Books: World’s End to Fag-End

A WORLD TO WIN (624 pp.)—Upton Sinclair—Viking Press ($3).

Clio, Muse of History, is just a girl who can’t say no. She has succumbed for the seventh time in six years to the same man—Upton Sinclair. But in their latest encounter, Volume VII of his novel-history of the 20th Century, 67-year-old Sinclair’s powers seem to be failing.

A World to Win takes Presidential Agent Lanny Budd, a peripatetic pink who poses as a fascist, from the fall of France through the U.S. declaration of war. Lanny is a spy, plutocrat (son of a munitions magnate), sociologist, art expert, musician, “psychical researcher” and avid reader of Bluebook magazine—all in a handy, handsome, 6-ft. package.

F.D.R. without Applesauce. As the book begins, this global Rover Boy is tête à tête with brackish Pierre Laval, who confides: “Money … is like toilet paper, when you need it you need it bad.” With this pearl rattling in his diplomatic pouch, Lanny leaves for London. He has to get a wiggle on because Upton Sinclair wants him 1) to take in the blitz, 2) to get back to F.D.R. in time to ram through the destroyer deal. He does both, easy as falling off a green baize table, and Roosevelt admiringly admits: “I need you, and that’s no applesauce.”

Lanny journeys to the West Coast, where Louella Parsons, floored by his dash and balderdash, gasps: “Somebody ought to give him a screen test.” Hearst begs him to accept $50,000 a year for some random reportage. He has another bedside chat with the President (Lanny edits one of F.D.R.’s speeches, in which he invents and inserts the phrase “arsenal of democracy”), and is off to see Adolf Hitler chew a rug. Göring smuggle a swallow of dope, and “Rudi” Hess resolve to fly to England.

By now as roundheeled as a neutron, Lanny penetrates the atomic age. Roosevelt packs him off to Princeton for a cram-and-jam (physics and Mozart) session with Albert Einstein, thence to Germany to abduct atomic data. But a plane crash lays Lanny up on a spiffy yacht; two lovely young shipmates make sweet moan at him all the way to Hong Kong.

Mr. Budd Gets Around. As “chance” would have it, they arrive just as the Japs attack. One of the she-shipmates is missing in action. Lanny marries the other—an amateur medium who has spirited conversations with the late financier Otto Kahn. They escape through China, sit a spell with Communist Leader Mao Tze-tung, then fly to a Moscow powwow with Joseph Stalin, who says: “You are a well-informed man, Mr. Budd, and good company. The next time you come this way, I hope you won’t fail to let me know.”

Even couched in the metaphor of a novel, history is best written from an eminence of years, and Sinclair’s vehicle is now pulling abreast of its own times. In his latest, Sinclair adds little to the bare newspaper stories but a bushy growth of prose and an air of implausibility.