Good for a Million
COAST TO COAST. By James Morris. (Faber, 21s.) IT must be gratifying to newspaper editors to see their young Well turning out good books in which they make their professiol el talents even more noticeable than in the daily columns. Jail Morris, for example, is a reporter of the very highest class an it must fortify any reader of The Times to learn what that no's. paper will not let him know—that Morris was its special e' respondent on the Everest climb. He has also brilliantly covered the Middle East, and I met him during an interminable milili3rY parade in Cairo, which he whiled away by pouring out a Oat volume of obviously accurate information about Egypt. It was a lifetime's work to master so many facts and he must have been there all of three weeks by the time I came across hint 4O. although his American trip lasted 'only' a year it has produe a book of vivid impressions which are neither as sentimental a5t the ordinary travel book nor as deadly accurate as the round guide. Whether full of sun, like his passages on New York 31
New Jersey, or clouded, like those on the South, by his hirig of colour bar, his snapshots of America are in focus and we
composed. Obviously with a little more work they could be made IND full-scale pictures. An odd thing is that where Morris writes of places 1 have visited I find no error. It is often the other way about and newspaper readers are perpetually writing to editors to
say so.
Yet in his lyrical passages about Nevada I was haunted by the feeling of something wrong. I remembered in the end: I met in tinia a homesick man from Nevada who instantly presented me with a silver dollar so that I should never forget that Nevada is the 'Silver State.' Surely it was not gold but silver from the Com- stock Lode that made Virginia City so prosperous? But not prosperous enough to attract Edmund Kean to act in its opera house, since he died before it was built—though admittedly the virtuoso Mr. Morris refers to spells his name Keen, which brings Up quite another train of thought (into which his singer Frankie Lane' also fits): where would the reporter be if it were not for the sub-editor? But now here I am niggling, and I didn't intend to. If it has a few errors of that sort Mr. Morris's book is fundamentally accurate and gives a splendid picture of the United States as a whole in all its lovableness and repulsiveness, its Warmth and its harshness, its up-to-the-minuteness and its firm attachment to the past. If the British were permitted by currency regulations to visit the United States on holiday this book would be worth a million dollars to America as a tourist country.
GERARD FAY
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