Opinionated History

THE LONG WEEK END--Robert Graves & Alan Hodge--Macmillan ($3).

This is a sort of criticaster's view of Britain's two decades between wars. Unlike Frederick Lewis Allen's headline-hopping Only Yesterday, which had the pleasant, white-flannel air of Commencement Exercises for the end of its period, The Long Week End is almost fiercely opinionated. More often sarcastic than affable, it is edged to the point of bad manners as well as bad history. Yet strong opinions are appropriate to a mature review of those times.

Veteran Graves opens sourly by speaking his mind on the abysmal cleavage between those who saw active service in World War I and those who did not, and on the shabby, flabby mess of promises and deals by which the former were cheated out of an England even half "fit for heroes." That out of the way, Graves and young (25-year-old) Alan Hodge get to work on the newspaper files. They remind us that Alcock and Brown flew the Atlantic eight years before Lindbergh did; reveal the British press showing "widespread disagreement . . . about even so recent and important an event as the German reoccupation of the Rhineland: according to a large body of opinion it took place in March 1934, not 1936." On the evils of the Versailles Treaty and post-war diplomacy, the authors go hard on France, easy on Britain. Politically unclassifiable, Graves & Hodge are proLabor, but regard the Left-Right split as a continental import inapplicable to British life. In their lusty cosmogony they class pacifists with nudists and hikers.

Graves & Hodge are literary men rather than historians, yet their opinions are blindest when they talk of arts & letters. They dismiss all photography except the journalistic and the strictly scientific; they hear no difference between hot jazz and commercial swing; they dismiss the important German and Russian films of the '20s as a high-brow rage. D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley are disposed of as writers who did too much reading; T. S. Eliot as an author of ultra-chichi -vers-de-societe; W. H. Auden as a slick eclectic who "perhaps never wrote an original line." If there were an award for that book which does the least to bootlick or otherwise seduce the reader and to cheapen its own contents, The Long Week End would be an admirable candidate.

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