In Peace and in War

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21180, 29 October 1938, Page 12

In Peace and in War

LESSONS FROM CLASH OF NATIONS

Take Miss Brittain’s earlier book, “Testament of Youth,” along with her new book, “Thrice a Stranger,” and you have a chronological parallel to Mr Huddleston's “In My Time: An Observer’s Record of War and Peace,” which, too, begins with the outbreak of war in 1914, and ends on the eve of another outbreak in 1938.

In the Days of War

During this period, while Miss Brittain has been a V.A.D., author, lecturer, University professor’s wife, and a feminist-Socialist-Facifist, Mr Huddleston, rejected for active service, has steadily pursued his vocation as foreign correspondent to some of the most reputable English and American newspapers, and has written his book, as Miss Brittain writes hers, in the cause of peace. Both look to America (indeed “Thrice a Stranger” is the account of three long visits to the United States at different times within the past 13 years), but Mr Huddleston is inclined to think that civilisation may yet be saved if England, like America, dissociates herself from European conflicts, refuses to have anything to do with war. This does not mean, however, a return to insularity. “What we must have is genuine cosmopolitanism, and that means a growing body of really civilised men and women in a number of countries, sufficiently enlightened to abandon the narrow conception of patriotism, with its parochial spirit, and to admire whatever is lively and of good report in every country; and sufficiently numerous to leaven and colour the thoughts and feelings of the masses.” An excellent idea, but will it solve international and racial problems? Will it satisfy Germany? Here and elsewhere one sees the influence on Mr Huddleston's thought of the Oxford Group Movement, to which he apparently now belongs.

Testament of Maturity

In a way, Miss Brittain is an example of this cosmopolitan type coming into being. Throughout the war she was in contact with men of every nation, and she overcame any natural prejudice she might have against the enemy as individuals; but, as her opening chapters in "Thrice a Stranger” disclose, she had remained English, rather narrowly English, and going to live in an American University town, in 1925, meant readjusting all her ideas. She exhibits herself quite honestly here as the somewhat objectionable type of “Britisher” who regards English standards as good for the whole world, and puts down countries as inferior where he does not find these standards. Comparisons of ways and costs of living, for example (she made them), are quite futile, and instead of clinging to home notions, one must learn to adapt oneself. This Miss Brittain finally accomplished after a long and bitter struggle. Her first significant realisation was that America is not British; that in language, modes of thought, national habits, it is coming to be an entirely different, a new country. One must therefore humbly try to understand it.

Part of her difficulty came, however, from the boisterous over-confidence, extravagance, and purse-proud vulgarity of Americans during the great days of artificial prosperity. In 1934, when Miss Brittain returned as the famous author of “Testament of Youth,” which must continue to rank as one of tire best of war-autobiographies, all this was changed. “The long shadows of the depression” were still lying over the land. The people were humbler, they spent carefully, it was possible to live more cheaply, and altogether America seemed to be on the way to a new and solider national being. This tour of Miss Brittain’s was mainly a literary one, meaning a series of lectures in town after town, but still she found time to observe social conditions and to preach her favourite doctrine of pacifism. Last year she went back again, on a similar errand, to find a “national temperature which, in spite of the ‘business recession,’ seemed closer to sane normality than the boastful affluence of the first period or the retrospective apprehension of the second.” The total result is that she looks to America with love and hope as the refuge of civilisation, and expresses unbounded confidence in its adventurous and glorious future. But, interesting though this book is as a record of experience and change of feeling for the better, it falls far below the quality of “Testament of Youth.” It suffers in the first place from an excess of detail which makes it look as though Miss Brittain chooses to exercise no power of selection, wants us to know every little thing that happened to her since 1925. The story of her whirlwind lecturing tours may be all very well, but there is far too much of it, and too much that the American might read with wonder at the naive innocence of the materially backward English. Tile speed and vitality of American life are not really things to write about for hundreds of pages on end. But the portraits of the many notable men and women (among the latter Mrs Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson and Mary Ellen Chase) whom Miss Brittain met and exchanged views with will be everywhere appreciated.

A Lonely Voice

Portraits such as these are a distinguishing feature of Mr Huddleston’s book, too. Here we have Joffre, Foch, Pershing, Northcllffe, Lloyd George, Poincaire, Briand, Eden and many others: “There are few men conspicuous in public life whom I have not known .... With some of them, and not the least, I have been on terms of intimacy; all I have watched at work, met, listened to, questioned.” Mr Huddleston spent the war years in Paris, on the staff of “The Daily Mall,” and after the war he attended all the

important conferences, writing on them for “The Westminster Gazette,” “The Times,” and American papers. Important Claims The author claims to have been the only newspaper correspondent of any standing who perceived the evils of the Versailles Treaty, and pointed them out; as he claims to have been, more recently, the only one to denounce the evils of Sanctions. From the League's attitude towards Italy, Mr Huddleston believes, all the subsequent troubles of the world have flowed. He would go so far as to say that the League has no right to continue to exist. Altogether he has maintained a detached critical attitude (he is, as he says, an observer), and his criticisms are directed not only at the leaders in the war, but also at the various national leaders in the period since and to-day. As he has a low opinion of the so-called “great soldiers” (“there was no mastermind”), so he thinks very little of Baldwin, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest. Of Chamberlain he has nothing to say. But he evidences a leaning towards other nations (the corollary of standing back from his own), which Chamberlain might not disapprove.

("Thrice a Stranger: New Chapters of Autobiography,” by Vera Brittain. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd)

I “In My Time: An Observer's Record ot War and Peace," by Sisley Huddleston. London: Jonathan Cape.j

In 1935 Methuen published a witty commentary on Scotland by a Frenchwoman under the title of “Without Alphonse." It ran into three editions. A new edition has just appeared with the less fanciful title, “So This is Scotland.” There are illustrations by Thea Doniach.

Some months ago cable news told of labour riots in His Majesty’s Crown Colony of Jamaica. These troubles seem to have been settled—or at least banked down—but if Mr Kenneth Pringle, whose new book is entitled “Waters of the West,” is a credible witness, futher unrest may still be expected in what Lord Oliver, a former Governor, has called “the blessed isle.” Mr Pringle is no casual literary tourist. He spent three and a half years in Jamaica, travelled extensively over that island and its neighbours, and is impressively well informed on his subject. More important still, he has a deep and sincere love for the land and the peoples he describes. This is no surface or sentimental feeling; no man could write as convincingly as he does were he not moved by a rich sensation of what one can only describe as athomeness with the simple folk of the Caribees and the teeming isles on which they live. Apart from the informative value of this book, its most noteworthy quality is the feeling of passionate, overwhelming life, both vegetable and human, which animates it. Only a lover could have written the descriptive passages which abound, passages which show Jamaica in all her moods—the cool Innocence of early morn, the lazy sensuality of noonday, the dark warm passion of night; Haiti, Gautemala, Grand Cayman, and Belsize, in their individual distinctiveness. Only a man innately earthly and close to simple types could have described so clearly and with such understanding the elemental negroes and coloured folk, whose life moves to the rhythm of the nature which gives them life.

Even worse than bad titles—particularly from the librarian’s point of view —are duplicated titles. They lead to endless confusion. This could all be avoided if authors and publishers would take the trouble to find out, before deciding on a title, whether someone else has a prior claim to it. The information is not very difilicult to obtain; there are plenty of reference books, and if any doubt exists it can be resolved by a visit to the British Museum, which has records going back over a long period. One young author (published by a firm with premises in Bloomsbury) is known to have asked to change his title after Inspection of the British Museum catalogue had shown that it was already in use. Ironically—for it was a good title—it has since been adopted by someone whose publisher was not quite so scrupulous!