Books and Writers

...Thousands of white collar workers in Moscow lost from twenty to twenty-five pounds apiece in weight...

...they repeated their request, and the second request brought a definite refusal, again on the ground that there was no typhus in Russia...

...Rtynal and Hitchcock, New York...

...She can imply that peace will not come to all of America when we have hung Hitler to a crabapple tree—not while physical or moral lynch law remains unchallenged...

...When we went out to investigate we found that the conductor was trying to throw off the platform a man who had hitched a ride at the last station...

...Miss Smith, who is a Southerner, is not interested in condemnation but in ex-Position...

...The British sailors on board crowded the deck and when the ship came alongside the pier hundreds of Russian workmen stood waiting to unlash the planes from the decks and to hoist the tanks from their holds...

...And, thus, in a novel in which the action is almost non-existent end the canvas limited to the inter-action of four characters, ws hsve three strikee...

...Now a novel has been published taking its title from this song, taking the macabre pun and extending it to include the bitter fruit of a Negro and white mating...

...Ia the heat of its inequality and betrayal the virus of intolerance and unrest thrives...

...A novel about the South is no joking matter...

...Fred Lang, a commander in the U. S. Navy, had typhus himself...

...The British asked for protection a second time...

...The North can be complacent or smug but it has done precious little towards social justice for the Negro...

...I'm not sorry...

...The British wanted to fly nlanes direct to Russia froi England, but the Russians insisted that their pilots do the job...

...The train was going twenty miles an hour on that cold November day, but the conductor had the fellow down on the last step and was doing his best to kick him off with his feet...

...Frank Keenan, the Brook I ins amateur of art, wrenching a grudging living from the big city as a credit manager in a wholesale hosiery firm, is Helper's central mouthpiece: "Suddenly I felt: we're like people sitting in the subwsy, riding past the ststions...

...Perhaps it is better that she deals with declarative facts rather than mystical precepts...

...He's just got active hemorrhoids, thst's all...

...For Frsnk, who is the / narrator of half of the story, is not only a dull young man, but, again, any dull young man...

...He is s cheap, wise-guy, embittered Jew possessed of a mania for flying, play-writing and Dorothy Lynch, his wife's best friend...

...It ia this realization which has made Miss Smith's novel more valid, her story more real, what she has to ssy more urgent icsn or British pilots flying over Russian territory...

...Go to hell, then...

...And yet, in spite of Mr...

...And a book about lynching can never be treated seriously enough...

...Of Sonny Allen, the drummer, one of Dorothy's numerous lovers, "Look at him," Sam sneered...

...Without being stuffy •nout it, Miss Smith hangs a mouse on Old Massa's eye (and on Hollywood's ¦ad...

...Kerr is a keen and honest observer, his sympathy with the Red Army and with Russia in general does not hamper him from seeing and telling the whole truth...

...The result was confusion at timea that actually delayed deliveries...

...Let me go further and say that it is probably the first thing I have read this season worth more than a temporary place on my bookshelf...

...Weren't the lest four yesrs the happiest in my life...

...When it comes to casting the first stone, we must hang back...

...Mr...

...So long as they got enough food to keep going, they were getting enough...

...I suppose they did not care whether any country sends supplies to Russia...

...All three of his obsessions are doomed to end in their separate frustration...

...Kerr had occasion to witness one of the most gloomy sides of Soviet internal policy on the very day he arrived in Russia...

...But the Negro is not purely a Southern "problem," not unless Detroit and Chicago and Harlem are below Mason-Dixon, and death by fire or rope the only way of lynching a man...

...In fact, one of our doctors in Moscow, Dr...

...Sam, the Broadway press-agent and aspiring but disappointed playw ght, ie in the What Makea Sammy Run tradition...

...One result was that when they used the American Aircobras and B-26 medium bombers, many were damaged through inexperienced handling...

...By choosing a rather limited ssnsibility like Frank's as the focal observer, the author has to limit his range of "obsei vat ion...

...Her strategic device, perhaps the only trick in her book, has been to make the Negro protagonists more complex and more articulate than the whites, and by this focussing to make them dominant in the novel...

...The British who were responsible for the protection of the ships, more than 60% of which were American, asked the Russians to increase the fighter protection of Murmansk...

...and this, in a psychological study (unless brilliantly manipulated as in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury where the idiot narrator, Benjy, adds tremendous vitality and freshness to the action), is a poor maneuver...

...Indiana, who winds up murdered on the pavement in front of Carnegie Hall by the wife of the swing artist, Sonny, as the band blsres "Goodbye Pretty Baby," is the most serious failure in the book...

...Kerr, but the privations and sufferings are terrible...

...A few squadrons arrived, stayed for a short time and left...

...My arrival here was like that of a wave washed up by an inevitable tide...

...Helper's Infatuation with her, Dorothy never seeme more than a kind of adolescent image of a "magazine cover girl" (as ths author describes her in one passsgs) with a heart of gold beneath her "green pallor" (as Sam amusingly puts it) and her stockingless (in winter and summer) legs...

...The Soviet authorities answered a half-yes and the British sent ground crews to Russia on the next convoy, but when they arrived they were not let in...

...Strange Fruit takes place in Georgia, but given the present temper of these United States, it might have taken place anywhere—North or South...

...T is this quiet sincerity, this seriousness of purpose, Which places it above "any other depictions of the South, tinsel or macabre...

...THE greater part of Walter Kerr's book deals with military and strategic •natters, with particular attention to the battles for Moscow and for Stalingrad...

...And he turned his back and went below, followed by the rest of the crew...

...The most powerful police force in the world is constantly enforcing its decisions and punishing offenders...

...It is interesting to note that American and British officers got along well with the Red Army, "inevitably, however, most of our dealings were with political leaders...

...alive and nasty although not loveable, he is the only person whose speech, a bitter, clipped, semi-intellectual Broadway-ese, ie authentic...

...The story is not involved, dealing with the love of a maladjusted young member- of the Southern gentry for a beautiful Negro girl with whom he can find the sole peace and tenderness in his life...

...In thinner tones, Strange Fruit revives the Holy Roller insistence of Faulkner and Wolfe in a style and a mood that stems unevenly from them, though never achieving the passion of Look Homeward, Angel, the seething and slow-working horror of Light in Augutt...

...The frustrations of this love, and its effects on the community, leading up to a sharp point of hiutality and death, are the elements of the plot The irony, perhaps the symbolism, is conscious and planned...

...Except, of course, talk...

...Why should I be sorry for anything...

...A few hours later we found out why the Russians had failed to acknowledge the cheer...

...Bp Albert Halper...

...However, "there was typhus" Welter Kerr says—"as every-Russian knew...

...By Lillian Smith...

...Because it is about Dorothy that the small structure of the novel is built' She ie the magnet who holds together the others: Frank, Ann Glrsckman and Sam...

...Mr...

...The tfciree countries were Allies in the battle against Nazi Germany, and yet Moscow wanted no AmerJudge Lynch fy PAUL CASTflAR STRANGE FRUIT...

...It was his first impression when the convoy pulled into Archangel...

...It is not too world shaking in its significance nor vital to the appreciation of Strang* Fruit...

...Harper and Broth*,*, A BANDONING for once the formula which he hit upon In Union Square and exploited with diminishing srtistie returns in his subsequent novels Th* Foundry and Th* Chut*, Albert Halper has attempted a psychologies...

...The Russians promised...

...Time and again America offered to send pilots and mechanics to Russia to show the Russians how to use the American planes, but the Russians said no...

...Strange Fruit," by Lillian Smith—a good book, a thoughtful book, definitely not a phony book—and having no relation to another work by s member of the Smith clan, dealing with Brooklyn vegetation...

...But besides this, it contains facts and stories of a purely political natu re and thus of great general interest...

...She has set out to write a good snd sincere novel, to'create more than a flashy success for Book-of-the-Month liberals...

...America was sending planes to Russia but the Soviet authorities insisted that Russian pilots fly them into the country...

...They said they could not stand the loss of so many transports and the port must be guarded...

...They were prison laborers, far from their homes, guarded by police with rifles and fixed bayonets...

...Dorothy, (he beautiful small-town girl from...

...One story is illustrative: In the spring of last year the United States sent to Europe, Africa and Asia a medical mission to study the extent of typhus and methods of combating it...

...What "cold porridge," whet a chill breakfast...

...The South, from a social and political viewpoint, ia one of America's disease spots...

...Dallin it the author of Soviet Ruttia't Foreign Policy and the more recent Ruttia and Pott-War Europe— two widely acclaimed bookt on Ruttia...

...A real conflict arose during the winter 1942-48, when the Germans began to bomb daily the port of Murmansk, whsre the British and American ships arrived with wsr supplies...

...Let's give them a cheer,—shouted one of the Scotsmen, and after the men had cheered they stared in amazement at the blank, disinterested faces of the Russians...

...There was perhaps a half minute of awful silence, and then the mouth of the Scotsman hardened and he screamed out: "All right...

...I can recall many times when riding on Russian trains how civilians were pushed around by officials who should have showed more courtesy and kindness...

...Even Tobacco Road had become quaint...

...I'm glad I came here...

...But although he has freed himaelf from the deterministic, institutional frame-work ef The Foundry and The Chute, spirituslly he still finds it necessary to lean on another kind of deut ex machina, here couched in moral rather than economic terms...

...Miss '.Smith lacks their sense of pervasive evil, but her vision is broader...

...The magnolias, the crinoline, and the family detainer serving juleps, had begun to *M«rish again...

...GOME years ago & famous Negro entertainer was moaning an unusual ballad in the New York night clubs—a product of crocodile concern over lynching but weirdly effective: Southern trees bear a ttrange fruit, blood on the leavee, blood at the root, black bodiet twinging in the Southern breeze, ttrange fruit hanging from the poplar treet...

...study la Only an Inch From Glory...

...Hslper evidently expects the reader to take comfort: "But a person liks mo could never have remained home...

...Where Miss Smith has probed deeply and painfully has been in her analysis of the helplessness and confusion of her Negroes, educsted or not, and of her whites before the facts of racial hatred, misunderstanding, and apparent inccmpatibility...

...The authorities promised additional protection...

...One afternoon, on our trip to Kuibyshev, we heard a terrifying scream from the platform...

...Dealing with four young people in Greenwich Village, with one of whom (Dorothy Lynch) the author himself is in love, he succeeds in making credible only the character, Sam Gluckman, who is most despicable...

...This led to real disagreement and the result was in April 1943 no convoya were moving by the Northern route and the story was that none would move until the question of protection had been settled...

...He possesses, for example, much information concerning the relations of Britain and America with Russia...

...The Russian economic home-front is firm and solid, according to Mr...

...AH of us desire some heaven, or a cupful of glory, and yet we keep sitting with tightening knees as the cars speed past the local stations of our lives...

...In a novel which depends largely on dialogue for its method, it is s msjor fault when three-fourths of it is stiff, trite and unnatural...

...on Margaret Mitchell's...

...Then the British asked for the right to send their own fighter planes to protect Murmansk...

...American pilots would fly planes to Alaska, and there they had to hand them over to Russian pilots, who would take them to Siberia...

...Even after It is in the heavily pathetic, prosy observation of the much - enduring Frank which ends the book thst Mr...

...Despite the dramatics of its title, the implied violence of its climsx, Strange Fruit is almost a pensive novel, a quiet and introspective study of a Georgia town, smacking little of the literary South's agonized mta culpitm...

...At times unnecessary suffering is caused, but its program is clear and it is ruthless in following it...

...Stilted Talk •y VlVff NNf KOCH ONLY AN INC8 FROM GLORY...

...When the mission applied for permission to visit the Soviet Union they wots told there wss no typhus in Russia...

...Thomas Wolfe and Wil-"»m Faulkner were no longer titans...

...Yet Sam is real...

...Despite shattering historic chsngee snd bombardments of traditiona we remain sitting passively...

...Still it did not arrive...