Books and Writers
Books and Writers The Trivial and Tragic By ISA KAPP A C4*MN" OF STRAW. A collection of short $torie$. %t) Stlv* Townteud Warner. The Viking Free*. MISS WARNER'S special hostility toward...
...The suppositions that lie back of his thinking are those of "free enterprise" as opposed to socially managed or controlled enterprise...
...They are thought of as something held in reserve—like firstaid kits...
...It's an unusual social critic who foresakes the Gods of demagogy and didacticism for the devils of involution and obscurity...
...But you begin to aecognize limitations and exaggeratiions only after » sigh of relief at Miss Warner's strange amalgam of viitues...
...Two refugee children •hack their middle-class British patroness by confining their interest and conversation exclusively to animal.i .. . until she tells them that a bombing has destroyed the Plymouth zoo...
...It may he that all that we shall have in the way of preparation for "X" . day will be the implementation of this report...
...With . 12,000,000 men in the war services, we have 7,«00,fl00 more workers employed in 1944 than In 1937...
...What the sainted elder statesman of American finance has given us is a capitalist's dream of demobilization...
...Pie in the Sky: 1944 la pastures grean he shall indeed Receive his due, and hourla ease His soul, perhaps by virtue of An inter-worldly lend and lease...
...By Violet Cretey-Morcke...
...Travelogue and Politics By EDWARD HUNTER JOURNEY INTO CHINA...
...Had wa all agreed from the start as to the objective to be attained by ail this arranging and selling and managing, there would be nothing more to say...
...But on this earth the soldier's lot Is not so good, the pickings spare: Where he seeks grass civilian* have Already made a picnic there, Pfe...
...There is one office which Mr...
...He leads' the procession in a retreat from planning...
...E. P. Dutton * Co., New York...
...If that is all that we have—if the American people fail to demand more—then we are in tor a depression which will make all othera look like pleasant holidays...
...Among the simplest and beat of the stories is one reminiscent of Galsworthy, "An Unimportant Case" of a young unemployed couple arrested for stealing, and the conflict in s policemen's mind between training and instinctive tympathy...
...The United States is sending big supplies to Russia, and an important part of them go by way of the Pacific...
...The average reader, of course, will just pass over ita political allusions, and this is mainly to the good...
...The author takes travel for granted in a delightfully nonchalant manner, no matter how hazardous it is or how uncomfortable...
...But Mils Warner gets along excellently in spite of her approach...
...With a large part of our population removed from industry, we' have more than doubled our production...
...I wish she had told some more about that mystery man traveling with her...
...There is to be a Surplus Property Administrator to dispose of government plants and stockpiles...
...But she has used an abnormal situation that has no bearing upon the general, and the implications become assy...
...Settaragic On"—as the window »hrn is read bsekwards, front tnsIHe* ah EhjfTrsfT tbbSCeo ihap—is a sustained mood piece about the cumulative fanaticism that feeds on deprivation...
...It reads like a Domei news agency report...
...AN EDITORIALPlanning for "X" Day TPHE Baruch report is an able document...
...She reduces to a fine symptomatic strain what began u mstsrisl of major social importance...
...The juxtaposition of world revolution and Miss Austen is funny enough, but the cartoon seems purposeless...
...But despite her inaccurate expeditions into politics, the book is interesting, although slow reading...
...If goods are produced, it is taken for granted that customers with money in hsnd will automatically appear...
...a,— - or...
...Apart from interpretive difficulties when shades of meaning are always implicit, this working in minute dimensions unresist the distance between intention and effect: when the sifting is over, the end product may have Jolt th* relative proportions of the original...
...What we have before us, then, ia a plan t* return not merely to pre-war days, but to the Coolidge-Hoover ers...
...Her explanation as to how the Jap invasion of Manohuria started can be described politely as cockeyed...
...More probably, she is concerned with the i-itects of Nasi moral and political conditioning...
...I have heard many bizarre explanations, but this one takes the cake...
...Communists invariably deny such details with such vehemence that it is valuable to obtain eyewitness confirmation from one who while not a Communist is very friendly to the Soviet Union...
...She has a trick of refraction that emphasizes the ludicrous...
...But, rather than suggest that we retain any of the successful techniques which have now been tried and mastered, all that Mr...
...Everything is to be done honestly and above board, "as in a goldfish bowl...
...At times the comic spirit pushes her to excesses, as in her account of the Trotskyi»t with a weakness for Jane Austen...
...Maybe it is the British in her...
...Ralph d* Taladana...
...It is all to be lone in first class style...
...We should have a Surplus Ideas Disposal Administrator to put up at auction all that we have learned during these years when American industry has doubled its prewar production figures...
...Within the year we are producing war goods to the value of $60,000,000,000...
...As artificial in its insistence upon exploiting the unfamiliar is "The Functionary," story of a Nasi executioner suddenly unbalanced by confrontation with a victim's idiot son, who demands his autograph...
...But about the objective there is obviously no agreement at all...
...There is to be no reference to them until th* day of surprising and unexpected ill fortune...
...Noah's Ark" is the story that has used indirectness most successfully...
...Though possessed of an extensive potential insight, Miss Warner is naturally at home in vitriolism and prefers to ree those things that provoke ironic critique...
...Definite and practical solutions have been expressed in clear and concise terms...
...MISS WARNER'S special hostility toward bromide M^nd truism is a little overconspicuous in these ¦tones...
...She says: "In 1931 trouble broke out between Korea and China...
...She gives the impreslion of being cornered by, rather than coming into contact with, human beings...
...Baruch suggests—and all that he was asked to suggest—is that we do our best to recreate the atmosphere of private initiative...
...The whole problem, he writes, "is soluble if we create the atmosphere in which initiative and resourcefulness—the traditional American spirit—ran again take hold...
...He suggests that public works schemes be carefully prepared and then carefully placed on the shelf where they can do no harm...
...This route, according to present information, is not much used nowadays, but the picture could change again overnight...
...If we could go on turning out goods at anywhere near war levels, we could grow in wealth with a speed that no nation has aver touched...
...Free enterprise ia assumed to be enough...
...Small business is to get its share...
...The immensity of our common task is a supreme challenge to the nation...
...Perhaps the Russians might be persuaded to release at least some supplies for the sorely stricken Chinese who have been fighting their battle as well as ours for six terrible years...
...Is one to deduce that Miss Warner believes German children to be congenitally sadistic...
...She has the faculty of endurjng native hardships and accommodating herself to native customs, without ever allowing herself to be actually on a level with the natives...
...Korea is a Japanese dependency, and therefore Japan despatched an expeditionary force to her aid...
...Unemployment is considered as something that falls upon a surprised world—like snow in Los Angeles...
...We are aaked to pretend that there never was a depression, a New Deal and a World War II...
...The President's adviser is completely conscious of his antipathy to planning...
...How to furnish jobs for sll who want them and sell the goods to civilian consumers, is a problem that requires deeper thinking than Mr...
...Baruch's thinking are frankly revealed...
...All the problems of the demobilization of men and the demilitarization of industry have been carefully set in order...
...To go from Mandalay to Koko Nor via Chungking and the red areas of China is no mean feat —and no route in that part of the world could be of more intensive historical interest...
...For two years we have had planning, and the results have been practically miraculous...
...Now, on "X" day, the men will start to come back, and the market for the war goods will close up...
...Miss Warner has the faculty of giving trivial form to a serious and meaningful preoccupation: the exposure of arrested understanding, and of crudeness and complacency in human relationships...
...JOURNEY INTO CHINA is mainly the sort of trav** elogue that people like to read late of an evening or in a hospital...
...His purpose is to get the government out of business as honestly, quickly and efficiently as possible...
...It was curious and instructive, therefore, to read about the secret Russian agent—apparently a Gen...
...Akenoff—whom she met at the Chinese Red front, and what "a big man" he was...
...The limitations of Mr...
...She is always the superior, hut a good fellow, nonetheless...
...If only they would continue to do so now...
...824 payee...
...She gives Soviet Russia the break every time...
...Baruch has done as good a job as any man could have done within the limits of those suppositions...
...There is to be a "Work Director" with uriforgetful mind...
...Apprentice," for example,' tells of a plump little German girl of ten who discovered an exquisite satisfaction in tantalising Polish children with food, and then snatching it adroitly back...
...She took the fascinating route up through Burma into China's interior, and up the highway between Russia and China...
...IT was interesting, too, to read about the tight-lipped * Russians who at that time were keeping the supply route to China open...
...Anyway it makes good reading...
...8.75...
...It is her way of achieving detachment from perpetual concrete annoyances...
...Part of the author's distressing naivete is the glihness wifh which she refers to Manchukuo—thus indirectly acknowledging Jap claims that it is an independent state...
...Baruch was drafted to do...
...But why she had to drag in Finland by the political bootstraps, ami give a long political spiel on that, is incomprehensible...
...It is a case of the exaggerated symbolism that her method induces...
...Monopolies are riot to be favored...
...She sets atmosphere perfectly, and she has intelligent convictions as to what is socially and culturally harmful...
...aha communicates subtly but self-consciously...
...Baruch haa not provided for...
Vol. 27 • February 1944 • No. 9
