Captains & King

The U. S. book publishing season of 1935-36 will probably be long remembered for its flood of able memoirs by U. S. foreign correspondents: The Chicago Tribune's Vincent Sheean and New York Times's Walter Duranty led off respectively with Personal History and I Write as I Please. The Chicago Daily News's John Gunther turned in Inside Europe, and its Negley Farson followed with The Way of a Transgressor. These shrewd, readable traders in world politics considerably disconcerted British newshawks who have for a century considered that the world's greatest news exchange was London. Last week a British foreign correspondent for the London Daily Herald spoke up for his country's onetime monopoly on world news when George Slocombe offered the U. S. his The Tumult & the Shouting.*

Virtue of the U. S. newshawks' professional recollections was their confidence that European politics was superlatively interesting. George Slocombe, like most of his British colleagues, is tired of it, remembers so much that he cannot recall what is important. He pays tribute to the race of Britain's foreign correspondents which largely disappeared with the 1920's: Wickham Steed, George Ward Price, Martin Donohoe, William Bolitho Ryall, Gordon Knox, Sisley Huddleston. Mournfully he adds:

"Able and enterprising, experienced and much-traveled as these British journalists in Paris and other capitals were, they were, however, outnumbered, outpaced, out-dared and out-traveled by their American colleagues. The War, in a great degree, discovered Europe to American newspapers as a field for news. . . . The American newspaper men swarmed all over the still-ravaged territories of the European belligerents. . . . They came with their bright and cynical eyes, their calm, unworried faces, their tireless industry, their cool courage, their infinite capacity for drinks, jesting, poker and work, their insatiable curiosity, their generosity to a comrade, American or European, their professional pride, their calm assumption of equality with any king, president, statesman or newspaper reporter under the sun. . . ."

What Correspondent Slocombe knows best is the depressing series of European conferences after 1919 in which the Allied statesmen tried to evolve from the War a neat, tight, old-fashioned victory settlement with Germany. At these doomed gatherings, now being repudiated by a fresh generation of statesmen, there was no more familiar sight than the large red beard of the amiable British Bohemian, George Slocombe. Twice, he claims in The Tumult & the Shouting, he personally contrived to bring about historic meetings between hostile statesmen: 1) at Geneva in 1927, between Russia's Litvinoff and Britain's Austen Chamberlain; 2) at The Hague in 1929 between France's Briand and Britain's Philip Snowden. When Slocombe knew France's present Socialist Premier Leon Blum, he was still a literary boulevardier, fond of the applause of women and a crony of the late great writer Marcel Proust. Implicit in The Tumult & the Shouting is Slocombe's own realization that not only have his captains and kings departed but that their tumult was a weary gibberish, hardly destined to outlive them. Bravely he concludes that they had "a common touch of frustrated nobility ... of genius," that "they are men like no other men who have gone before or who may come here after."

* Macmillan ($3.50).

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