The War & Mr. Sheean

THIS HOUSE AGAINST THIS HOUSE (420 pp.)--Vincent Sheean--Random House ($3.50).

Fairly modest about it, but willing to let others share his secrets, contemporary journalism's readiest confessor (earlier autobiographical volumes: Personal History, Not Peace but a Sword, Between the Thunder and the Sun) reports on what he has been up to during recent years. In the spring of 1942, at the age of 42, he joined the Army Air Forces. He rose from captain to lieutenant colonel.

This House Against This House is a pretentious title for Mr. Sheean's mixture as before: part tract, part treatise, part I-was-right-there testimony. The ingredients are not up to prewar quality. Journalist-Lecturer Sheean (he returned to civilian life late in 1944) opens with a long, rambling, Shesanesque introduction and concludes with a brief tailpiece in which he discusses world history from Versailles to San Francisco, poses the somber question of whether we are in for another war. His half-hopeful, half-baffled, wholly unstartling conclusion: no, if the U.S. and Russia can agree. He thinks they may, and should: it ought to be possible "for two views of society to share the same world. . . ."

Sheean fought World War II in Africa, Europe, Asia, Washington, D.C. Sometimes his job, and his living quarters were so pleasant that "I felt heartily ashamed of [our] comfort [while] our combat units, replete with Spam, [were] contesting with the cold and the mud." Yet even air intelligence officers had their share of bombs to duck, their jobs to do. Off the Salerno beachhead Major Sheean's ship, the Ancon, stood up to 19 German bombings in one day. Beyond Salerno itself a sudden German ground thrust nearly caught Major Sheean asleep, forced him to evacuate in such a rush that "my rare and wonderful air mattress" had to be left behind. Later, disgusted by the effects of "neoFascist" Churchillian policies in Italy and the protracted Italian land campaign, he asked to be transferred to the OSS.

Instead, he was returned to Washington, subsequently sent to India and China. India, which he had never visited before, inspires some of the most nearly apoplectic, most polysyllabic (and shrewd) passages in the book. The "impermeable autochthonic self-responsive misery" of the Indians depressed him almost as much as "neo-Fascism" had in Italy, though for entirely different reasons. Sheean regards Britain's stay in India as a "silly impertinence," but says that India's major problem is the Indians themselves.

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