Hanover Browsing
MOST OF THE books mentioned in this column are not, in general, best sellers. The large literary reviews, and the daily newspapers, take charge of those, and it would be fatuous here to even mention them. Consequently my policy has been to bring to the attention of alumni good books which may be missed.
Neither have I any intention to pick the book-of-the-month, but a book which any alumnus could give to his mother or his wife, with heartening results to all concerned, is Delia T. Lutes' The CountryKitchen. The publishers claim it to be the country counterpart of Clarence Day's Life with Father, which is lavish but deserved praise, and possibly the comparison is a good one. The book describes life as it was some fifty years ago on a farm in Southern Michigan. The story is interspersed with frequent recipes, which make ones mouth water just to think of them. Even vegetable soup, if made right, can be more appealing than poulet at the Au PetitRiche. Do you like salt-rising bread, bubble-and-gqueak, coffee cake, fried chicken, sour-cream cookies, fried ham with milk gravy, fried parsnips, apple and pumpkin pie, scalloped potatoes (there is a dish), tarts that melt in the mouth, roast turkey, or switchel? This book has the directions so simply and clearly written that I believe anybody could become a great cook if he or she followed them. The book has humor, and a rather quaint tang reminiscent of hooked rugs and antimacassars. One reads of pung rides, of church suppers, of picnics, of drives to town, of hard stick candy; in a word, of an age that has passed with "the horse and buggy." Not a bad age at all as Mrs. Lutes has described it. At a church supper, when boxes of food were auctioned off: "Gallantry played its part. Well, if I can't get hold of my own woman's cookin', I'd be tickled to death to get yours, Miz' Bouldry. That fig cream cake you make is enough to make a man drool just to think of it." A charming and delightful book for which I thank "Delly" Lutes, and the editors of the AtlanticMonthly who first published some of the chapters in their magazine.
Another book which recreates a quiet age is Carl Van Doren's Three Worlds. Much has been written of this book, and I merely mention it as a book well worth your time. The first half had the most interest for me. A nostalgia for the past seems to be in the air these days, and Mr. Van Doren, a distinguished editor and critic depicts it well.
You may have missed, as I did, Howard
Odum's Wings on My Feet, a novel about a negro soldier, written in both prose and verse. Full of negro slang, negro songs, spirituals, prayers to the dice, and such lilting passages as this: "One day I seed sailors savin' few soldiers been floatin' on raft after ship been torpedoed or sunk by storm or sumpin'. Never seen such sight since I been born I'm travelin' man and done heap o' things in my day but never could do like white sailors on rollin' sea; Lawd, big green waves with white foam, like dragon or mad dog or sumpin', deep an' cold an' wet, captain standin' up on deck orderin' boys round jes' as easy as Cap'n Tero used to holler at us to wheel that dirt on railroad fill. Ain't no doubt 'bout it, Lawd, Lawd, Uncle Sam maybe starve us to death or pack boys together like shippin' hogs in box car, but sholy can take keer of us on sea." The simple dignity of Maxwell Anderson's The Green Pastures is here, and it is chock full of fun. "An' little French manyselles ain't nothin' to me; I got me three high yallers, an' two teasin' browns.
It takes a long, lean, lanky broion,To make a rabbit fight a houn';It takes a long tall yaller brown,To make a preacher lay his Bible down.
The negro in the war deserves a chapter in history. Let us call this a lusty footnote, more entertaining to read, perhaps, than the statistics of the amount of time it took four negros at Brest to carry a three by six sheet of corrugated iron a distance of twenty feet. (About half an hour!)
George Milburn in Catalogue has written a series of sketches, called a novel, built around the incident of the arrival of mail-order catalogues to a small town in Oklahoma. Although the technique of the novel has so far escaped Mr. Milburn his book is entertaining, and that, after all, is a great deal to recommend it.
For serious readers who wish to renew their scholarly (?) days I mention an admirable book entitled The Origins of Jansenism, which deals with subtle doctrines of grace, of the near-saint named Pascal, and of the main origins and history of illfated Port Royal. This is for lovers of French thought. The author is Nigel Abercrombie: the publisher, the Oxford Press.
Two books for lovers of poetry. More Poems, by A. E. Housman.
A. E. Housman is dead, but his A Shropshire Lad will live as one of the finest books of poetry of our time. Housman, late Professor of Latin at Cambridge, was a shy and retiring man, and it would seem from his last letters, that he was glad to die. His work was done, and he was weary of mortality. He directed his brother, Laurence Housman, "to destroy all my prose manuscripts in whatever language, and I permit him but do not enjoin him to select from my verse manuscript writing, and to publish, any poems which appear to him to be completed and to be not inferior to the average of my published poems."
Here are forty-eight of them.
The first American edition has the misprint Todd for Dodd on the frontispiece. An amazing inaccuracy, but the book is beautifully designed by W. A. Dwiggins.
The Ascent of F6, by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
An amusing and satirical play by the authors of a book I reviewed here last year entitled The Dog Beneath the Skin.
The satire is occasionally a bit obvious, but the language is crisp and the whole thing quite interesting. This will please the younger intellectual set.
Duff Cooper's authorized biography entitled Haig suffers a bit from a natural partiality, but it may be wrong to expect a biographer to be entirely objective. Haig has had his detractors, notably Lloyd George and Liddell Hart, and possibly C. S. Forester had him in mind when he wrote his excellent novel The General, and Duff Cooper's book helps swing back the balance.
Duff Cooper takes up cudgels for Haig particularly against the attacks of Lloyd George but not, it seems to me, with entire success. Haig regarded the Liberal prime minister as follows: "no great opinion of L. G. as a man or leader," but posterity I feel will credit him with perhaps the major influence in England's successful conclusion to the war. Haig's principle weakness may have been that he did not easily make friends, and that he never succeeded in even approaching intimate relations with a Frenchman. This in 1914-18 was important, and Haig's lack of tact caused immense difficulties. In the quarrels with General Nivelle Haig wrote, "All would be so easy if I only had to deal with the Germans." The English Tommy paid .heavily for the blunders and quarrels of the High Commands. "Attack, counterattack—ground gained, lost, regained and lost again—a long-drawn out and bitter tale of effort, suffering, failure and glory," describes most of the actions on the Western Front.
Haig unquestionably had great difficulties. On July 1, 1916, after a seven days' bombardment of 1,600,000 shells the infantry attack began on the Somme. Little appreciable ground was gained; the "break through" was frustrated. Many thousands died, yet, writes Duff Cooper, "Verdun was saved; the maintenance of Anglo-French co-operation was assured; the British were taught to fight; the heart of the German army was broken," etc. This is the conventional defence but the facts are, I think, that no battle was won on the Western Front, in spite of the "Million men who died for King and Country." The war was won. and a very dubious victory it has proved to have been, when the German nation themselves mutinied. It might be fairer to say that the British fleet, through the blockade, won the war.
Haig, after the war, devoted his life to the British Legion, and it must be said for him, that his devotion to the common soldier was sincere and entirely generous. He was a warm-hearted and entirely unselfsaking person. Still .... the ghosts of the Somme must have haunted him,, and no earthly man can atone for blunders that slaughtered thousands of innocent men.
Duff Cooper's whitewash, and perhaps Haig doesn't need any, is pretty thin.
I recommend Cecil Lewis's SagittariusRising, the autobiographical tale of an English war ace.
Kenneth Roberts writes me that his new novel called Northwest Passage, a story of Roger's Rangers in the Connecticut valley in 1759 and thereabouts, is to be serialized before publication. I am predicting for this book the success it deserves.
For anyone who desires or expects to write books I call their attention to G. H. Thring's The Marketing of Literary Property issued on this side of the water by Scribners.
