Home to the Wars

BETWEEN THE THUNDER AND THE SUN--Vincent Sheean--Random House ($3).

At the end of Vincent Sheean's Personal History (TIME, Feb. 4, 1935) he told how he stood near the Acropolis at Athens one day and held a passionately political conversation with the ghost of a Bolshevik. The Bolshevik was the late Rayna Prohme, U.S. Marxist, with whom Sheean had had a violently platonic love affair during the Chinese revolution and later in Moscow. "But I'm not a revolutionary," Sheean complained. Said Rayna's spirit: "Whoever told you you had to be a revolutionary? Everybody isn't born with an obligation to act." Mrs. Prohme's spirit urged Sheean, if he could not fight, to write against "the whole system of organized injustice by which few govern many, hundreds of millions work in darkness to support a few thousands in ease . . . and the greater part of the human race has to live in filth and starvation to maintain an artificial system of profit." Sheean promised. The result was Personal History and Not Peace but a Sword (TIME, July 31, 1939), and now Between the Thunder and the Sun.

Between 1919 (when Personal History begins) and 1942 (when Between the Thunder and the Sun ends) there occurred the aftermath of Bolshevik revolution, the Italian Fascist revolution, the Chinese revolution, the Nazi revolution, the New Deal, the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of World War II. At some time or other Vincent Sheean managed to look in at all of them. He has a unifying sense, derived from his Marxist studies, that all these historic spasms were related forms of a common convulsion, a worldwide social revolution. He writes with vividness and candor of his own life amidst this convulsion.

Indisputable Nitwits. Some of the most ominous pages of Between the Thunder and the Sun describe the prewar scene at the Chateau de 1'Horizon, a villa near Antibes on the south coast of France. The chateau belonged to graciously aging U.S. Actress Maxine Elliott, aunt of Sheean's wife, Diana Forbes-Robertson. Like the society of which it is a symbol, the chateau perched precariously on a rock between the railroad tracks and the deep blue sea.

The center of Maxine's villa was the swimming pool. She felt that the "purpose of the human body was to be displayed." "Lady C. wore a patch or two of yellow; Lady P. was older and less naked; Lord A. wore practically nothing. . . ."

This group of international nudists included British aristocrats, "but it was by no means aristocratic: it was 'fashionable,' a very different thing. The gleaming red fingernails and smooth white flanks of the lady opposite you might indicate a present status, but they did not authenticate a past . . . the young man in the infinitesimal black trunks . . . came from, the deserts of Australia to make his way by love, love alone; there was no stability in all this. . . . Some of the most indisputable nitwits in the contemporary world . . . dwelt in Maxine's house, week in and week out, carrying on their subhuman intrigues and complicated intramural arrangements."

Maxine did not mind so long as everybody looked nice, had some traces of manners, played games and were not "too tiresome" about Kiki. Kiki was Maxine's pet lemur which used to attack the guests, upset breakfast trays, invade beds, leave "traces of its passing wherever it chose."

Brave Winston. Vincent Sheean resisted the seductions of this phony pagany by refusing to undress--though "it probably was indecent of me to remain clothed in the midst of all that nakedness." If there were "too many elaborate strangers," Sheean "became violently ill and had to spend the greater part of [his] visit in bed, vomiting profusely from morning to night." He believes that "Maxine understood that it was some kind of unconscious protest."

But there were some guests whom Sheean was able to stomach. There was Winston Churchill, who "first became visible" to Sheean "in a red bathrobe over bathing trunks; he wore a large, flopping straw hat, and slippers and a cherubic grin." His first words were: "My dear Maxine, you have no idea how easy it is to travel without a servant. I came here all the way from London alone and it was quite simple." Said Maxine: "Winston, how brave of you!" Churchill spent much of his time painting. "In such a society [he] was slightly out of place . . . but he never noticed." Once Churchill smiled at Sheean and lisped that Personal History was "very shubvershive."

At this time, says Sheean, Churchill was pro-Franco and greatly concerned about Russian intervention in Spain. Later "he was willing ... to work with the extreme Left if necessary to defeat the paramount enemy." Sheean was able to watch Churchill's mind at close quarters during "the precise years in which he was traversing this immense ideological area." Sheean once heard Churchill shock the Duke of Windsor by urging a British alliance with Russia. The "self-willed, pleasure-loving little Prince" said: "You of all people, Winston!" Winston replied: "Sir, I would make a friend of the devil himself, if it would save England."

Astronomical Remoteness. The unbridgeable distances dividing class from class were emphasized for Sheean by a conversation between the Duke of Windsor, Lloyd George and Winston Church ill. Subject: compulsory baths for British miners. The Nazis had just shown the Duke such baths in German mines. Churchill observed that he had proposed compulsory baths in 1911, but the miners refused. Quite rightly, said Lloyd George, because the miners wanted the mine own ers to bear the full cost for installing the baths. "I've always heard," said the Duke seriously, "that the miners' wives didn't want baths at the pithead because washing their husbands' necks is one of their special prerogatives. They enjoy it, and they expect to do it every evening. They didn't want to be robbed of the privilege."

Says Sheean: "I sat there musing. . . . The seriousness of their interest in the question could not be doubted, and yet it was confounded with an incurable frivoli ty owing to their astronomical remoteness from the conditions of life of which they spoke. . . . In the exquisite little room, gleaming with glass and silver, over the flowers and champagne, all so enclosed and private and secure, one who had been King, one who had been dictator, and one who was to be: what did they have to speak of but the dirt on a miner's neck? In the realm of ideas it was like an invention by Salvador Dali, not least because in the grotesque juxtaposition was revealed so much of . . . their sense of the necessity to acknowledge what they could not experience in their hearts because life lad set them too high, the agenbite of inwit, the gnaw of an impersonal remorse and a dim perception of the far-off sorrow of others."

Look Out, Jock. Sheean got to Paris just before the Nazis. He saw the confusion that centered around Helene de Portes, Premier Reynaud's mistress, whom Sheean believes to have been the shrewish organizer of defeat. In Britain, Sheean walked past the workmen stringing barbed vire around the Houses of Parliament. "So it's come to this, has it?" said Lady Diana Cooper, "in that curiously husky voice;" Inside Parliament Sheean heard history made by "a colorless voice." It was Clement Attlee reading the one-sentence law which declared that for the duration all persons and property were at the disposal of the state. Said H. G. Wells "rather happily" at lunch next day: "The revolution in England has now begun."

Shean watched the first rounds of the London blitz from a sunken road near Gravesend. While the Nazi bombers came over in formations of 30, a suburban bus drew up. "All hell seemed to have broken loose in the air above and all around us, "but the bus conductor sat quietly totting up his receipts. The guard told a story: "There was a bloody monkey hanging by his bloody tail in the jungle . .. and along came a bloody air-raid warden. One monkey says to the other monkey, 'Look out, Jock, here's this bloody bastard comin' along to civilize us.' "

Sweet Adeline. Back in the U.S. for a lecture tour, Sheean strongly disapproved of the Roosevelt-Willkie election campaign. It was "perfectly clear" to Sheean that no Republican administration would "dare" repeal the New Deal's social legislation, so "what was the sense of the argument?" The only person Sheean met in those days "who did not talk about this election as if the fate of humanity depended upon it was the President himself."

Gloomily, Sheean flew back to England and accompanied a British patrol to a North Atlantic rendezvous with a convoy of "the dirty little tramps that saved the world." Then he went out to China. It was a return to his youth of Personal History. He still has snide innuendos for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Government, pleasant things to say about Chinese Communists, and fine passages on the misery and grandeur of the Chinese people.

Sheean found Singapore "a mass of contradictions." He heard some Australian troops singing Sweet Adeline loudly and off key, and thought that their "raucous dissent with their surroundings" was "pure essence of Singapore--jazz dancing on the edge of the jungle, unthinking but offensive racial pride, a general clash of unrelated forces and a great unawareness of destiny." There was greater awareness at Mandalay, where the Flying Tigers' Colonel Claire Chennault first told Sheean about a new Japanese plane, the Zero. Chennault had reconstructed a fallen Zero, had great respect for it.

In November 1941 Sheean took a clipper for the U.S. More than personal history was right behind and ahead of him. At Guam, the governor told Sheean about a recent delegation of islanders who had come to express sympathy. Said the governor: "I am very grateful, but I do not know why I stand in need of sympathy." Said the islanders: "Pardon, sir, but we think you are in the same position that the Spanish Governor was in 1898." At Wake Island, the signature just before Sheean's in the station master's wife's autograph book took a whole page in English and Japanese. It was Saburo Kurusu's. Six days before Pearl Harbor, Sheean got home.

In May he joined the U.S. Air Forces, in which he is now a lieutenant colonel. In a way that might have surprised Rayna Prohme, Sheean has finally turned from writing to fighting.

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