Jungled Orator

IN THE AMERICAN JUNGLE--Waldo Frank--Farrar & Rinekart ($2.50).

If the U. S. refuses to mend its manners, morals and mores it will not be Waldo Frank's fault. For some 20 years he has been adjuring, adverting, advising his countrymen to discover in their fragmentary selves a Sense of the Whole. Disregarded by the majority of Americans as a left-wing liberal with a boringly Messianic style, Waldo Frank at 47 is at least as much a part of the U. S. scene as the Hyde Park orators are of London's. Unlike most liberals he suffered a broken crown for his beliefs (in 1932 when he led a relief committee into troublous Bell County, Ky.). Last September he was jailed in Terre Haute because he was in Communist Candidate Earl Browder's company.

The U. S. scene seems to Waldo Frank less like a metropolitan park than a jungle. Nevertheless he comports himself with oratorical earnestness, harangues the jungly prowlers as if they were gaping democrats. His latest book, a collection of speeches and articles covering the last ten years, ranges from the autobiographical to the abstract, from the satiric to the scriptural. Readers found the scriptural passages skippable but the satiric often well-seasoned, salty.

In 1913 Waldo Frank returned from Europe to rediscover the U. S. He found it "a hostile waste." Manhattan's skyline failed to impress him: like John Ruskin viewing the exterior of King's College Chapel ("an old sow lying on its back") the sight depressed him. reminded him of "an old comb lacking half its teeth." Manhattanites struck him as "uncomfortable, nervous, harassed, brutal, sullen, dehumanized." The U. S. method of solving social problems roused his scorn: "Folks get drunk on alcohol? Easy: abolish alcohol. . . . Dour dramas corrupted Sweet Sixteen? Easy: censor the drama. Crazy communists upset bedtime story mood of bourgeois gentlemen? Easy: jail 'em and let the Supreme Court of the U. S. outlaw their nonsense." The press so disgusted him that he confined his reading to the sports page: "You've got to have some certainties at breakfast. You've got to have some English written in a style living, appropriate, honest.'' In U. S. vulgarity he saw a glimmer of light. "Vulgar people exist everywhere. We are perhaps the only nationally vulgar people. And therein dwells not alone our predicament, but our hope."

His fellow-intellectuals he considers a sorry lot: "If the average pundit in The Nation, the New Republic, Harpers, the Atlantic Monthly, The Dial, were to put down with . . . candor, his philosophy of life, it would turn out a ... pitiful confusion. . . . Behind the materialism, the cynicism, the indifferentism. the impertinence, the impotence of most of our popular writing exists a failure to think straight from the facts, and to feel straight. . . ." Now and then Waldo Frank sees a few rays of hope filtering down through the nearly impenetrable jungle: in the work of such men as the late liberal journalists Randolph Bourne. Herbert Croly, the late poet Hart Crane. But unfortunately for the reader, when Waldo Frank approaches the appreciative he verges on the mystical, puts his audience to sleep or to flight. And his practical suggestions for clearing the jungle are likely to strike his hearers as more furious than sound: "I know a way out, if you want one. Let the conduits of 'information' and 'news' be placed in the hands of philosophers and men of science. For instance, give the dailies to the metaphysicians; the weeklies to the psychologists, the radio and movies to experts in social science. And let it be stipulated that no edition and no story be released until the entire Board agree upon the truth. This would at once diminish the output of press, radio and cinema to precisely what that output was in the year 1200 B. C. . . ."

In his jail cell at Terre Haute, Waldo Frank found a microcosm of the U. S. jungle: "In the Terre Haute jail I had our world with me: the atavistic, careless and abnormal; the future, striving to be; the dolorous, dangerous present. I felt at home there. ..."

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