...
...But it is not the plot (which is Slim and rather obvious) that matters...
...Literature and philosophy, politics and religion have all been scrambled into an obsessive dilemma...
...He felt sure that the secret service men at their listening posts knew perfectly well who was speaking...
...Several New York newspapers have been filling their editorial columns with innuendo about Lepke, the Mirror writing a provoca tive one entitled Who Fears Lepke . . . Dave Manna, editor of Space and Time, has started another newsletter entitled The Pacific Farmletter...
...Soviet Russia Today has been sending as a premium to ita n<« subscribers a map of Russia upon which no Poland is shewn...
...The map, drawn by the American-Russian Institute, shows Bosnia's boundaries as of the Molotov-Hitler 1939 agreement . . . Although William C. Bullitt was the target of one of the dirtiest swear campaigns ever organized by the Communists, the ex-Ambassador to Russia was invited to the Russian Embassy celebration of the 26th anniversary of the Russian revolution...
...the masses may "learn to hope again," and barricades will emerge again from the pavements of the cities, and "the snipers will appear behind attic windows, and the people will fight again as in the old glorious days...
...Down with the church...
...The "from reliable sources" whispers have placed it from Alaska to Iran, and year guess is as good as the next man's...
...See What I Mean...
...2.50...
Vol. 26 • November 1943 • No. 48
