"If a Channel Fog . . ."

England's famed critic-novelist Rebecca West, whose historical tone poem of the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, has been called "a passionate analysis of the great crisis of contemporary man," has a sharp tongue in a fearsomely feminine head. Last week, in The Atlantic Monthly, she turned her critical attention to Elder Statesman Herbert Hoover's The Problems of Lasting Peace, written in collaboration with Elder Diplomat Hugh Gibson (TIME, July 6). Never noted as a motherly sort, Critic West sailed in with claws open, left Messrs. Hoover and Gibson considerably tattered. Critic West wrote:

> "Doubtless as a compliment to the dove of peace, the book is written chiefly in pidgin English. . . . If a Channel fog wrote history, it would have much the same attitude to time and the sequence of events as Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson . . . but a Channel fog would presumably be less biased.

> "Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson have set themselves the heavy task of rigging up some sort of platform on which old-fashioned Republicans could oppose Mr. Roosevelt, and this involves finding an alternative to his anti-Axis policy which is not straight pro-Naziism. . . . To do them justice, they would be honestly revolted by straight Naziism but . . . if I were an American, and had read this book . . . I should think myself a fool to make any sacrifice whatsoever in order to win this war.

> "It is obvious that Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson are in a complete fog about the past. . . . These are a series of sour stories about the European peoples who had the impertinence to defeat the Germans in the First World War. . . . How does it happen that Mr. Hoover and Mr. Gibson, so severe on states that are stumbling blocks to their neighbors, have hardly a word to say against Germany? This book is full of propaganda, direct and indirect, in favor of the common enemy. . . . There are hints that the United Nations are really as bad as anybody else.

> "I am somewhat appalled by the spectacle of an English citizen assaulting the former President of the United States. But I would remind the reader that the problems Mr. Hoover discusses are bone of my bone as well as of his, and that in our common peril I believe it is my right to differ with Mr. Hoover in print as I did with Mr. Chamberlain over Munich."

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