Travelers

BEYOND THE MEXIQUE BAY--Aldous Huxley--Harper ($2.75).

IN ALL COUNTRIES--John Dos Passos--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50)

Restless travelers both, both endowed with a seeing eye, Aldous Huxley and John Dos Passos view the world through spectacles differently tinted. Huxley is an intelligentsiac, Dos Passos a neoCommunist. But both are as free as any lances to be found these days, and their eyewitness reports make worthwhile reading for stay-at-homes.

Weak-eyed Aldous Huxley, no such graphic reporter as Dos Passos, travels always with book in hand, but never a Baedeker. With a better seat in a library than on a horse, he is a hard man to upset in his own style of country. The physical peregrinations described in Beyond The Mexique Bay took him through Central America and Mexico, but many a peak in Darien, or even the depression of a valley, set him musing on an inner landscape. When he wants to, he can be as descriptive as the next 20th Century citizen, as in this definitive portrait of the pitch lake of Trinidad: ". . . The real pitch lake is simply about 200 asphalt tennis courts, in very bad condition, set in the midst of some gently undulating green meadows." But he usually saves his penetrating glances for the scenery of ideas: "The truth is that our so-called wars of interest are really wars of passion, like those in Central America. . . . Nationalism is the justificatory philosophy of unnecessary and artificial hatred. . . . Under the Nazis, for example, every German is made to take his daily dose of what I may call Nordic Fly."

Though he thinks Mexico City an unanswerable "argument against our present economic system," mass movements, whether political or esthetic, fail to move his scientific enthusiasm or stir his particularistic curiosity: "It will be interesting to see whether the revivalist enthusiasm worked up by Communists, Nazis and Fascists will last longer than the similar mass emotion aroused by the first Franciscans. . . . Folk-art is often dull or insignificant; never vulgar, and for an obvious reason. Peasants lack, first, the money, and, second, the technical skill to achieve those excesses which are the essence of vulgarity." Author Huxley speaks for the majority of travelers and intelligentsia when he confesses: "Frankly, try how I may, I cannot very much like primitive people. They make me feel uncomfortable. 'La betise n'est pas mon fort.' "

The oldtime religion, even cloaked in the new creed of Communism, is not quite good enough for John Dos Passos either. But in all countries he is glad to observe the old forms breaking up. First-rate reporter, he keeps his editorial comment packed, neatly tacit, between the lines. In All Countries is a collection of quick camera shots made in the last nine years in Russia, Mexico, Spain, the U.S. Dos Passes' angle is never strictly orthodox, from either camp's point of view, but his camera is candid, though tilted perceptibly to the left. His tale of the Red Army soldier, the counter-revolutionary surgeon and the Persian merchant will not be accepted by Communists as propaganda for their cause: supporters of the Spanish Republic (which Observer Dos Passos, with a straight face but an oblique eye, calls ''The Republic of Honest Men'') will not welcome his unveiling of last year's uprising at Casas Viejas and its bloody censorship.

Many a plain U.S. citizen will linger over the snapshots of the last Republican and Democratic Conventions, will hoot with sudden delight at an action photograph of the Senate ("Ever seen a section of a termite nest under glass?"), will scratch his head over this group picture of the House of Representatives: ". . . Everywhere the closeset eyes full of lawyer's chicanery, the pursed, selfrighteous mouth drawn down at the corners, the flabby self satisfied jowl."

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