EDITOR’S NOTE: 2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of National Reviewpos. In celebration, NRO will be digging into the NR archives throughout the year. This book review by Priscilla L. Buckley appeared in the March 10, 1964, issue of NR.
Two Hungarians struck up a conversation in Lausanne one winter evening in 1922 and, as Hungarians will, when Hungarians meet, they talked the night through. That, says Emery Kelen, was the start of “our thirty-year partnership.” (“Our thirty-year war,” snorts Alois Derso.) At any rate, they were to become the pictorial biographers of the League of Nations (“our girl of Geneva”) doing for the League what Queen Mathilda had done for the Battle of Hastings at her loom so many centuries before. The Kelen-Derso entente (cordial or not) didn’t break up until after the Second World War when Emery Kelen became television director of the United Nations while his partner, Alois Derso, opted instead to continue as an artist and in due course became National Review’s chief, most popular (and for the first three or four years) only regular illustrator. (In consequence of these choices Emery Kelen now lives in the country, is semi-retired, and finds time to write first-class books such as Peace in Their Time, while Derso continues poor, and unretired–and available to NR’s editors, provided they don’t call before 3PM.)
In 1922 the young Derso was already famous. It was a day when major international journalists, such as Jules Sauerwein of Le Matin, traveled to conferences, not with their typewriters, but with their typists; and Derso, Le Matin’s cartoonist, cut a mean figure. He went around gloriously bedecked in a loud checked overcoat that swept to the ground like a monocled Graf-Baron, Kelen recalls. “With his long upper lip and demonic smile, he gave the impression of a cardinal contemplating heresy.”
They had different styles of working (and of living). Kelen’s subjects sat for what were almost formal line portraits. Derso, when he finally got up, circa 4:00PM, would “prowl around the Lausanne Palace Hotel, head cocked, melancholy eyes riveted to his model. After a while he’d get labor pains, borrow my pencil, scuttle to a quiet corner of the bar, and scribble profiles over every piece of paper within reach.” Sometimes Derso would make a hundred sketches before selecting one he liked. “He walks around today,” says Kelen, “with ten thousand portraits in his head, a morgue of caricatures.”
Between them, Derso and Kelen sketched the story of the League from her start as “an odd, sad waif, born on the wrong side of the two-party blanket and abandoned by her Uncle Sam on the Quai Wilson” to her end, at Munich, when “this girl of ours… had grown short sighted. Her nose was red from weeping; for she was a maid betrayed. …The people had turned against the League and our girl was doomed.”
In Peace in Their Time, an extraordinarily vivid, witty, and well-written book which Mr. Derso insists must be in large part the work of Kelen’s charming English-born wife, Helen, because, “frankly Kelen’s Hungarian-German-goulash-English is only a little better than my Hungarian-French-goulash-English,” Emery Kelen has placed his artist’s eye in the service of his pen. His word portraits are memorable. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, he tells us, “was a little old man who looked like a little old woman who resembles a little old man. …” And “…slim and trim, [Austin Chamberlain] stood and walked square-shouldered, as is he had swallowed a coat hanger…[his nephew Neville] could not laugh, and if he smiled, the smile ran down the tips of his wilted mustache like the juice of a bitter melon.” “[Sen. Claude A. Swanson’s] mustaches needed a good clipping, but his frown did not, as it was already clipped, but his frown, did not, as it was already clipped to his face by a pince-nez lest it slide off his beaky nose.” Two stout women rolling down the Quai Wilson with heavy strings of Venetian beads look to Kelen “like a couple of overflowing barrels of pirate treasure just fished out of a lake”; a Polish priest “whose name was a bottleneck of consonants…read while he ate, using his thin nose as a pointer. …”
To Kelen, the irreverent incidents and sidebars that more serious historians hastily sweep under the rug beg to be told, and tell them he does. Did you know, for instance, that the first time Sir William Tyrell (later ambassador to Paris) made his mark diplomatically it was in arranging the ransom of Lord Curzon’s trousers, which had been kidnapped by a distinguished valet? … or how French Foreign Minster Aristide Briand got the check: “I’ll pay for the lunch,” said Briand, “you can take care of the reparations”? Or that certain fiscal inconsistencies in Gandhi’s style of living finally brought forth this frosty comment from one of his most devoted followers, Mrs. Naidu: “People have no idea how much it costs to keep the Mahatma poor!”?
Emery Kelen emerges here as a man of peace, a believer in the ideals of the League: but he leaves the heavy-handed moralizing (he couldn’t be heavy-handed if he tried) to others as he tells what happened to Miss Geneva from her highpoint in Locarno down to the day that Chamberlain betook himself to Munich, umbrella in hand, and it was all over for “our girl.” “All she had to her name were a few Nobel prize winners, some sugar daddies, two caricaturists, and a wisp of an olive branch.” In Peace in Their Time the talents of Derso and Kelen are reunited a last time in tribute to an old flame, who, as old flames so often will, ended life pretty much as she started it, “an odd, sad waif.”