Books: The Steppes of Oklahoma

In Ada, Okla. (pop.: 15,143) Paul Hughes, 26, was a young man to keep an eye on. He worked his way through teachers’ college, later got a job with Ada’s radio station KADA. He wanted to write, collected the young writer’s usual swatch of rejection slips. He knocked around in minor radio jobs in Colorado Springs and Oklahoma City, married an Oklahoma girl named Marjorie Higbie. At last he got the night editor’s desk on the Ada News.

Outside the News office in the long night, Paul would listen to the lonely wail of the locomotives that brought the world to Ada—the engines of Santa Fe; the Frisco ; the Oklahoma City, Ada & Atoka R.R. that took Ada to the State capital 85 miles away. Inside the News office Paul boiled down facts & figures about the teeming life of Oklahoma’s oil wells, zinc and lead mines, cotton and alfalfa fields, stockyards and cement mills into daily news for Ada’s readers.

Over Paul’s desk also came the prodigious data of the outside world. One night he edited a story about Marshal Timoshenko’s defense of Rostov. For the first time, Paul realized, the Nazi army had been held, walloped, hurled back.

Says Paul: “Here was one of the most stirring events of the war— and a man sitting anywhere in the world could . . . write about it.” Deep in the heart of Oklahoma, Paul Hughes decided that he was the man to do the writing.

There were difficulties. Paul had never seen a Russian, knew no Russian history. But Russians, he believed, were no different at heart from Oklahomans. So Paul read a lot of Tolstoy and every available news story on the Russian war. He studied standard works on Russia, combed encyclopedias. Since his book was to be a novel, Paul added to his research “some understanding of human nature and a little imagination.” Then he set to work. In eight months he wrote 586 pages. Last fortnight, Paul Hughes’s Retreat from Rostov (Random House, $2.75) reached the public. A week later it had sold out its advance edition of 15,000 copies.

The Book. Readers of Retreat from Rostov found Novelist Hughes’s mid-Oklahoma notion of Russia and the war a view of uninhibited proportions. The novel was a Russian rodeo of heroes, heroines, Nazi villains, Don Cossacks, foreign correspondents, soldiers, civilians, enough snow to bury an army, enough melodrama to burn out every fuse in Hollywood.

In Author Hughes’s novel Rostov does not fall to Nazi might alone. In the beleaguered city sat the Russian traitor, Colonel Blazonny. Every night he slid through a secret panel into a secret room, radioed secret information to the Germans. But Boris was after him. Boris was 6½ ft. tall and hair grew in swirls all over his body, but he managed to steal unnoticed in & out of the German lines on NKVD (secret police) missions. Boris did his best, but though Traitor Blazonny fell at last (with five bullets through his body), so did Rostov.

The Red Army retreated. But Bess Elsenburg, lovely U.S. newspaper girl, who “experienced a glorious, cold twitching throughout her body” whenever she heard Stalin’s voice on the radio, refused to retreat. She got herself a peasant smock, changed her name from Bess to Katski. Luckily, her redheaded lover, Roger Dameron of the International Press Association, entered Rostov with the German army. He saved Bess by telling the Nazis that she was his Russian prostitute.

Meanwhile the fight for Rostov continued. Temperamental Rostovian Josef Balenkov played the great organ in Rostov Cathedral: when he touched the top note, hidden machine guns began “electrically muttering.” Their “nasty chatter of death” finished off 50 Nazis in the front pew. Larcenous Nazi Corporal Kette opened the cash register in a German brothel, innocently blew the whole place to hell.

When the Red Army counterattacked, Bess and Roger escaped to the Russian lines in a sledge. The Russians thought they were spies. But Bess sent her photograph to Marshal Timoshenko, who gallantly replied: “Please release Bess Elsenburg and her companion at once.” “What could possibly stop us now?” cried Bess, as they took a plane to Iran. “Now I’ll have something to tell my grandchildren!” answered Roger.

Said Novelist Hughes last fortnight: “I realize that the historical novel is my forte. My next book will be about the war in China.”