Rambling Reporter

PERSONAL HISTORY--Vincent Sheean-- Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Vincent Sheean became a reporter to satisfy a perennial upbubbling curiosity. He ceased to be a reporter because he began thinking about the meaning of events, commenced to take sides, to make what the philosophers call value-judgments. Personal History is the warm, semi-rueful story of how this sea-change came about as Sheean wandered from Chicago to New York, to Paris, to Persia, to China, to the Holy Land, to dinner parties in London and around the lecture circuit in the U. S.

Sheean was a good reporter almost from the beginning. He cut his eye teeth on New York's tabloid Daily News, went on to Paris, where Henry Wales made him assistant in the European bureau of the Chicago Tribune. Followed some years of chasing political bigwigs from conference to conference in Europe, and then came the break that made Vincent Sheean a name. The break consisted of an interview with Abd-el-Krim, Riff Chieftain who was making things hot in North Africa. Later, after a second interview with Abd-el-Krim, Sheean became known as the "modern Richard Harding Davis," a feature writer who could be counted upon to turn up good "personal adventure" stuff for the entertainment of the feature-reading public.

Whenever Sheean suggested anything to his syndicate, the North American Newspaper Alliance, it would be vetoed unless it involved dashing across deserts in sheik robes. Wanting to go to China, where the Kuomintang Revolution was sweeping up towards Shanghai from the South, he had a hard time persuading his bosses that "personal adventure" awaited in the Far East. Eventually, however, he managed to turn the trick, got a drawing account, set out to interview Sun Yat-sen's widow, the delicate Soong Ching-ling; Borodin, the Russian adviser to the Kuomintang; Eugene Chen, who had been Sun Yat-sen's secretary, and other figures in the Chinese Revolution. These figures are pictured vividly in Personal History.

The wandering Sheean arrived in Shanghai just after Chiang Kai-shek had split with the Communist-dominated wing of the Kuomintang and made peace with the Western powers. Two governments existed in China after that--the Nationalist of Nanking, dedicated to making China a Middle-Class country, and the so-called Communist government at Hankow, where Borodin and Madame Sun Yat-sen stood in the wings, hoping to "proclaim the Soviet," but never getting a chance. Sheean saw Borodin daily, was impressed by the man's philosophy, the "long view" of the theoretical Marxist who regarded immediate events as meaningless unless related to other events in the past and future. Friendship with Borodin, and with Sun Yat-sen's widow, helped ruin Sheean as a practicing journalist. A U. S. girl named Rayna Prohme played the dominant part in the sea-change.

Contact with the "ideas" behind the Chinese Revolution made Sheean into a sort of Bruce Lockhart, both onlooker and participant. Unable, in spite of Borodin and Rayna, to make up his mind about Communism, Sheean wavered. But he began to take a hand in the processes of history, attempted to bring T. V. Soong, brother of Madame Sun Yatsen, from Shanghai to Hankow, offered to smuggle Fanny Borodin out of Peking. No longer the impassive newshawk, Sheean, when he covered the Jewish-Arab conflict in the Holy Land, broke down completely, took sides violently, and learned conclusively that he was "no longer a newspaper man." What journalism has lost, the quality magazines have gained. Mr. Sheean has become a "personality" in his own right.

Personal History abounds in sharp character-portraits. Making no pretense at "objectivity," it records the education of a young man from Illinois who is trying to discover the "relation of the individual to the mass."

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