An Impassioned Reporter-
TEE title, presumably chosen by the English publisher, is a quite inadequate label for this astonishing book. But so too was the title (Personal History) under which its American success was achieved. A good many young men, English and American, who were rosining the world in the 1920's and trying to make out what it was all about, have put their adventures and confessions into print. Mr. Sheean has produced what is so far the most vivid and downright record of that decade. His book has been thoroughly written ; it bears the mark of unmistakable quality ; it has the force of a deed done with entire conviction.
Vincent Sheean is a young Irish American who as the War ended was a student in the University of Chicago, eighteen years old. When he awoke to the world he was shocked at his own ignorance, but he had the advantage of being able to speak two European languages. In 1923 he entered upon his apprenticeship to international politics at the Lausanne con- ference and at Geneva in the following year. His adventures as special correspondent began in the Rhineland when the Ruhr occupation was breaking down, and a brief spell of Madrid under Primo de Rivera preluded his first contact with warfare, in Morocco. He forced his way through to the Riff, knew Abd-el-Krim during the few months of his triumph over the Spanish troops, and then, after hardships and escapes which would have done credit to one of the old travellers in the lands of the Prophet, he saw the Riffian leader go down before the power of France. Next, on behalf of a great American syndi- cate he was in China at the time of the abortive revolution. In 1927 the armies of Canton had swept up to the Yangtze and taken Hankow and Nanking. A Communist coup seemed imminent, and Moscow denounced Borodin for not bringing it off. Mr. Sheean was close to Borodin and Madame Sun Yat Sen (his portrait sketches of both are excellent), and he makes plain what must have happened if Borodin had yielded to the clamour of those who were demanding a decree proclaiming all power to the Soviets. The fate of the Communist parties throughout the world, says Mr. Sheean, depended upon that issue eight years ago. Borodin himself was under no illusion. He knew that riparian China lay, as it lies today, at the mercy of the Western navies ; and in any case Chiang Kai-Shek was there to destroY the revolution in his own way. Driven afield by his employers in pursuit of what they called personal adven- tures—though he happened to be in Hankow, then the world's most marvellous news-centre—Mr. Sheean made a cross- journey to Peking and thence to Moscow, witnessing the first anniversary of the 1917 Revolution from which Trotsky was excluded. He • devotes 100 thrilling pages to his experiences in China. They cover little more than six months, and Mr. Sheean says that, so far as his newspapers were concerned, the upshot was flat failure. That may be ; but one is tempted to ask whether there can be one among his contemporaries who could claim to have packed into a single half-year as much political excitement and intense personal experience as fell to the lot • of this remarkable youth at the centre of the Chinese tragedy.
Mr. Sheean has succeeded in heightening the interest of his narrative to the end. This is due in the main to two examples of his method and spirit. He gives an impassioned account of his doings in Palestine during the terrifying outbreak of 1929, and he reveals the essential features of an absorbing friendship which, as he confesses, was the one thing of trans- cendent signifiesn3e in his life before thirty.
Mr. Sheean's relations with Jewry have been unusual, and for himself highly disturbing. The friends who most deeply influenced his early years were Jews. He went to Palestine by arrangement with the Zionists, intellectually detached but sympathetic with their cause. In a few brilliantly written pages he recounts the circumstances of his change of mind and heart. His despatches from Jerusalem were the first to reach the American Press. Their statements and implications, as to the relative responsibility of Arab and Jew, provoked a storm of resentment, which was renewed when Mr. Sheean, against his own interests, testified before the commission of inquiry appointed by the Labour Government. He says that the horrors of this time finished him as a news correspondent : the things he saw and knew made it impossible for him to
act as an objective observer and reporter. He is aware, of course; that his final chapter must reopen the controversy and bring further objurgations on his head. But he assures us that he has done with the Holy Land as he has done with journalism.
As for the friendship here described, it stands in need of no explanation. In China and Russia Mr. Sheean's personal life was dominated by a Jewish-American girl, Rayne Prohme, a devoted supporter of Borodin, whose ardent spirit burnt itself out when she exchanged Shanghai for Moscow. Their relationship, as precisely defined by Mr. Sheehan, is symp- tomatic of our epoch, and it deserved this memorial. He tells of his agonized effort to keep Ray? a from the Bolshevik equivalent of taking the veil, of his failure at the moment of her death, and of her final conquest of his thought and purpose. His closing reflections on the world crisis, like his continents on England and his friends among the English intelligentsia, make an odd contrast to the maturity of his chronicle of events. All the areas of confusion and anguish he has seen, what are they, he asks, but parts of the one vast problem to which the sentient individual must relate himself ? Quite so ; and yet he imagines the spirit of Rayna enjoining him to " stop talking nonsense about Jews and Arabs " just after, in some of his best writing, he has been reminding his readers how stern and ineradicable that " nonsense " is.
S. K. RATCLIFFE.
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