The Heart Behind the Eye

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE (310 pp.) --Carl Mydans--Harper ($4).

It can be true, as the saying goes, that a picture is worth ten thousand words. But it depends on who is looking through the range finder. Photographer Carl Mydans has been making picture history for LIFE for nearly a quarter-century, and in many a picture has made words seem superfluous. Yet sooner or later a man must speak or write. Mydans, living and working in a time of violence, has seen more of history than most men, and recorded so much of it that immunity to ordinary feeling might seem a natural result. But his time, too, has come to write, and he has put pen to paper with simple eloquence in More Than Meets the Eye, a book that underscores his camera work with emotions that many a more practiced writer would find difficult to control.

A Ruse for Life. For a photographer, this is a remarkable book in one respect: there is not a picture between the covers. It is a book of memories and responses--to men dying on a dozen fronts, to crushing defeat and stirring victory, to sights that stretch a man's capacity to endure with sanity, and to simple gestures of humanity under pressure that are reminders of what is noble in man. Mydans' first taste of war came on the Finnish-Russian front in 1940. It is typical of him that he does not rehash the politics of that cynical war, or play the omniscient journalist with hindsight. What he remembers best is the first Russian prisoner he saw: a frightened, ignorant peasant reduced to blubbering tears by the offer of a cigarette from his Finnish captors, and later brought to hysterical laughter when he realized that Mydans' camera was not a deadly weapon. Then, having been decent to.the prisoner, a Finnish major turned to Mydans and, between clenched teeth, assured him: "Russians are pigs."

As the Japanese overran the Philippines, Mydans and his wife watched from the shore as the freighter that might have taken them to safety was sunk at her mooring by a Japanese plane. Soon after, they were taken prisoner and for two years endured a hell that many failed to survive. Mydans' account of those years is remarkably free of rancor: he has compassion for his abused campmates, admiration for their capacity to endure.. And when, after an exchange of prisoners, he returned with the U.S. troops who dashed into Manila to rescue his P.W. friends, he realized afresh how moving was man's capacity for hope and how strong was man's capacity for life. Man's will to live was a familiar story to Mydans: in 1940 a shrieking, clawing Chinese woman in Chungking had begged for money as she held aloft her dead infant, waving it by one foot, "like a butcher with a plucked chicken." Mydans gave her some money, and later that night, belly tight with food, Mydans came shamefully back to the spot where he. had seen her. There she sat, a bowl of white rice by her side. Something stirred at her breast. Mydans looked. It was the child--alive and suckling with contented gurglings. "Then," writes Mydans, "I understood: in starving China any ruse is a fair one that adds a few more days to life."

A Sense of God. Mydans' mind is itself a kind of camera. He writes in pictures that illustrate life in swift, touching anecdotes and impressions: the wedding procession that moved along an Italian road on foot while up ahead, U.S. troops were in deadly battle with a German rearguard; or the terrible day when he was caught in a Japanese earthquake and watched in horror as rescuers sawed through the arm of a pinned victim. He recalls with fine comic effect two G.I.s in top hats putting on a mock duel in the Italian moonlight, and he remembers the combat medics on bouncing Jeeps who, "kneeling and balancing and clinging miraculously with one arm, raised the other high, as one would a torch, holding a bottle of plasma, pouring life back into a broken body. I think I have never seen a soldier kneeling thus who was not in some way shrouded with a godlike grace and who did not seem sculptured and destined for immortality."

The "more" here than meets the eye may sometimes verge on the sentimental. But no combat soldier will think for a moment that this quota of sentimentality is unusual. It was often a saving grace, and so Mydans uses it. He can remember the day when, boarding the U.S.S. Enterprise in 1940, he, as a photographer, was sent below with the enlisted men, while his companions, writers, were berthed in "officers' country." Today, even if the same discrimination were still being practiced, Writer Mydans could move in with his fellow writers.

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