An Awful Lot of Books (15 page)

In 1949, Silvin Craciunas escaped from his native Roumania with the secret police after him and a price on his head. He spent a year in Paris, where he met and fell in love with his future wife, but his National Committee asked him to go back into Roumania to organise further resistance and escapes. That he accepted this invitation - knowing so well what was involved - offers some clue to the quality of his nature and courage. For six months he carried out his mission, constantly hunted by the police, and continuously in danger of being betrayed by friends under arrest and torture. Then, just as he is ready to leave again, he is caught.

He is subjected to a concentrated and scientific interrogation, and when that fails, to torture. The torture and interrogation - the former running a frightful gamut of sadistic ingenuity - alternate for four years. At the end of this time his captors have failed utterly to extract a single betrayal or any other information, but his health has broken down, and when an attempt at torturing him by electric shocks results in prolonged fainting, he is taken to a hospital for medical examination, in order that his interrogators may determine exactly how much pressure can be put upon him without killing him outright. As soon as he realises why he is in hospital, he takes advantage of three clear minutes when he is not watched to escape. It is dark and raining, he does not know the country and is very much afraid of a haemorrhage from his infected lung, but he runs far enough to board a goods train, carrying timber at twenty miles an hour, south.

Then follow nerve-wracking months of hiding, pursuit, near capture and flight, until two years later, he manages to cross the border of Hungary and thence to Vienna.

These are the barest outlines of events inside which are contained the bones of the oldest and most triumphant adventure; the human spirit surmounting all fear, pain, imprisonment and despair; proving its life and growth in spite of every material force directed towards its destruction; achieving a liberty and bliss which bodily privation did not influence - which drove away the longing for death, and strengthened the resolution to keep silent, to live and to escape. It is clear that this state was achieved through steadfast courage in a situation as horrible (only continuing for months on end) as the worst moments of a nightmare, but possibly its greatest value lies in it not being legend, or theory, or myth but one living man’s actual example and experience.

I must add that the book seems to me admirably composed; the quantity of peopled encountered in it, and the necessarily complicated geography of the author’s movements are all most simply explicit, and beyond or outside the personal experience one is struck by the picture of a country wracked by terror, misery, agonising gallantry and loss which seem to mark all Communist encroachment. This is a book which I found passionately interesting and which moved me very much.

March 1961

The purpose of this book is to examine and make plain the significance of the vast experience in which India is engaged - of bringing her giant economy into the main stream of modern life at a time when the world is divided by the capitalism of the West, and the communist ideology and State capitalism of Russia and China. Miss Ward’s chief concern is to point out that the significance is not an isolated, national business, but one which must fatally affect the balance between the free and communist worlds. She begins her study by a brilliant and lucid exposition of the ‘break-through’ to a modern economy - originating in Britain - from subsistence farming and an illiberal system of government, via the industrial revolution to a new economy which brought with it a sudden increase of prosperity and power, and eventually, to the sweeping reforms which have gradually distributed both money and opportunity. In contrast to this method, she describes the communist variants - the most extreme being China, who has achieved her economic ‘break-through,’ at a cost which even Mr. Khrushchev has described as rather high (State slaves show no sign of being endowed with their Cobdens, Brights or Shaftesburys).

The second half of the book is devoted to a brief account of India before and during the British occupation; the situation in which she was left when Pandit Nehru and Congress took over, a description of the gigantic problems facing her in her attempt to achieve the necessary ‘break-through’ and the funds available for developments - their sources and the terms on which they have been given or lent. Miss Ward gives much interesting information about the first and second Five-Year Plans, describing many of their achievements and difficulties: she remarks on the contrasts between the communist loans (£250 millions at 2 per cent - some of it for twelve years - much of it ‘soft’, plus technical assistance for development and training in communist countries) against, admittedly, many more millions from the West, but most of it at an ordinary commercial rate of interest and therefore with strings, which cannot be described as ideological, attached. She then compares aid to India from the West with the Marshall Plan for Europe after the last war. India needs £400 millions a year for the next five years, which as Miss Ward points out, is for developing an economy, not simply for repairing it, is for a country with twice the population of western Europe, and would still be less money than Europe received during the four years of the Marshall Plan.

On a national scale in western developments, it was not until ideas which originated neither from self-interest nor from charity were put into practice that anything like a stable economy was reached from which the majority benefited, and Miss Ward’s main plea is that we have now reached a time on this planet when we can no longer afford to think simply in national terms, and that if a country the size of India has made earnest her intention of acting significantly in the modern world, while conducting herself within the framework of a free society, we can and ought to help her practically on a scale which gives her some guarantee of success. If we don’t, others may, and this is not a matter of blackmail, but a practical answer for all those who are concerned with the menace of atomic warfare - the possible devastating effects of a cause and conflict which is already so built into contemporary history that we easily take it for granted or ignore it.

Miss Ward manages to deal with huge quantities - of ideas, situations and materials - in such perfectly plain and articulate language that her meaning is always clear (you do not have to be an economist to read this book): beside this, her reasons for writing it at all are communicated without hysteria, sentiment, or any of the boredom which so often accompany good and serious intentions - she has a formidable mind, but it is serving, rather than dominating, her purpose.

This review is necessarily a mere colander, whose holes can only be stopped by reading a book which I feel would turn out to be a vital and moving interest even to many who have never considered this kind of reading before. Take advantage of living in a free society and buy it, as it provides a unique opportunity for understanding something on which our futures may very well depend.

March 1961

After reading Miss Ward, Mr. Packard’s third survey of the American way of life has a paradoxical significance which is perhaps even more shaking than he intended. Americans, he says, have used more of the world’s resources in the past forty years than all the people of the world had used in the four thousand years of recorded history up to 1914. This is not really so surprising, but it does open up the question of what man actually needs, as opposed to what he can be induced to want.

This survey is of the methods that have arisen in American to combat over-production; planned obsolescence, or death dates for supposedly durable products, the worship of ‘consumerism’, the admonitions to waste as much of everything as possible (each person in American is using up to an average of eighteen tons of materials a year, and each family today spends 500 dollars of its income each year just for the packaging of whatever it is that they are buying): the continuous temptations arising from the fact that families watch and listen to three hundred hours of commercial advertising on TV per year and are encouraged to use limitless H.P. - even children are using ‘credit cards’, and everyone is exhorted to feel ashamed of anything ‘used’. The population is rising at the rate of one every eleven seconds, with the results that beneath the glittering gadgetry, basic raw materials and social services are both in dangerously short supply. Materials such as water, oil, wood and various minerals are seriously depleted, and water is in some places a real and immediate problem; social services have never, at any point, caught up with the fast expanding society they are supposed to look after - health and education are two of the major inadequacies. Increased automation means either spreading unemployment or increased consumption of the products, and this spiral has not been successfully stabilised, although Mr. Packard points out that a few enlightened people are beginning to see the necessity for helping under-developed countries towards a higher standard of living - in fact, that there is a mutual advantage in thinking and acting in international terms in order that the discrepancy between waste and want should not be so horrific and isolating.

Mr. Packard is painstaking, sometimes amusing, sometimes repetitive, courageous and frightening and his message is one we cannot afford to ignore here: it may well be that a fridge is a fridge is a fridge, but in Miss Stein’s terms, there is a certain decadence in requiring three of them to make one’s mark.

March 1961

Biographies of living persons present one set of difficulties; biographies of film stars also have their problems, and I don’t mean to be condescending when I say that Mr. Zolotow seems to have made a surprisingly good job at this one. It is an intelligent, painstaking, only a shade over-serious work about as exceptional, possibly unique, creature who has achieved a position in cinema which puts her in a category containing only half a dozen other artists of that medium.

The book traces her from birth in 1926 as Norma Jean Baker up to the present time -
The Misfits
made and her marriage with Miller at an end - putting some flesh, so to speak, upon the bones of that now famous legend of the illegitimate child, brought up in foster homes and an institution, raped when she was nine, who thereafter stammered, was plain and shy and utterly withdrawn, but all the time privately obsessed with the desire to become a film actress. Her marriage, at sixteen, was dissolved four years later without making much mark: after it she began the slow, gruelling climb from modelling to being a starlet - under contract to Twentieth Century but with nothing to do, on to Columbia and one B picture and the nude calendar posing that she did for fifty dollars in order to redeem her broken-down old car. Her first real part was for Huston in
The Asphalt Jungle
, but it was not until 1953 that she emerged into stardom in
How to Marry a Millionaire
(Mr. Zolotow has made a fascinating description of her Cinderella-like preparations for the première of this film).

One of the best aspects of this book is that in the course of his six years’ research, the author has taken the trouble to find out exactly how various directors have managed to work with Miss Monroe, as from them, one begins to appreciate her extremely rare and desirable talent in different ways. Some of them found her impossible - Preminger and Olivier, for instance, went nearly mad, but others, such as Logan and Wilder, who were able to withstand her pathological lateness, the constant presence of her acting coaches, the time she took to prepare for each shot and her passion for retakes, etc., still found her uniquely rewarding. Altogether Mr. Zolotow pieces together the jagged life and temperamental extremes so that they make a coherent and extraordinary portrait of somebody who at thirty-five has been described as ‘one of the greatest actresses on the screen’ and ‘the most powerful commercial attraction in the world’. The book has illustrations and seems to me very good value.

April 1961

This book was first published in 1952, but for extraneous reasons was neither read nor noticed as much as it certainly deserved. The author, who was dropped into France in 1942, during the German occupation, was captured, and spent eighteen months in France - outside Paris - in solitary confinement. His experiences, of continuous and intense hunger, of cold, of anxiety (he was intermittently hauled off for interrogations of varying degrees of brutality and constantly expecting to be killed), and above all of being thrown absolutely upon the resources of his mind and spirit (nothing to read excepting occasional torn pages of newspapers or fragments of books given him for the lavatory) and nothing whatever to do (his cell measured ten feet by five) are described with a kind of serene intelligence made up of enquiry and detachment and with double regard - at the time to living and afterwards of writing - for the truth of his matter.

It is an adventure both bare and profound; uncovering resources which, however much they may be theoretically acknowledged, do, none the less, provide a most comforting inspiration in the flesh of personal experience. Mr Burney takes one so simply through the earliest lessons of imprisonment: ‘I soon found that variety is not the spice, but the very stuff of life’, that one actually feels the pangs of a starvation diet of impressions as acutely as one recognises his hunger for ordinary food. Adjustment to lack of the latter was a painfully slow, partial, and continuously difficult business; but the ways in which the author overcame the lack of natural nourishment for his mind and spirit are what make this book so eminently worth reading. By the time - at the end of it - that he is to be moved to Germany (to Buchenwald) he is reluctant to exchange his solitary confinement for the noise and promiscuity of a camp. ‘I knew that so many months of solitude, though I had allowed them to torment me at times, had been in a sense an exercise in liberty,’ Perhaps one of the most valuable points made in this exceedingly precise and courageous book is that liberty is a most personal and private business, and one which - above its crudest level - cannot be shouted about by one person on behalf of others.