Books: Noonday & Night

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Man is changed by his living; but not fast enough.

His concern to-day is for that which yesterday did not occur.

In the hour of the Blue Bird and the Bristol Bomber, his thoughts are appropriate to the years of the Penny Farthing;

He-tosses at night who at noonday found no truth.

Four years ago a young English writer, Wystan Hugh Auden, incorporated these lines in the chorus of a play. Auden's poems were at that time widely talked about and widely misunderstood—with some reason. They seemed brilliant, veiled, obscurely revolutionary. By October 1939, however, few Englishmen could still look blank over such lines as these. Their meaning was all too painfully clear.

The most significant ideas of War, as of everything else, may sometimes be found in the words and deeds of free writers. In Germany, in Russia, and to a great extent in Italy this sensitive register no longer exists, or if it does, remains hidden. In France and England no "war" books have yet appeared. But by last week many writers had tentatively or tartly expressed themselves.

At least three first-rate English writers were paying the U. S. the compliment of "exile"—which at least two great U. S. writers (Henry James and T. S. Eliot) had paid to England in the past. W. H. Auden (rhymes with applaudin'), whose search for noonday truth took him to Iceland in 1936 (Letters From Iceland), then to Spain during the Civil War, then to China (Journey to a War), last week had taken an apartment in Brooklyn and intended to stay. Bony-faced, eager, un-slicked, Auden told a reporter that he saw one hopeful prospect from the "muddle" in Europe; a general realization that violent revolution is as impotent as violent war. Said he: "In America nationalism doesn't mean anything; there are only human beings. That's how the future must be. . . ."

In Hollywood, Christopher Isherwood, Auden's old friend and collaborator, was at work last week on a scenario for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Richard Aldington, who came to his conclusions about war ten years ago (Death of a Hero), left the Riviera last February to settle in the U. S., summered in Peace Dale, R. I., and last week was in Manhattan.

But most English writers remained in England, where the vast armory of English literature was being mobilized along with the rest of the Empire. In the first week of the war the London Times recommended, for blackout nights, a reperusal of such "lenitive" 19th Century giants as Trollope and Dickens. Publishers adopted slogans like "Always carry your gas mask; always carry a book." The London Library resolved to stay open. Publisher Geoffrey Faber publicly suggested that writing a book was "the most valuable piece of national service which an author can render. . . ."

National service of this sort was indeed already being rendered by talents so widely diverse as Mystery Writer Dorothy Sayers, who wrote cheerio editorials for the newspapers, and Herbert Read, art critic and scholar, who prepared an anthology of prose and verse to be called (for its destination) The Knapsack—"just the sort of thing I wanted myself in the last war."