Cyclorama: Third Panel

DRAGON'S TEETH -- Upton Sinclair --Viking ($3).

Dragon's Teeth is the third and best volume in Upton Sinclair's rich cyclorama of 20th-Century world history (World's End, Between Two Worlds, TIME, June 24, 1940 & March 24). It is the first to suggest that the completed work may, for all its lack of psychological and esthetic depth, be almost great. Great or not, few works of fiction are more fun to read; fewer still make history half as clear, or as humane.

In the two former volumes Sinclair's characters, skipping here & there like grass hoppers on a hot stove, managed to be present at practically every important event of their century up to the Wall Street crash of '29. Now (1930-34), as the world's disease narrows its carbuncular focus in Germany, Sinclair narrows his, too -- though never to the exclusion of the view that the responsibility for Naziism is as broad as the surface of the planet. He manages to whip in a good deal of data on the U.S., England, France; on such symptomatic side shows as the Lindbergh kidnap scare, Basil Zaharoff's patronage of mediums, and the game of put-&-take played at the Geneva Arms Limitation Conference. But he draws his most serious bead on Germany, and on what happened there to his hero Lanny Budd.

Lanny Budd, a sort of contemporary Renaissance Prince, is half-symbol, half-character. Pinkish, amiable, charming, and vaguely uneasy about his softness, he plays prince consort to his rich bride Irma, who in turn plays salonniere in a million-franc-per-year Parisian palace, and who is a comic-strip X-ray of heiress mentality.

Lanny chats with Leon Blum and with the protofascist sons of an ex-mistress, and indulges in some mild flirtations, but his one dissipation is his telephone talks with old Johannes Robin, his rich Jewish relative by marriage in Berlin. These talks, and Lanny's occasional visits, reveal Germany's complex political landscape--and reveal also the terrible pathos of a Scheiber (profiteer) who caught on too late.

Johannes Robin is not half scared enough. Hitler sounds crazy and dangerous, but in Robin's experience no soup is ever eaten as hot as it is cooked. What with his son Hansi a Communist, and his son Freddi a Social Democrat, the family is splitting up badly, to his sorrow; but he has his crafty reasons to feel that he has protectors among the Nazis, and in all their conflicting camps. At length, of course, he is framed, robbed, imprisoned. He and other Jews are stuffed with strong purgatives, stripped, and forced to flog each other's buttocks. Johannes Robin is a symbol of that international class myopia which bankrolled Naziism--a bland, would-be-guileful sower of "dragon's teeth."

Sinclair's history of National Socialism sometimes sounds like a newspaper written by a kindhearted, turn-of-the-century U.S. Socialist (which Sinclair is). But it works in keen little vignettes--of a devoted block-leader, of a Nazi composer, of a leftish Nazi--and portraits of Hitler, of Goring, of Goebbels (with all of whom Sinclair's ubiquitous hero talks and negotiates). These portraits fall short of Tolstoy's Napoleon by as far as the whole work falls short of the sublime Homeric purity of War and Peace; yet they are honest, moving.

In his efforts to help Johannes out of captivity, Hero Lanny Budd first gets a half-chance to realize that he is a brave, intelligent, responsible human being. In his effort to save Johannes' son Freddi, he is given still more dangerous opportunities, and meets them halfway. In the closing pages Lanny, tempered beyond any further possibility of being a playboy, sits in the room next to the rescued but ruined Freddi, silently crying, and realizing, of his life and of Europe: "He had traveled here and there over its surface, and everywhere had seen men diligently plowing the soil and sowing dragon's teeth* from which, as in the old legend,-armed men would some day spring."

They begin to spring, in this third volume, with a lucid ferocity which will probably make the fourth even better.

The greatest power of Sinclair's chef-d'oeuvre lies in its sweetness. This quality makes history far more honest and more clear than if anger and hatred gave their edges to it. Sinclair understands how intimately involved individuals are in the making of history, yet how helplessly conditioned they are by their lives. He understands "occupational psychosis": that disease of specialized thinking by which human beings, in this age, are most inevitably set at odds. That is what makes his characters genuinely tragic symbols. It makes for a sort of sublimity when he can unexcitedly use the word "pitiful" of Joseph Goebbels.

*Cadmus, Prince of Phoenicia, slew a dragon with Athene's help: its teeth, when sown, sprang from the earth as fully armed soldiers.

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