Books: Subjective Camera

TRAVELS IN TWO DEMOCRACIES—Ed-mund Wilson—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). Records like Mark Sullivan’s Our Times are valuable, as any competently edited newsreel is valuable. But, mechanics and editing aside, the strength and weakness of any newsreel is the man behind the camera. A purely objective view may not be misleading but it often leads nowhere. The widespread popularity of such subjective photography as Walter Duranty’s I Write As I Please, Vincent Sheean’s Personal History, John Gunther’s Inside Europe, Negley Parson’s The Way of a Transgressor are strong indications that many an individual still regards the cameramanas more important than the camera. Last week such individuals watched with interest the latest subjective newsreel, Edmund Wilson’s Travels in Two Democracies. At first sight merely a notebook of scattered impressions of things seen & heard, it has a cumulative effect less personal than Sheean & Co., more sharply focused than Mark Sullivan, more impressive than either. Ticketed as a literary critic, Edmund (“Bunny”) Wilson a few years ago found his position too academic in a day “when accuracy of insight, when courage of judgment, are worth all the names in all the books,” went out of his study to take a look for himself. His subjective-factual report covers three years (1932-35), two countries (the U. S. and Russia). Parts of the U. S. he found like Hell, parts of Russia like Purgatory; but he came to a patriotic conclusion. He tells of an election night in Manhattan, Roosevelt II’s inaugural parade in Washington, Bernard Shaw’s speech at the Metropolitan Opera House, a Buchmanite mass meeting, Jane Addams and Chicago’s Hull House, a drunken evening with the intelligentsia, a milk strike in upstate New York, Charles E. Mitchell (“a man with a full-fleshed common face and a fierce, unconvincing eye—a man of a low order, caught insuspicious circumstances and hard put to it to talk himself out”) on trial for defrauding the Government, his grandfather’s house in a country town. On his way to Russia he found that London now looked “much like Chicago.” (And on his way back, through France: “Rigor mortis has set in in Paris.”) Prepared to be sympathetic with Russia, he discovered many a Soviet custom that turned his U. S. stomach. In Moscow, he says, it is true that people always look over their shoulders before hazarding a political remark; he got the habit himself. The suppression of publicity has resulted in a plethora of scandalous rumors. Glasses of tea are always too hot to pick up conveniently. The food is too heavy. Vodka, the national drink, is simply a form of raw alcohol. Russian wastebaskets are so wide-meshed that everything falls through them. When Russians make beds they never tuck in the bedclothes. Wilson’s stay in Russia brought out his U. S. patriotism, made him feel that Americanism was different from everything European not in degree but in kind. After weeks of scarlet fever and quarantine in an old-fashioned hospital in Odessa he was glad to be leaving Russia. Nevertheless the U. S. S. R. impressed him: the kindliness of the people, the devotion of the minority of patriots who are working to bring the Russian experiment to success. Says he: “Only idiots gush about Russia. Only idiots pretend that life there is easy . . . whomever one sees, wherever one turns, one is made to feel the terrible seriousness of what is being done in Russia and the terrible cost which it requires.” And in spite of Russia’s glaring defects, “you feel in the Soviet Union that you are at the moral top of the world where the light never really goes out. . . .”