Books: The Bad Earth

Journey To a War—W. H. Auden & Christopher Isherwood—Random House ($3).

Last year W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, talenty, touted young English poets and amateur leftists, went to China to see what all the shooting was about. First peep at Canton’s muddy West River reminded the boys of the Severn. Next peep showed them the crews of U.S. and British gunboats playing football (“hairy, meat-pink men with powerful buttocks”).

The young correspondents handed their visiting cards (bearing the Chinese version of their names: Au Dung and Y Hsiao Wu) to U.S. missionaries and British diplomats, who received them kindly. They interviewed General von Falkenhausen (Chiang Kai-shek’s German adviser at that time), histrionic U.S. Red Writer Agnes Smedley (China Fights Back), who thought they might be fascist plotters because they talked with von Falkenhausen. Madame Chiang Kaishek, with whom the poets took tea, was “for all her artificiality a great heroic figure,” but the Generalissimo was “bald” and “mild-looking.” We laughed as we pictured Chiang, Madame and Donald [Chiang’s Australian adviser] flying frantically about the country by aeroplane . . . clearing out the drains in one city, buttoning up the coats in another, starting a trachoma clinic in a third. . . .”

When at last the correspondents coaxed skeptical Chinese to take them to the front in a quiet sector, “we found ourselves discussing the poetry of Robert Bridges. The Testament of Beauty can seldom have been quoted in less appropriate surroundings.” In China’s wildwest Sian, they met a Swiss doctor who had attended D. H. Lawrence. Back in Hankow, a Chinese lady gave them a lacquer box containing an ivory skull for Virginia Woolf.

Down they drifted leisurely toward the southern front, ran into a Japanese advance, but were helped away just in time by efficient Rightist Newshawk Peter Fleming (News From Tartary). Despite twinges of conscience, they let themselves be carried over the mountains by coolies, wound up in the Shanghai International Settlement as guests of British Ambassador Kerr at Number One House.

In high holiday humor, this bright, fast, pert reporting rollicks along almost as if there were no war in China. Messrs. Auden & Isherwood are right in their element describing such Alice in Wonderland scenes from topsy-turvy Chinese life as two old men gravely trying to put a rat in a bottle, a woman tirelessly pouring water through a sieve. More startling than anything they report about the East is what they report, often unconsciously, about themselves. Their own honest verdict on Au Dung and Y Hsiao Wu: “. . . though we wear out our shoes walking the slums, though we take notes, though we are genuinely shocked and indignant, [we] belong, unescapably, to the other world. We return, always, to Number One House for lunch.”

Author Isherwood wrote most of the book: Auden’s contribution is a sequence of 27 sonnets and a commentary in which left politics and a sense of personal disorder mingle in some coolly fluent, somewhat vague verses about war in China, sometimes rhymed.