The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
The Home Front WILLIAM E. BOHN Critics and the Mountains AS my cryptic friend, Llston Oak, to often remarks, this is not tat« liook pile. Kut il.im- U no law ayainst discussing books- or the...
...Nicholas Kadcliffe, the Englishman, is Ihe most civilized of the lot...
...The one woman who dares the dangers of heights is Carla Dehn...
...The democratic American who had wanted to help climbed on past the point where the Nazi had fallen...
...That makes all the difference...
...It is foreign, un-American...
...They merely raised a great fuss about the accepted regulations, remarked that the author had a lot of trouble getting these six persons together, said the machinery of the first part of the plot creaked in the joint...
...In the climactic scene Hein, the Nazi, bets his life that uncooperative and ruthless power can win to the top of the tower of life...
...It must, in a general way, be something like Sinclair Lewis...
...Now, authors of stories and plays of ideas have from the beginning been allowed a certain leeway in starting their plota...
...And last comes Martin Ordway, the American flier...
...The danger comes from the way man is organized for political purposes...
...The Liberal Party is the party of security-plus-liberty...
...I think this is a wrong emphasis...
...But in this realm 1 am willing to acknowledge that the author has tried more than he could do more than anyone could do...
...Common and ordinary folks doing common and ordinary things make up the stuff of a good, ordinary American novel...
...Whst we can say against them is that not one of them bodies forth the full quality of his people...
...The Frenchman does not speak for all of France, the Britisher speaks for only a part of England, and the brave but essentially speechless American acts out only one side of what we recognize as our national character...
...I 'til it ii-- today is not merely a mailer of who cleans the streets or who collects the aches...
...It ia about books and critics and life—and everything...
...Another step toward Sovietization...
...For the moment I am not committing myself on the degree of hi* success...
...Of course, the mysteries and ihe romantics are something else again...
...Benes is rumored to have confessed to friends that he is a prisoner of the Kremlin...
...The danger never comes from bombs «? planea or tanka...
...Do these three men and the one woman adequately represent the inner hopes that make them tick...
...The problem is who controls...
...We wi'l never do that so long an the United States is a democracy...
...Politics is life...
...If the present social system cannot give ui full employment and solid peace, the old parties will soon be swept away...
...Kut il.im- U no law ayainst discussing books- or the atomie bomb- on any page...
...Genera) ideas are taboo...
...Ullman haa tried to portray the tragedy and heroism of man on this whirling chunk of rock...
...The problem is not the atomie bomb or our vastly expanded methods of production...
...In lasa than 601) pages Mr...
...She is an Austrian, but in this adventure it is her function lo suggest th* Uiialities, not of her country, hut of the Kuropean Underground, of the great group of conscious opponents of Nazism and Fascism...
...Weapons are lifeless and useless without man...
...It is dictatorship, including governments which, though not totalitarian, strive for empires, monopolies and dominating military power...
...Think of Homer and the creaking uf the machinery whereby he got all of Ins people aboard his boats...
...industries employing more than 600 are to be nationalized...
...Old parties are going to die with Ihe old concepts of the pre atomic age...
...Ullman isn't writing a tale iilmiit Susie and Sam and their kids and the neighbors, because h* goes to some pnin* to get together, out of all Ihe world, just the six persons whom he wants, he ia said to be awkward, artificial, mechanical...
...From the point of view of symbolism he is, perhaps, the last satisfactory of all...
...In a moment he was gone...
...Liberals in the Atomic Age By LOUIS FISCHE* KlceerptM from a gpeeeh at th* Women's Committee, Liberal farty of New York...
...That is social democracy...
...For his idealism remains to Ihe end practically inarticulate...
...Vs a parable of man's hope, faith, failure and success, the book is, too, a monumental success...
...When he wanted I hem, they just walked on...
...It was an exciting story and well written . . . but it was a sort of funny thing . . . not like regular American writing . . . bad hidden meaning" which gave the reviewers an itchy feeling...
...He saw him leap toward the rockwall, hit it, grasp it, cling to it, claw at it, slip from it, fall slowly back from it...
...I doubt whether ever in my life a story has held me more gaspingly tied up with the fates of the actors...
...The mountain is not just a mountain and the characters are not just people...
...When I had got deep enough in to find what the book is about, ? laughed a big laugh...
...And there was a young fellow named Shakespeare who didn't even go to the trouble of ? ? pluming how a lot of his characters (.ol into his plays...
...Uni they hedged on their com-im minium by all sorts of humming and hawing...
...In the Atomic Age, in the Liberty versus Totalitarianism Age, politics is life and death...
...We Americana, who number Hawthorne and Melville among our novelists, muri not rise above Joe and Jane, who say and do this or that...
...Is it conceivable to you that the United States Government would order an atomic bomb dropped, in peacetime, on Mexico or Brazil, or Argentina, or France, or England because we wished to extort something from those countries...
...What holds my attention is the coyness of the critics about letting him do the thing at all...
...Kut they are both narrow, limited, uncomplicated...
...3.00...
...Next comes Kenner, the faithful Catholic peasant who serves as professional guide...
...We have a certain picture of what a novel should be...
...The BBC announced that Bene« has signed an edict that all Czechoslovakia...
...Hut the government of a dictatorship, which is subject to no control and does not have to consider public opinion — because it makes public opinion - would be under no such restraint...
...Politics has become a matter of every person's job, safety, security and health...
...This i" not merely Ihe Atomic Age...
...It is true that the more or I ¦¦ s official reviewers who speak for Gi I and the publishers • lut acknowledge that this is a good novel...
...We could have endless debate about his choice of symbolic characters and their investiture with qualities...
...Anyon* who reads this acene afler having followed the fortunes of the five men and one woman up to this point will acknowledge that we have here something of higher significance than the run-of-the-mill story about Susie and Sam and what they did before church or after the movie...
...As usual, I read the reviews first and and the novel a couple of months later...
...They did not rule outright that it was contrary to law...
...Martin saw him crouch, motionless...
...There was only the great silence of the sheer cliff...
...EVERYBODY has been saying that the atomic bomb changes everything, that if there i* another war we could blow the earth to smithereens and destroy all of humanity...
...Ullman and bis critics give us a picture of what is going on in a large section of the American world of letters...
...But now because Mr...
...In action wa catch some glimpses of it, but Ihr man , from (hi land of Jtjferton and Lincoln and Roosevelt never one* tpeaki up for the faith that ig in him...
...I am talking about the regular and recognized type of novel that passes for good literature...
...The first of these men is bad, the other good...
...In other words, it is not the atomic liiuiib which is dangerous to civilization...
...Symbolism is out...
...The stcp-by-atep accounts of the climbs over glaciers, up clammy, frozen, slithery perpendiculars of rock or ice, of the endurance of these daring mortals with nothing but flapping canvas between them and the fury of cosmic storms— these held me as though I myself— frozen, numb, exhausted were taking every daring step, blindly feeling for every desperately needed handhold...
...But Hein'* tragedy had revealed to th* American the aecret whereby the wall could be climbed...
...but before we have finished the first hundred pages, we are deep in the meaning of man and his life on this shrinking globe...
...Delambre symbolizes a France so super-sensitive and sensual that insight stymies action and contemplation ends in impotence...
...Gentle, poetic, restrained, deeply devoted to ihe natural sciences, so rational that he is ready to retreat in good order before an unconquerable obstacle—the man takes heroism in his stride...
...Il i- also Ihe Liberty versus Totalitarian Age...
...It opens like an expert war story about a Hier...
...It should tell about a couple of Gl Joes in the war or Tom, Dick and Harry—or their girls, Susie and Sadie— in business, going to night clubs, doing the dishes...
...He refuses to accept the help of the despised American...
...Each has a well-verbalized faith which sustained him...
...The cast and the setting represent the peoples of the world facing the war and all the subterranean forces which made the war...
...On the first— and lower—level it is a superb tale of adventure...
...And along comes The While Town...
...The others, standing for higher degrees of civilization, are more difficult lo do—and the results are necessarily less convincing...
...In other tunes, before our rules of iealism had Iwrume so rigid, no one would have boggled over a little thing like that As a novel of meaning, this book must be judged on two levels...
...I hem...
...His greatest success is Hein, the embodiment of Nazi efficiency, pride, ruthlessness...
...And this column I* nut juat about booka...
...The Atomic Age calls for a party that will give us security while preserving our liberties...
...I was slightly wearied by certain im-plietionft in the professional comment on James Ramsey Ullman'a The While Tutoer (I.ippincott...
Vol. 28 • October 1945 • No. 43
