Kind but Uncritical
America Speaks. By Philip Gibbs. (Heinemann. ros. 6d.)
IT is a little difficult at first sight to decide why this book is so depressing, for Sir Philip Gibbs is a very experienced reporter indeed ; he has interviewed the great and the little in many countries, and he has, or had, a dramatic style. He was in Amenca, just before and after Pearl Harbour, he visited cities as far apart as Boston and San Francisco, Fort Worth and Detroit. He had special connexions with America, where his son and grandchildren were living. Yet for all his advantages and all his journalist's experience, his book is painfully flat. He makes one point over and over again, the resolution of most Americans, before Pearl Harbour, not to send "the boys overseas," and their conviction, when they thought of the matter at all, that Japan was a pushover if she was rash enough to incur the wrath of the United States. But the same story repeated in Taunton and Youngstown, Worcester and Toledo, does not improve in the telling. Sir Philip is obviously a good listener, too good a listener, for he seems to have been rather uncritical in his acceptance of the views put forward by the people he met on this lecture tour. He talked to taxi-drivers as well as hostesses, but he does not seem to have asked for the views of the taxi-drivers on the dogmatic statements about labour he got from some of his more opulent acquaintances. Nothing could exceed the amiability of this narrative ; the cities and people, like the London police, were all wonderful. (A few anonymous letters or other gestures of displeasure at Sir Philip's propagandist activities are all in the day's work.) But it is odd to find so distinguished a newspaperman not paying his colleagues the compli- ment of giving their papers their correct titles and themselves their correct rank. It is also a little disturbing to find that Sir Philip wasted the hours he had to spend in Parsons, Kansas. The local paper is owned by Senator Clyde Reed, and both it and its owner would repay study, at least as well as the clubwomen with whom, naturally, most of Sir Philip's time was spent. The role of a lecturer in America is exhausting, and the trade is dangerous. There is so much kindness, so much interest, so little time to reflect or investigate, that the impression made is sure to be blurred. That Sir Philip's impressions were so kindly speaks well for his own success as a lecturer, but, alas, good writers should be made of
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