Boost for U.S.A.
This Is My Country. By Stoyan Christowc. tRobert Hale 125. 6d.)
AT a time when native American writers have, on the whole, been knockers of the land of plenty, two immigrants have come to the defence of their adopted country with great success, first Mr. Louis Adamic and now Mr. Christowe. Both apologists for the American way are Slays from South-
Eastern Europe, Mr. Adamic a Slovene, Mr. Christowe a Macedonian Bulgarian. Both have won a distinguished place in contemporary American journalism and letters, both have undergone the ordeal of the return of the native to the land from which he had come, and both have found that the life and outlook of their native lands is now alien to them. But the differences between Mr. Adamic and Mr. Christowe are as striking, more striking than the resemblances. When pe came back to Bulgaria, Mr. Christowe was soon on the best terms with leading people, with friends of the King, with whom indeed, he had an audience, and from whom he received the honour of the royal photograph. It is true that he also inter- viewed the head of the Macedonian revolutionaries, from whose organisation came the assassins who, so conveniently for some great and middling Powers, assassinated King Alexander of Jugoslavia, the tyrant of Mr. Adamic's books. But, on the whole, the powers in America and in the Balkans have treated Mr. Christowe well, or he has taken a sundial attitude, and has recorded only the pleasant hours. There are in his narrative some minor tragedies ; a dear friend loses an eye working on the railroad, but then he gets enough compensation to retire to Bulgaria in comparative opulence. There are differences in the ranks of the Bulgarian gangs working on the Great Northern railroad for the better development of the great North-West and the glory and profit of James J. Hill. There are moments of literary disillusion, too, but Chicago, for all its apparent harshness, was a fairly amiable foster- mother. Even the dangers of being dragged back into a Bulgarian environment by association with Mr. Vladimiroff were compensated fOr by the fact that the Bulgarian engineer had an American wife, and that his nephew, John Gunther, was one of the bright young men who then made Chicago the successor of Indianopolis as America's literary capital. (New York, of course, being barred, as Joe Louis might be by sports writers anxious to evoke interest in other heavy- weights.) In short this is a success story, much more on the lines of the Saturday Evening Post convention than of the New Masses convention, but it is a first-class specimen of the class. Indeed, Mr. Christowe, like Mr. Marquand, shows what can be done by a natural writer with a somewhat shop- worn formula. But, of course, Mr. Christowe has special advantages ; to have moved straight from Turkish Mace- donia to St. Louis gives an opportunity to a writer to see America new that even an immigrant from the Deep South
or Darkest Maine moving to New York does not get. He was fortunate, too, in his educational opportunities, for
Valparaiso University, under its two presidents, was a com- plete lesson in good and bad Americanism. The old presi- dent—simple, democratic, unconscious of formal dignity—
was replaced by a go-getter, plastered with degrees, deter- mined to get a move on, to replace the simple, socially back- ward " Poor Man's Harvard," with something like the other Harvard as seen from Hollywood. This in itself was a good story, and is all the better when we learn that the go-getter had indeed earned his title, that his degrees were bogus and his brilliant promises a front for a high-class confidence trick. Such little mishaps, after all, are not unknown in older and more famous institutions than Valparaiso or confined to America. What was more American was the energy of Mr. Christowe's Iowa friend, who did his own detective work and got the goods on the President. It was he who got from the Federal Bureau of Education the definitive proof that the President's least bogus degrees came from an institution " not recognised either by the educational authorities in the several States nor by any reputable higher institution in this country." The grammar did not do a paid body of educators any credit, but the meaning was clear enough ; the fraud was exposed and Valparaiso saved. It is a story worthy of "Rackety-Rae" So, in this case as in so many others, America did the right thing. As this is a success story we have no right to complain, we can go to Mr. Cantwell or Mr. Steinbeck for the other side, to writers who have not known Turkish rule, leaving Mr. Christowe to state the case for America in a most readable book which, if vague on dates (so that the hero of Valparaiso is to be found reading Bryce's Modern Democracies before it was published), is concrete and persuasive in more important matters.
D. W. BROGAN.
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