The Hard Way

NEVER CALL RETREAT--Joseph Freeman --Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

It is clearly Joseph Freeman's hope, in his first novel, to write a political and spiritual history of the 20th Century to date. His hero, Paul Schuman, a middle-class Viennese, thinks and feels along this century's grand median line of liberal optimism. He suffers, like many of the century's most symbolic men, in a concentration camp. He escapes, as most of them have not, to the U.S., where hope and war are relatively fresh, and where, with a psychoanalyst's help, he becomes fit for new fighting.

Schuman is a historian, concentrated--evidently like his author--not only on the vision of freedom, but also on those obstacles to freedom which seem intrinsic in the very effort to achieve it. When he is telling his own story, he offers a perhaps too facile newsreel of the past two decades." When he is talking history and quoting--he quotes, it seems, nearly every man who has ever written well, usually very aptly--Never Call Retreat becomes as rich an anthology of ravenous reading as ever disguised itself as a novel. When he is talking politics, or living them in the concentration camp, the book reaches a grinding blend of clumsiness with poignancy which puts it, like many better books, in a class by itself, almost irrelevant to normal criticism.

Tone Deafness. The trouble is that Joseph Freeman is by no stretch of the imagination a good novelist. He is not even, in the sense that a novel requires, a good writer. With rare exceptions he is incapable even of suggesting that his characters are human. Even when, through pure earnestness, he manages to, his dialogue throws the matter in doubt. Few young women lie in bed and say to their husbands, "You can't call Spain a handful of fanatical idealists. A whole people is fighting at bay for its freedom and its life. And millions the world over are with them, and one-sixth of the earth aids them. . . ." That official dialect, with which this book is crammed, is no light matter. It betrays in intricate detail the tone deafness to human meanings and values which is perhaps the greatest handicap of most would-be liberators.

Diseases of the Left. Deafness aside, Freeman is a man to whom liberty is neither a slogan nor a parade salute, but a wrenching, incandescent obsession. In his characters he gives powerful symbols of the conflicting indispensables of genuine revolution or civilization--Intellect, Heart and Action. His findings suggest--though he is too devotedly political-minded to be aware of it--that any attempt to achieve liberty through any form of organization, as such, is tragically hopeless.

From its faults as much as from its virtues, especially by its bone-crushing sincerity, the book becomes large and impressive. The watchful, sympathetic reader will find that Freeman has done something both courageous and important. More often accidentally than not, Never Call Retreat is an almost endlessly revealing record of the typical liberal-to-leftist mind and spirit, with all its hopes, doubts and occupational diseases as limpid as amber.

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