Intellectuals, Arise

FAITH FOR LIVING--Lewis Mumford--Harcourf, Brace ($2).

Fear enters Lewis Mumford's door with the daily newspaper. The last radio report in the evening causes him a living nightmare which slips imperceptibly into the horrors of his sleep. These and other apocalyptic afflictions he describes this week in Faith for Living, 333 pages as hortatory as Isaiah, as alarming as The Book of Revelation. But by implying that every right-feeling man these days must awake with a shriek and a shiver in the dead of night to find himself surrounded by phantom parachutists, he somewhat alienates sympathy for his case.

Lewis Mumford is an art critic, a specialist in architecture and city planning at a time when more cities are being destroyed than built. He has written authoritatively about these and other subjects. He is also a militant and vocal liberal, and has en joyed a long connection with The New Republic that ended last June in a hideous rupture (TIME, June 17, July 8). When Russia, the "Socialist Fatherland," began to exhibit openly all the symptoms of a flourishing fascism, Mumford denounced Communists. When German, Italian and Japanese Fascists began to burn the cities of Spain and China, Author Mumford blew up with a pop heard round the publishing world. In Men Must Act he demanded complete severance of U. S. diplomatic relations with, complete boycott of, Germany, Italy, Japan. He praised the assassination of Huey Long as a political stitch in time. When New Republicans stirred with embarrassment, but declined to get down from the left end of the liberal fence, Author Mumford loudly parted company with The New Republic.

The clearer things became to him, the louder Author Mumford screamed; the louder he screamed, the more he was po litely disregarded and the more isolated he felt; the more isolated he felt, the louder he screamed. Faith for Living is his most piercing shriek to date. The book suggests that Author Mumford has been practically overrun by Nazis already and the U. S. will get its turn in a few minutes. To thwart this fate, Author Mumford urges total moral regeneration for U. S. liberals. His program embraces three main points: 1) restoration of the family; 2) re-establishment of ties with the soil; 3) the development of personality.

Says he: "There are three areas, in particular, where a swift renewal of faith and act and deed must take place: these are the areas that have always been lifesustaining, life-preserving, life-forwarding. One is the family. The other is the land. And the third is the self. . . . Without a revamping of our ideas and practices in these areas . . . our efforts to preserve a civilized social order will be feeble and hollow. . . ." How this revamping is to be accomplished, practically under fire, is left somewhat vague, all the more so because Author Mumford. by habit, intention and idiom, addresses his exhortation to the one group in the U. S. which is least capable of acting on it--the liberal intellectuals.

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