Sermonets and Stoicism

By Melvin Maddocks

NOT SO WILD A DREAM

by ERIC SEVAREID

522 pages. Atheneum. $12.50.

In television, last impressions are all. For a dozen years now Eric Sevareid, 63, has been the Dr. Johnson of the two-minute essay on the CBS Evening News. With his "somewhat forbidding Scandinavian manner" (as he has described it) and "a restraint that spells stuffiness to a lot of people," he has delivered so many thousand editorials, sermonets and sit-down comedy routines that the unkind younger generation has begun to refer to him as Eric Everyside.

Not So Wild a Dream proves that this ironic network Polonius was veri-fiably young once, a hard-edged radical and a complete stranger to the pundit's chair. First published 30 years ago, Sevareid's precocious autobiography was then compared with The Education of Henry Adams. It wound up around fifth on the bestseller charts, making the New York Times 1946 list of "Ten Best Books of the Year." Three decades later, young Sevareid's memoir does not seem quite in the Adams class. Yet it remains an important book with a new kind of timeliness. Not So Wild a Dream can stand on its own as an intelligent, eloquent accounting of a generation that had to survive the Depression and World War II in order to reach maturity--and then took a long, deep breath because the worst simply had to be behind. Didn't it? The book is also the curiously touching will and testament of a last liberal, predicated on hopes for that 1940s happy ending, a better world, but steadily haunted by intuitions that this was not to be.

From the start, both his times and his temperament have cast shadows across Sevareid, the all-American believer in simple faiths, decent instincts and great men. A cosmopolite from Velva (pop. 1,241), N. Dak., he was born into a bleak prairie universe whose "skyline offered nothing to soothe the senses." The grandson of a Norwegian immigrant, he inherited the official optimism of a pioneer, but also the matchless pessimism of an old-fashioned Lutheran. His father had to move the family to Minneapolis when the bank he worked for went broke during the droughts of the late 1920s.

Concentrated Misery. Odysseys and exiles--melancholy rather than exuberant--are the motifs of this book. At the age of 17, Sevareid and a high school friend traveled the 2,200 miles from the Mississippi River to Hudson's Bay in a secondhand 18-ft. canoe to prove that two red-blooded American boys could connect the waters of the Gulf of Mex ico to the North Atlantic. As Sevareid remembered it 15 years later, the expedition was "sheer, concentrated misery." For years afterward, "a visit to the woods produced a moment of nausea."

A summer as an amateur gold miner in the High Sierras of Northern California produced more muscles, more sober thoughts and a net profit of 80-c-. The next stop on his pilgrimage, college, was less of an ordeal. Still, despite his being a leading campus socialist at the University of Minnesota--a protester against the ROTC, a spark of the Jacobin Club and a charter member of the "first American student movement"--Sevareid could write a dozen years later: "I remember only struggle . . . emotional exhaustion."

The Minneapolis Star paid him $100 for a saga of the canoe trip, but that not-so-easy money only got him into the rapids of journalism. By the time he was 26, the boy from North Dakota was a proper exile in France, working for the Paris Tribune by day and the United Press by night. Edward R. Murrow rescued him from that predicament, recruiting him for CBS radio. But nobody could rescue him from the disaster he and the world had been moving toward from the time he was born. "My generation," the 32-year-old Sevareid summed up, "lived in preparation for nothing except this war."

Head-Hunters. As a radio correspondent--a member of a new breed of "I-am-there" journalists--Sevareid survived the bombing of London, the Anzio campaign, the landing in France and a plane crash in the mountains of India that left him living with the Nagas, a tribe of headhunters of whom he became inordinately fond. By all standards, Sevareid was a brave and conscientious chronicler, cramming into four or five years enough action for a lifetime. Not only did he get to know Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he made it his job to dine with the Maquis and to camp with the partisans of Marshal Tito.

It seems characteristic of Sevareid that despite this wartime record, he should condemn himself for not having served as a soldier. He also condemned himself for failing in a first marriage hopelessly handicapped by his wife's mental illness. Nor can he, apparently, forgive himself for not being another Edward R. Murrow. Somewhere within Sevareid a puritan perfectionist sits in judgment mocking all his affirmations.

"One becomes a 'moderate,' " he writes in his new introduction. But the man who faces the camera is a stoic not satisfied with stoicism. He had the sense of humor to understand 30 years ago better than his critics today that he often sounds like "the ideology boy who sees all, knows all, and don't say nuthin' " --"the com-men-ta-tor!" Yet he also understands that the American dreamer, for all his odysseys and exiles, for all his tired knowledge, cannot give up on the American dream even if the American dream gives up on him. To play a skeptic cursed with hope -- this, as every Sevareid watcher knows, is the role he will be comically and heroically stuck with until the last cam era blinks off.

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