Back to the Cauldron

INSIDE EUROPE TODAY (376 pp.)--John Gunther--Harper ($4.95).

John Gunther, who still has to go Inside Australia, instead spent last summer on hauntingly familiar territory. Hopping from capital to capital, filleting his sources like sole meuniere, he wrung a wholly new book from the beat where he first made a name with Inside Europe a quarter-century ago. In Inside Europe Today he surveys the new faces and altered conditions of a continent that has "immeasurably, fantastically" changed since 1936. The most striking change he found is one that makes Inside Europe Today a less urgently important book than its doom-shadowed predecessor. This change, in Gunther's view, is today's near-impossibility of all-out war.

While three "worthy, honest and decent little countries" (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia) have vanished outright from the map and seven more have been sealed behind the Iron Curtain, Gunther finds that Western Europe, by contrast, is a far more hopeful place. In most countries, "democratic impulses are comfortably on the ascendant." Europe is enjoying an unparalleled boom, and the Common Market has pushed it closer to economic unity in a quarter-century than it had moved in the previous 500 years. More important, U.S. troops guard the Rhine. For if one thing has not changed, says Gunther, it is Germany's crucial role as "the key to everything."

Conversational Canapes. Gunther's theory of history (and Gibbon's) is that events are shaped by "accidents of personality." Focusing on each country mainly through its key men, he succeeds best with those he knows. He did not interview Adenauer (though he notes later that der Alte "will see almost anybody") and his sketch of "this tenacious old gentleman" seems curiously flimsy. On the other hand, he vividly pictures De Gaulle--whom he interviewed before the return to power--as "gnarled with ego" and "positively lunar," yet possessed of a curious humility that prompted him to answer, in longhand, some 5,000 letters on his handling of the 1960 Algerian crisis. Gunther is even more successful with the elusive personality of Harold Macmillan, a fellow member of London's Bucks Club, who granted him a rare two-hour interview. In a revealing passage the author says that the Prime Minister talked "about the glow and throb of the England that was, the gallantry and peculiar innocent ardor, valor, of those lost, silken quivering days, and how a whole generation was cut off, sacrificed, exterminated."

From last year's inspection and a stack of notebooks on Europe that go back to 1926, Gunther extracts such conversational bits of color as the Albanians' name for their country (Shqiperia), Khrushchev's scholastic record (he was illiterate until his mid 20s), what Mr. K. and Tito have in common with Hungary's boss, Janos Kadar, and Czechoslovakia's Antonin Novotny (all were once locksmiths). His sidelights often illuminate the mood of a country more effectively than pages of analysis. Discussing West Germany's affluence, Gunther reports slyly that an elaborate marble trough in a restaurant washroom was for "gentlemen who had dined too well to vomit into."

Mercedes Taxis. Though he has many times "circumnavigated the cauldron," as he describes his swings through Europe, Gunther can still be absurdly misled--and misleading. The fact that almost every taxi in West Berlin is a Mercedes-Benz is presented as a sign of prosperity; in fact, as Germany's only diesel-engined car, the Mercedes is favored by cab owners purely for economy. On West Berlin's city council, Adenauer's Christian Democrats are not "the opposition." as Gunther reports, but in coalition with Willy Brandt's Socialists. Benelux currencies are no more or less "interchangeable" than the rest of Europe's money. Another irritation is Gunther's constant trick of prefacing the obvious with the phrase "as everybody knows," or worse, "as is well known."

As is even better known than many of his facts, what Gunther does with unsurpassed skill is to compress and illuminate the conditions, conflicts and characters of nations that he has covered for more years than any other U.S. newsman left on the beat. Pundits may fault his tightly packed book as superficial. Most other readers will probably agree with Critic Harold Nicolson's verdict on the first Inside: "It's only superficial on the surface."

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