Reviewed in Brief

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, by Evelyn Waugh (Little Brown, $3.75). Waugh entered English letters as a clown. Even those he mocked did not take the jester seriously until, in Brideshead Revisited, the jester became minstrel and romantic poet, openly religious and—the great offense—in earnest. His fans and the critics turned on him, he became a favorite gossip’s target, and he never could roam free again in his own literary world. The restriction of outside pressures and his own pent-up romantic longings met, in a moment of sickness, to form hallucinations which he tries here to exorcise before resuming his long successor to Brideshead. No purgative could be more complete—or pitiful—than this grotesquely humorous record of hallucination. For his good—and ours—and that of the English tongue, may Pinfold find peace, and the real Waugh write again as he has in one book only, the masterpiece of twentieth-century English novels. G.W.

The Communist Party vs. the CIO, by Max M. Kampelman (Praeger, $6.00). Chronicling power struggles within the CIO, Mr. Kampelman introduces us to a cloud-cuckoo town where “right wing” is a synonym for the ADA, and Walter Reuther is the fiercest of antiCommunists. Reuther is cast as the hero of the piece; and, as is often the case in such discussions, his anti-Communism pops up as bootlegged premise, rather than as a conclusion warranted by the evidence. Liberals such as Mr. Kampelman would doubtless insist that Reuther’s early coalition with UAW fellow travelers—in the interest of advancing his own position in the union—does not necessarily mean he was pro-Communist; but they are reluctant to admit that his later opposition to those same elements, for similar reasons, could be other than conclusive proof of a militant antiCommunism. Nevertheless, Mr. Kampelman often digs into the facts of pro-Communist labor activity (by such as Harry Bridges and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers) with a sternness that few conservatives could slip past a “respectable” publisher. His book is thus a net gain for the cause of effective anti-Communism. C.L.

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The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, by Evelyn Waugh (Little Brown, $3.75). Waugh entered English letters as a clown. Even those he mocked did not take the jester seriously until, in Brideshead Revisited, the jester became minstrel and romantic poet, openly religious and—the great offense—in earnest. His fans and the critics turned on him, he became a favorite gossip’s target, and he never could roam free again in his own literary world. The restriction of outside pressures and his own pent-up romantic longings met, in a moment of sickness, to form hallucinations which he tries here to exorcise before resuming his long successor to Brideshead. No purgative could be more complete—or pitiful—than this grotesquely humorous record of hallucination. For his good—and ours—and that of the English tongue, may Pinfold find peace, and the real Waugh write again as he has in one book only, the masterpiece of twentieth-century English novels. G.W.

The Communist Party vs. the CIO, by Max M. Kampelman (Praeger, $6.00). Chronicling power struggles within the CIO, Mr. Kampelman introduces us to a cloud-cuckoo town where “right wing” is a synonym for the ADA, and Walter Reuther is the fiercest of antiCommunists. Reuther is cast as the hero of the piece; and, as is often the case in such discussions, his anti-Communism pops up as bootlegged premise, rather than as a conclusion warranted by the evidence. Liberals such as Mr. Kampelman would doubtless insist that Reuther’s early coalition with UAW fellow travelers—in the interest of advancing his own position in the union—does not necessarily mean he was pro-Communist; but they are reluctant to admit that his later opposition to those same elements, for similar reasons, could be other than conclusive proof of a militant antiCommunism. Nevertheless, Mr. Kampelman often digs into the facts of pro-Communist labor activity (by such as Harry Bridges and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers) with a sternness that few conservatives could slip past a “respectable” publisher. His book is thus a net gain for the cause of effective anti-Communism. C.L.