SUCH LIFE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25270, 23 August 1947, Page 7

SUCH LIFE

DOCTOR Jsbos: Tte Story at * Doctor. By John Pleach. Gollancr. 579 pp. The author of this autobiography is a\ distinguished Hungarian medical scientist and practitioner. He quitted cou "try before the first World . war, .-because professional opportunity Was greater in Germany, be- f came Professor of Medicine in the University of Berlin, served with the German army, saw the Weimar Republic rise and fall, distrusted and detested the authors of its fall, and left Hitler’s Germany for He has a rich story to tell, rich less in self-revelation or m the intimate records of a medical career than in the great range of his experience and of his familiar comrpany among the statesmen and diplomats, writers and artists, and scientists of Europe. He is one of those selfeffacing autobiographers who induce a reader to forget that only a remarkable man finds or makes such an experience, lives in such an environment, and—essential condition—does justice to them in memory and word. Almost with surprise the reader comes to the last section of the book, 150 pages of P octor ’ s Dialogues,” and finds that here “Janos” discourses wholly and steadily on medical themes, answering such questions as “What do you think of surgical intervention?” • . . “What -exercises would you recommend to maintain bodily health?” • - • ‘‘What about old age and death?” (Sood as this section is (to venture a lay opinion), it cannot approach in general and various interest those many chapters in which here the great Zuntz of the Agricultural Institute in Berlin is characterised, here the even greater Wassermann and Ehrlich, here the Centrist politician, Erzberger. here (through many pages) Einstein, most charmingly drawn, and then, in dazzling succession. ■ Reinhardt, Hauptmann, Kreisler, Ko- , koschka, Toscanini, Richard Strauss, Slevogt, and many another. Nor should one special gallery be forgotten: that in which are ranged the por- | traits of Berlin’s diplomatic corps in Flesch’s time Gerard, D’Abernon, Lindsay. Poncet, and the rest. This most entertaining and profitable book is copiously illustrated, here and there (it may be) superfluously, but generally very well and most valuably in many drawings by Orlik.

SOLDIER Playing with Strife. By Lieut.-Gen. ' Sir Philip Neame, V.C. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 352 pp. Sir Philip Neame wrote this book, . all but one chapter, the last, -while a prisoner of war in Italian hands; and the skill with which he hid his manuscript from his gaolers, his care to carry it with him when he escaped, and the good guardianship of the alpine monks with whom he was obliged

to leave it, hidden from the Germans’ search, all earn the gratitude of the reader to whom it is at last delivered. Part of the story, of course, concerns his capture. He was in command in Cyrenaica when Rommel swept through and overwhelmed his too small force; and his escape from his fortress prison in Italy is described m that last-added chapter, an excellent example of his cool, neat style in dealing with events turbulent- enough. This coolness—which does not prevent the reader’s temperature from rising—is even better exhibited in an account of the terrific little business, with grenades, in which Sir Philip won the V.C. in the first world war, and in that of his being mauled by a tigress in her death agony. Much in the book will delight sportsmen; for the author shot big game (and small) in many countries, played polo, climbed mountains, and rode cross-country, when he was not soldiering. Three chapters on Tibet, the most substantial in the book, are valuably informative.

OLD LADY REMEMBERS Life Without Theory. By Violet Stiart Wortley. Hutchinson. 158 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd.

Mrs Wortley’s first, clear personal recollection is that of ‘‘an invalid, or rather a dying man, in a Bath chair, a beautiful woman walking by his side.” This was at Ryde in 1871; the couple were Napoleon 111 and the Empress Eugenie; the child was five years old. Last year, at Highcliffe Castle, her birthday and the war-time achievement of the village of Highcliffe, which looks across the Channel to the Isle of Wight, were celebrated together. Change, change, change; change, upheaval, catastrophe . . . and this steady, serene life spanning them all. The steadiness and serenity, though, were not those of one sitting detached at a window, watching life go by. Her husband’s career as a field officer and military attache drew her out into it; her connexions were all among those who stirred the affairs of Europe, or stood near those who stirred them; and her own eagerness for travel, experience. and action was searching and studious rather than inquisitive. When she found a copy of Fisher’s ‘‘History of Europe” in Ankara, she pounced on it hungrily. She was not an “intellectual”; she does not philosophise; but knowledge, sense, and discrimination give her view of the world a clear relief and colour unknown in autobiographical kaleidoscopy. SAILOR

In the First Watch. By William McFee. Faber and Faber. 285 pp.

Mr McFee does not conceal it from us that he let his practice as a novelist help him in this new and welcome account of his years at sea. Its characters are “based on remembered shipmates but are composites . . . The names are fictitious and the incidents

have also suffered a sea change.” But the truth stands: “This was how we lived in the old days.” Blending, sharpening, disengaging the significant from the trivial—if this is not an autobiographer’s right, then Boswell, shaping his notes of Johnson’s dicta to their final, memorial form with the tools of his memory, his ear for the sage’s idiom, and his knowledge of the man. was a cheating biographer. Mr McFee’s admirers will be grateful to him for this appearance in his own character, using his own voice, though they have been happy to hear it so often modulated to the character of Spenlove. These episodes of the BurrSfield, the Framfield, the Fernfield—episodes as often of the port as of the open sea—are beautifully written: beautifully, it is true, in the narrow sense, applicable to not a few passages of nostalgically tuned phrase and rhythm, but beautifully, first and last, in the widest sense, applicable to all precise, faithful, evocative writing. Such is Mr McFee’s in this piece, as he calls it, of “ancient history.” His sea days, like those that Joseph Conrad described in ‘‘The Mirror of the Sea, v are not only over; they are gone, vanished, beyond men’s knowledge now, except in such mirrors as these. CHEMIST Without Fame. By Otto Eisenschiml. Herbert Jenkins. 288 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. The author of this enjoyable book graduated from the Vienna Polytechnic with the highest marks, one other graduate -excepted, in 80 years. And when he migrated to the United States, he never thought of his honours or his diploma again. He was ready to learn from new masters —as from Kern, the Pittsburg iron-works chemist, selftaugnt, who in a few hours completed a pig-iron analysis, figuring up 99.81 per cent., after poor Eisenschiml, following the “rapid analytical method” cf the texts, had spent a week on an analysis figuring up to about 87 per cent. His experiences in the iron and other industrial fields—glass and oil, for example—are racily described, by cne whose humour is a natural spring end whose wise, warm, tolerant humanity becomes more and more attractive. It is not surprising to find ihat, when such a % man himself became an employer, he was an enlightened one, or that his practical thoroughness and technical genius made him a successful one. There are

fascinating glimpses of the arduous work (and the occasional strokes of luck) behind the triumphs of science in industry; of the battle of science and the law against the knave in industry —sometimes supported by knaves in politics; and of colleagues in chemistry —such as Lewis, the inventor of Lewisite, who never spoke of that but preferred to dwell on “his promotion of higher sanitation and more precise chemical methods in the packing house industry.”

FRIEND OF THE FINNS In the North. By Constance Mallegon. Gollancz. 189 pp. These “autobiographical fragments in Norway, Sweden, Finland: 19361946” are sure to be taken up with pleasant anticipations by many who read the author’s earlier autobiographical w’ork, “After Ten Years.” They will not be disappointed. Much that is here might be in a travel book—if the traveller had not hurried. Lady Constance Malleson did not hurry; she spent months, and indeed years, living m these northern countries; and it is, therefore, no journeying that is her theme but the discoveries that can cnly be made at home. Finland, above all, won her heart and deep respect, especially as she saw the Finns bitterly tried by war and invasion and defeat. The book is filled, rather untidily (but the disorder is itself engaging), with vivid sketches of land and people, with the kind of small observation that opens wide views on a national character, order, and economy, and with rhapsodies and reflections, less valuable but not to be wished away.

POLICE STATION BLAND The heading is not descriptive; it is the name of Mr Julian Symons’s C.I.D. Inspector—the one he launched with a sort of unsteady brilliance in “The Immaterial Murder Case” and now brings to an even keel in A Man Called Jones (Gollancz. 192 pp.). But the description would do very well. . . . This story, in which the death of the worthless Lionel Hargreaves (bullet) is soon foik wed by that of his tough father (poisoned sherry) and that of Polly Lines> an obvious suspect’s brassy secretary (fire), is as smooth as cream: so smooth that a complicated plot never becomes confusing. The puzzles are written plain; but, though the clue is as plain as the nose on a reader’s face, he won’t see how Detec-tive-Sergeant Filby, with a certain vulgar little gesture, gave Bland the key to the answers. THE CLEVER ONE

Marion Holbrook’s Suitable for Framing (Cassell. 207 pp.) is a murder story staged in an America.! advertising agency. (Mr Symons’s is centred in an English one. as it chances: some curious atmospheric differences.) Miss Holbrook’s heroine. Mimi Ellsworth, one of the copywriters, uses her brains very cleverly, from the time the first body is found, through the fatal series, until her cleverness makes her the logical next victim. So it is lucky for her that the homicide squad man,-Shid, is just a little cleverer, and clever enough to be on hand and in time. This is good, in the high-tension American style. TO THE CHAIR

Gordon McDonell’s They Won’t Believe Me (George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 127 pp.) is a neat, short piece in the pattern first (or best) used by Francis Iles, some years ago. There’s no puzzle, no mystery. But ®Mr McDonell’s variant within the pattern is ingenious. Johnny Hill, whose story is dictated in San Quentin as he waits to go to the chair, did intend to murder his wife and inherit her money, when chance contrived for him the fool-proof certainty of going unsuspected; but she forestalled him by committing suicide. . . . And the foolproof certainty turned into a trap. No need to be sorry. Johnny was a heel. Mr McDonell studies his victim with ironic insight. SALLUST

Gregory Sallust, Mr Dennis Wheatley’s secret service man, reappears in Come Into My Parlour (Hutchinson. 384 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.), his new adventure beginning with Hitler’s assault on Russia. In Russia, as Russian resistance, against all the odds, does not break, in Switzerland, and in Germany itself, Sallust and his Russian partner. Kuporovitch, are pitted against the German Gestapo chief, Grauber, in a battle of wits to save Moscow and to penetrate the secret of Peenemunde. The rescue of the lovely Erika completes Sallust’s triumph. THE OIL

The Ramsays, David and Andrea, were called in by Major Cassius Hart, U.S. military intelligence, to act as guests in an oil king’s house while they looked and listened for something to explain how the great Youba tanks were being secretly drained to fuel Hitler’s submarines. But. after all, Cecile Hulse Matschat’s Murder at the Black Crook (Cassell. 171 pp.) makes very little of the oil. It’s murder the Ramsays drop in on, and a horrible tangle of family and financial and love affairs at the back of it. This doesn’t rate high.

The Royal Society of Literature in Britain has awarded the 1946 prizes on the W. H. Heinemann Foundation for Literature to Miss V. SackvilleWest for her poem ‘‘The Garden,” and to Bertrand Russell for his ‘‘History of Western Philosophy.” The following writers have been elected Fellows of the Society: Mr Arthur Bryant, Lord David Cecil, Mr Winston Churchill, Sir Alan Herbert, Miss F. Tennyson Jesse, Sir Frederic Kenyon, Miss Rosamond Lehmann, Lady Lenanton (Carola Oman), Sir Shane Leslie, Mr Peter Quennell, Mr Ernest Raymond, Dr. J. T. Sheppard, Professor G. M. Trevelyan, Dr. Arthur Waley, Miss C. V. Wedgwood, Miss Rebecca West, and Mr G. M. Young. Fellowships are awarded for outstanding work of merit in English literature.