Books: Notable

HEARING SECRET HARMONIES by ANTHONY POWELL 272 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

Latecomers probably should not be admitted during this finale to Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. Or should go back to where it all began with A Question of Upbringing in 1951. For Powell is here concerned with staging effects for the subscription crowd—”the touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains.”

The time is the tumultuous 1960s.

Favorites from earlier volumes—Dicky Umfraville, Jean Duport, Flavia Wise-bite—totter back to take bows with Powell’s tirelessly ruminative narrator, Nick Jenkins. A catharsis of sorts is achieved when Kenneth Widmerpool, the dogged, faintly ridiculous overachiever who looms as Powell’s most memorable creation, gets a grisly comeuppance. Widmerpool renounces his peerage to cavort with a satanic cult called Harmony. But he is literally run into the ground by the cult’s leader—a young, spiritual storm trooper named Scorpio Murtlock.

With utmost precision, Powell measures the decline of a society in the curve of a false smile or the adulterous squeak of a bedspring. He is a writer who should be read in bulk, however. Dipped into at random, any one of these books can seem bland at best. But several together reveal rich patterns in the caperings and transformations, the pairings and partings, the exits and reappearances of Powell’s more than 300 characters. Later installments take on the throb of a long hangover, pierced occasionally by icy glimpses of mortality. Taken as a whole, A Dance to the Music of Time may well live up to Powell’s own description of Aubrey’s Brief Lives—”a kind of tapestry of the good and evil; the ingenuity and the hypocrisy; the eccentricity, the melancholy, and the greatness of the English race.”

WORLD OF WONDERS

by ROBERTSON DAVIES 358 pages. Viking. $8.95.

Rich in stage magic and other illusions, World of Wonders admirably winds up a trilogy that began in 1970 with Fifth Business, and continued with The Manticore in 1972. The narrative circles back to a point decades ago in an Ontario hamlet called Deptford, when one boy threw a stone-weighted snowball at another, who ducked. The snowball struck the pregnant wife of the town’s Baptist minister. She gave birth to a premature infant, then lapsed into insanity.

Boy Staunton, the thrower, arrogantly refused to accept responsibility, but in a town of Deptford’s rectitude, his guilt was publicly presumed. The boy who ducked, Dunston Ramsay, had a sense of private blame and carried it with him through life, as recounted in

Fifth Business. Staunton remained arrogant and became rich, but at the age of 70 was found in his convertible at the bottom of Toronto harbor with a stone in his mouth. It was (and here Author Davies could be seen peeking from the wings, grinning at the reader’s astonishment) the very stone he had thrown 60 years before.

The question of who killed Boy Staunton was rung out in The Manticore, which took Staunton’s alcoholic son through psychoanalysis. Now, in World of Wonders, a magician named Magnus Eisengrim appears, claiming he did it. Eisengrim is revealed (the author’s opera cape swishes through empty air) to have been the premature child born on that fateful night in Deptford.

Davies is not only Canada’s finest active novelist but also one of the most gifted and accomplished literary entertainers now writing in English. He tells his apparently outrageous story wryly and wisely, by seedily leading his central characters from a Canadian carnival to the London stage, and then to a tumultuous mating with a monstrously ugly Swiss sphinx named Leisl Vitzipiit-zli. The people are brilliant talkers, but when they natter on too long, the highly theatrical author causes a grotesque face to appear at a window, drops someone through a trap door or stages a preposterous recognition scene. A master illusionist himself, Davies well deserves a packed house when—on a bare stage, out of nowhere, in a puff of smoke—he materializes with his next book.

NIGHTMARE: THE UNDERSIDE OF THE NIXON YEARS

by J. ANTHONY LUKAS 626 pages. Viking. $1 5.

Powerlessness corrupts. In 1970 President Richard Nixon felt beleaguered by the Democrats, the kids on campus who were raising hell over his invasion of Cambodia, and by Washington bureaucrats, many of them still Kennedy-era holdovers who leaked presidential secrets to Nixon’s “enemies” in the press. It was back then, midway through his first term, according to Pulitzer-prize winning Journalist J. Anthony Lukas, that Nixon set out to totally demolish his various tormentors. The result was the pageant of buggings, break-ins, dirty tricks and dirty money that led to Watergate and has now preoccupied the U.S. public for so long.

That much-worked-over ground is Lukas’ subject matter. He gathers his moss only from the underside of Nixon’s career. He does not praise the President’s foreign policy or celebrate his kindness to children and dogs. On the other hand, he also scrupulously avoids the kind of titillating invasion of privacy —the tears, the booze, the beating of fists on the carpet—that Woodward and Bernstein trade on in The Final Days (TIME, March 29). The result is a massive, careful encyclopedia that sorts out all existing Nixon-era evidence—the tapes, hearings. Justice Department documents, civil-suit depositions, newspaper and magazine accounts—and puts them in order for the final judgment of a dispassionate reader, or of history itself. The Lukas index alone runs to 45 pages. In short, the one book to have if you’re having only one.

THE LAST EUROPEAN WAR: SEPTEMBER 1939 DECEMBER 1941

byJOHNLUKACS

562 pages. Anchor Press/Doubleday.

THE CRUCIAL YEARS: 1939-1941

by HANSON W. BALDWIN 499 pages. Harper & Row. $20.

These two books examine the critical early years of World War II in ways so different that they can be read in succession without serious overlap.

Hanson Baldwin, who was for 26 years military editor of the New York Times, has produced a workman-like history ideally suited to the generation of readers that does not remember the war at all. From Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” through Russia’s winter war with Finland to the fall of France, the German attack on the Soviet Union and the early Japanese conquests in the Pacific, Baldwin briskly introduces the cast, recounts the action, highlights the principal dramas.

Historian-Philosopher Lukacs, by contrast, offers an almost Spenglerian vision of a civilization in crisis. Crotchety and idiosyncratic, he seems to have swallowed whole libraries of original documents in completing his research, an experience that causes him to denounce “the cancerous growth of publications” as a sign of “civilization nearing its end.”

His account of the “main events” —the first third of the book—is a broad but nuanced overview, richly augmented with long footnotes often gleaned from eyewitness accounts of the events. Thereafter, Lukacs concentrates on the politics and ideas of the warring peoples. His section on the ferocity of nationalistic religion is horrifying: in the summer of 1941, he reports, some 100,000 Serbian Jews and Orthodox Christians were massacred by the Catholic Croats—who were often urged on by their priests. He notices small amusing details too. Discussing the prewar Americanization of Europe, he notes that one 1940 German Luftwaffe ace named his Messerschmitt “Mickey Mouse.”

Lukacs—who was a teen-ager living in Hungary when the war began —also evokes what many have forgotten: how enthusiastically, even ecstatically, many people of Middle Europe welcomed Hitler at the time. Hitler, insists Lukacs, was some kind of genius, though a genius stoked almost solely by hate.

In a provocative ending, Lukacs, in disagreement with most historians, takes seriously the informal attempts by Nazi Germany to negotiate the exile of Europe’s Jews to America. He suggests that only when that possibility had been closed off by U.S. entry into the war was a Gestapo plan for extermination adopted. This interpretation ignores Hitler’s earlier and often stated intentions regarding the fate of the Jews. But its eccentricity does not make any less chilling Lukacs’ corollary point. Only the horror of the Holocaust made anti-Semitism impossible. Feeling against the Jews was so rife that had they merely been exiled, many people in Europe might well have come to embrace the Fiihrer’s Third Reich willingly, racism and all.