Living With Books

...These novels take their departure from public events, and they throw some light on them, but they are not dependent on them for their interest and cannot ultimately be judged by them...

...But the amazing thing is that it may also be taken as a first-rate novel about a fictional character called Edward Cavan...

...Toledano himself, decides to avenge the murder of Gino Rosselli, the Carlo Tresca character...

...and thus we have a brief glimpse of Stern at the height of his power...

...occupations and revolution: "Only years later, I was able to add up the score...

...The reader of Darkness at Noon asks not only, "Would Rubashov have confessed...

...Then, in an epilogue composed largely of newspaper dispatches and excerpts from broadcast testimony, Wechsberg tells the story of Stern's abrupt and typical decline/—the dismissal from office, the trial, the confessions, the sentence, the hanging...

...Unfortunately, however, we don't get to know the "Red despot" who is the book's excuse for being...

...and this, we realize as soon as we think of Matthiessen, is too easy a simplification...

...On the other hand, the book is so many-sided, so much more than merely political, that an element of political confusion is relatively unimportant...

...In all this youthful gaiety, an incongruous note is struck by one of Willert's classmates, Bruno Stern, who at 12 is a passionate student of Marx and Lenin and soon afterward begins his career as a revolutionary agitator...

...That, so far as I know, is a fair description of Matthiessen's politics...

...I could account for a total of seventeen...

...Miss Sarton's method is to go all the way around Cavan, showing him from many points of view...

...We also owe more than can be estimated to the apparently effortless way in which Miss Sarton has created the atmosphere of Cambridge...

...It is in many ways a good novel, and we come to know some of the characters very well...

...It is Cavan's passionate desire for identification with others that leads to his isolation, and in this paradox Miss Sarton finds a modern tragedy...

...This is Matthiessen's story, and yet at the same time, as I have tried to say, it is Edward Cavan's...

...His protagonist, Paul Castelar, who bears many resemblances to Mr...

...And they are so good because, in the last analysis, they elude the odious comparison...

...What the Communists have done to Czechoslovakia Willert learns from his observations and from what his acquaintances say and don't say...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS Political Novels by Joseph Wechsberg, Ralph de Toledano and May Sarton HICKS Although it is true that many of the talented young novelists choose to write on quiet, personal themes, public events continue to attract writers of fiction...

...The consequences of that quarrel carry us from character to character, all friends of Cavan's and all distressed by his distress, until we come to the suicide...

...I mention these particular books because they seem to me the best novels of recent years on public themes...

...Wechsberg had in mind Rudolf Slansky or Joseph Frank or one of the other Czechoslovak Communist leaders who were tried and hanged in 1952...

...Of the four still living in Czechoslovakia, one is Bruno Stern, who, as Willert learns when at last he is able to revisit his native land, is the power behind the Communist throne...

...The practical consequences of Cavan's political position, however, are worked out only with regard to a single issue, civil liberties...

...The novel of public events, however, has its special problems...

...And it is no wonder, for the daily papers are full of stories so spectacularly dramatic and so highly colored that it seems a pity not to use them...

...Then the novel drops back a week...

...Wechsberg skips deftly down the years, into the period after the Second World War...

...I have no reason to believe, and I do not believe, that he was ever a member of the Communist party...

...We know that it could have happened, that something of the sort has happened many limes...

...Miss Sarton says that Cavan was a Socialist who believed not merely in granting Communists all the civil liberties to which Americans are entitled but also in cooperating with them...

...But Wechsberg's method, which permits him to BOOKS CONTINUED give such a pleasant account of Czechoslovakia in the '20s and such a horrible account of the same country in the '50s, keeps him and us from getting close to Bruno Stern...

...No one would have dared invent so bizarre a character as Harvey Matusow, but there he is, and it is a great temptation to do something with him...

...Of the thirty-nine boys and girls in our class, five, I found out, were now living in England, two in the United States, two in Germany, and one each in Israel, China, Australia and Russia...

...Not at all in the same class as Day of Reckoning and considerably more successful than The Self-Betrayed is May Sarton's Faithful Are the Wounds (Rinehart, $3.00...

...He has transferred from the '30s to the present day such incidents as the disappearance of Juliet Stuart Poyntz and the murder of Carlo Tresca, and has fashioned out of them a melodrama in the hard-boiled style...

...seventeen out of thirty-nine...

...There is only one point at which there is an unresolved conflict between Cavan, the character in a novel, and Matthiessen, the man of flesh and blood, but it is an important point...

...This, of course, is the one who is to become the despot...

...The opening chapters are full of amusing scenes in Wechsberg's best vein—accounts of Willert's colorful relatives, of school life, of girls and dances and celebrations...

...Ralph de Toledano in Day of Reckoning (Holt, $3.00) has also borrowed substantially from contemporary events, but he has taken considerable liberties with them...

...What Miss Sarton borrowed from public events was well suited to her purposes, for Matthiessen was an extraordinary and an extraordinarily complicated person, but the book's distinction comes from the qualities she has brought to her material...

...Bruno Stern remains as inscrutable as Rudolf Slansky or anyone else we read about in the papers...

...Rubashov comes to seem so real and important a person in his own right that we cease to care whether or not Koestler has offered the true explanation of the Old Bolsheviks' confessions...

...four were in their native country...

...Wechsberg's alter ego...

...but also, "Is this the way the Moscow Trials were managed...

...It is all perfectly real...

...The story begins with an account of life in a Czecho-slovakian city after the First World War, as seen through the eyes of Jacques Willert, who is obviously Mr...

...Although Stern is supposed to be completely inaccessible, Willert determines to see him, not for political but for personal reasons: Willert was once in love with Stern's sister, and he wants to find out what has happened to her...

...The reader of All the King's Men thinks not only of Willie Stark but also of Huey Long...

...It is natural, in commenting on the book, to speak mostly of Edward Cavan, for he is intended to dominate it, but it must be pointed out that we come to know him so well and to feel his reality so strongly because the people through whose eyes we see him have so much substance...

...We see Cavan through the eyes of an admiring graduate student, and then move into a crucial situation, a meeting in Boston of the Civil Liberties Union, in the course of which Cavan quarrels with a close friend over the issue of a kind of loyalty check...

...A novel is essentially an invention, no matter how faithfully and realistically the author may draw his material from his own life and the lives he has observed...

...There is a telling passage in which Willert sums up the results of war...

...But the novel of public events invites comparison with something outside itself...

...Miss Sarton, a poet and novelist of distinction, has written about a character whose resemblance to the late F. 0. Matthiessen is unmistakable...

...He pursues the murderer, Colonel Talavera alias Neri alias LoBello, who resembles an OGPU agent named Major Contreras alias Sormenti alias Vidali, and finishes him off in a bloodthirsty fashion...

...It would be a sad total for an American class of '24, but it was not a surprising one for that specific class in that specific part of the world where we had lived once...

...To the sensibilities of a poet she adds sharp powers of observation and a fine sense of structure...

...Koestler took a tremendous chance when he chose to show Rubashov from inside, but he succeeded, and that is why Darkness at Noon is a classic...

...Robert Penn Warren's Willie Stark becomes in some ways more significant for us than Huey Long, and so it doesn't matter whether or not he is Huey Long...

...But cooperating with Communists is not the same thing as cooperating with Democrats or Methodists or believers in ESP, and it seems clear that by the end of his life Matthiessen had made that distressing discovery...

...He was also, like Cavan, a person to whom his friends were deeply devoted and about whom they constantly worried...

...Miss Sarton has surrounded her Edward Cavan with a group of intensely interesting and admirably realized characters, and, as she examines their relations with her protagonist, she explores some of the deepest problems of identity, friendship and love...

...He does see him...

...She begins with his sister—from whom he was pretty much estranged—as she learns of his death...

...Although Edward Cavan went to Cornell instead of Yale and committed suicide by throwing himself under a subway train rather than by jumping out of a hotel window, he is in all essentials Matthiessen, and the book may be taken as a perceptive tribute to a great teacher and critic...

...Miss Sarton's Edward Cavan is a great teacher, a scholar of distinction, a first-rate literary critic, a man with a strong social conscience, and a person torn by inner conflicts...

...Thus, her' book belongs to the small group of novels that transcend the public events with which they deal...

...This is approximately midway in the book, and thereafter we are con-Spring Book Number May 9 cerned with the impact of Cavan's death on his friends, with his sister's impression of these friends, with the attempts of this one and that one to evaluate his character, and, finally, with his surviving influence...

...The novelist creates a world, and if he is fortunate and deserving, as Joseph Conrad would say, he persuades the reader to accept it...

...All of these things F. 0. Matthiessen was...

...Joseph Wechsberg's The Self-Betrayed (Knopf, $3.95) is described on the jacket as "a novel that tells the vivid and timely story of the rise and fall of a Red despot," and it seems clear enough that Mr...