Eastern Diary

FOREVER CHINA -- Robert Payne --Dodd, Mead ($3.50).

Journalists' books about China are in evitable. A poet's book is rare and un expected. Robert Payne, a versatile, thirtyish Englishman who is a professor of literature, a lecturer in naval architecture, a playwright and also a journalist, has done the unexpected book. The result is exciting and evocative.

"The greatness of this country," Payne observes, "is terrifying. [China is a nation] swiftly changing and terribly virile . . . where the metal is molten and the people are searching for new gods, or the old gods transformed into a more virile strength. . . ." Through the diary he kept during the bleakest years (1941-44) of China's war, the author comes back again & again to this thought -- sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse.

Payne takes no partisan stand on Chi nese politics, and so avoids the pros & cons of the Kuomintang-Communist feud. His concern is with the people and their land. He is as sensitive to the landscape as a super-polychromatic film. "I am obsessed," he writes, "with life and death at their sharpest points."

A plum tree flooded with white birds, the clean curve of a plow as it comes dripping from the earth, the tuck-tuck of mah-jongg tablets, the faltering steps of a blind man on a moonlit night, Chungking in the mist, the whistle of unseen leaves--all these, in Payne's record, are as ineluctably part of China's life as the suffering, corruption, brutality and terror bred by foreign and domestic wars.

But the book is much more than a catalogue of sights & sounds, or a stylistic appreciation of scenery. There are also a dirgelike visit to Changsha battle field; illuminating talks with Dr. Sun Fo, "Christian General" Feng Yu-hsiang, WPBoss Wong Wen-hao; ferryboat rides across the dragonlike Yangtze; discourses on the world and its state; days with abbots, poets, children and cymbal-beating actors. Above all, Payne admires and respects China's students and professors, the guardians of the past and the planners of the future, whose great hegira from the coast to the interior never fails to fill him with wonder. ". . . All that is best io China is crystallized in their presence." Forever China is a literary adventure and discovery. It sometimes suffers from, overwriting and hyperbole. But these are minor flaws among the major pleasures of a superior book. There is a good sample of the Payne style in his evaluation of the bygone Chinese warrior-poet Shen Shan:

"[He] remembers the texture of things -- a squirrel's fur, the thickening of a horse's mane in the frost, the glint of armor and the impact of wind on the pennons in the van. The imagery is swift, the pen races the thought, the heart beats time, the invention never falters, but be neath and around all this there is an atmosphere of tender pity, of universal friendliness, of how mellow a wisdom, how golden a simplicity."

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