Variety
Mr. Joseph E. Davies as a
Master of Prose
I have just been reading
Mis–
sion to Moscow,
Mr. Joseph E.
Davies' book, after seeing the film
of the same title. The picture, I
find, coincides with the book in
almost no respect. The real Mr.
Joseph Davies, for example, is a
shrewd corporation lawyer who
contributed to the Roosevelt cam–
paign fund and was appropriately
rewarded with an ambassadorship.
The Davies of the Warner Bro–
thers picture is a plain rugged
American business man, played by
Mr. Walter Huston rather like a
more elderly version of Sinclair
Lewis' Dodsworth, who demurs
with a touching humility when the
President asks him to go to Russia,
and protests that he is really not
qualified because he has had no
diplomatic training. The real Mr.
Davies was sent specifically to talk
about a trade agreement and to ·
arrange for the settlement of debts
contracted by the Kerensky gov–
ernment. The Hollywood Mr.
Davies is simply entrusted with a
solemn mission of reporting on the
state of the Soviet Union. The
real Mr. Davies was troubled by
the tyrannies of the Stalinist police
state. "No physical betterment of
livif!g standards," he wrote, "could
possibly compensate for the utter
destruction of liberty of thought or
speech, and the sanctity of the in–
dividual. ... The government is a
dictatorship riot 'of the proletariat,'
as professed, but 'over the prole-
116
tariat.' It is completely dominated
by one man.'' One could go on like
this at length.
There is one point, however,
in
which the picture is quite faithful
to the real Mr. Davies. When the
Davies of Walter Huston is made
to attend the Moscow trials, he
enunciates the following statement:
"Based on twenty years of trial
practice, I'd be inclined to believe
these men's testimony." The trials
themselves, it is true, are repre–
sented falsely, and this is not
precisely the kind of thing that Mr.
Davies was saying about them at
the time; but the undependable
syntax: of the Warner Brothers'
Davies is absolutely true to life. I
should say, indeed, from reading
the book, that the author of
Mis–
sion to Moscow
is, so far as my ex–
perience goes, the greatest master
of bad official English since the late
President Harding.
The prose style of President
Harding has been analyzed by H.
L.
Mencken in his admirable little
paper, "A Short View of Gamalie–
lese"; and this piece, which I have
lately been reading, has stimulated
me to try to do some justice to the
beauties of the writing of Davies.
Let me begin with one of the
cultural notes with which Davies
the connoisseur and man of taste
diversifies his record of affairs of
state, a passage which illustrates
brilliantly his skill in producing
the effect of surprise:
For weeks there have been ce–
lebrations of the centena1)Y of
