Hanover Browsing

Reviewer's Praise for Book by Willis Fitch '17 and Other Recommended Reading for Alumni

I HAVE ENJOYED each moment of each experience of my life and have found that each experience has given me greater interest and powers of understanding, so that I stand each day more ready for the next. Why should men collect tangible assets which may be swept away in a moment? Marian and I have a treasure-trove of knowledge and memories which are ours as long as we shall live." So ends the autobiography of David Fairchild, famous botanist and plant explorer, which is titled The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer. (Scribner's 1938.) In this large and long book (481 pages) Mr. Fairchild describes his many trips around the world in search for plants and fruits which might be cultivated successfully in the United States. The author has, with his associates, done as much to benefit Americans as any living man I can immediately think of. His book is the revelation of a great man, simple, honest, faithful to his scientific ideals, and with a warmth of heart that gives a vast satisfaction to the reader. A great book according to an early critic Longinus is "the echo of a great soul." Mr. Fairchild has no pretensions as a stylist, nor indeed to being a great soul, being a modest man, but he is the latter, and one can only wish him many more years to reflect on the world of plant life in America which he has done so much to create. His wife, Marian Fairchild, was the daughter of Alexander Graham Bell, and a great galaxy of men and women (of the generation mainly of the late Henry Adams) pass through his pages. This is a book to be bought and read, not once, but again and again. There are many illustrations all taken by the author.

TENNIS AND ADVENTURE

Over the Brown week-end I met Willis Fitch '17, author of Wings in the Night, a tale of his flying days in Italy during the Great War. The risks of flying somewhat rickety bombers on the Italian front was as great, if not greater because of the terrain, than on the Western Front, and yet this is the first book that I have read which tells, honestly, and with a fine dramatic sense the life, and often the death, of American flyers flying over the Piave and Austro-Italian front. Fitch looked so youthful and clean cut that it was difficult to believe that he had had the adventures he relates during the Great War. But have them he did, and this belongs on any shelf of American war books. Many Dartmouth men sweep through its pages from Prexy Hopkins to Walter Wanger. And there are others, who died. One of the most vital characters in the book is Mr. Fitch's father, and one feels a genuine sadness at the very end of the book when Willis arrives home and finds that his father had but a short time before been killed trying to save an elderly woman from the Montreal express. "Oh, Dad, I had so much to tell you!" We are the richer for Willis's tale, and although it has been reviewed here before by "Texas" Bill Cunningham I, too, want to throw my garland. I am one who believes in supporting friend's books, and books by Dartmouth men, but in this book one does oneself the favor, and I hope you will see fit to do likewise. The publisher is Marshall Jones of Boston.

N. L. Goodrich, wide reader of travel books, recommended to me John Hanbury-Tracy's Black River of Tibet (Frederick Muller Limited, 1938.) This book details the adventures of Tracy during nineteen months' exploration of the Salween and Tsangpo Basins of South-Eastern Tibet. So isolated were Tracy and his party that they heard of the death of King George V six months after it occurred. The book is well illustrated and will reward the reader.

Some men, whose judgment in tennis I respect, rate Bill Tilden the greatest tennis player who ever lived. Arguments about such things are futile, but in Aces, Placesand Faults (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1938) Tilden gives his frank opinions of the tennis stars of his generation and the present, both men and women, estimates countries in regard to their tennis, discusses with great candor the U. S. L. T. A., and weighs the- pros and cons of amateur and professional tennis. He adds for good measure advice on various strokes and tactics. He believes in the "all-court game," which is to say that he believes Bromwich would be a much greater player if he knew all the orthodox strokes, and that any player may become good enough to enjoy playing the game if he concentrates on learning all the strokes rather than in developing a chop-backhand, or a flaming forehand.

Dean Bill, voracious reader, recom- mends Peter Freuchen's It's All Adventure, which he says is "another extremely interesting narrative by the author of ArcticAdventure .... in a class by itself among Arctic tales—who lost a frozen leg, acquired a beautiful wife, and became a writer."

Compton Mackenzie, writer

extraordinary, has written in The Windsor Tapestry: Being a Study of the Life, Heritage,and Abdication of H. R. H. the Duke ofWindsor, K. G. a spirited defense of the Duke of Windsor, and an attack on the British hypocrisy which attended the King's abdication. At least half the book deals with the history of the Hanoverian Kings, the Church of England and marriage, the Royal Marriage Act, etc. The author, it may be added, is a Catholic and a Royalist in conviction.

In early September, before the "big blow" struck New England, I happened to be visiting a friend who is a Cambridge book seller. We talked of this or that and finally I noticed a novel called The Foxes, by R. P. Harriss. (Houghton, Mifflin.) He told me that Richard Blackmur, one of the most astute of our younger critics, highly recommended the book. So I bought it, found it to be all that Blackmur said of it and more, and so pass my feeling along to you. It is the story of foxes which roam over the land of a decaying southern plantation. That's all, and it proves enough. The wise bibliophile will seize upon this book, read it, and hold it for the rising market which may greet his grandchildren.

Hogben's Science for the Citizen has been well advertised and well reviewed. If the average British citizen can take it all in I can't understand the present English crisis. It is a difficult book and you will have to rack your brains a good bit when you read it, but it is all the reviewers have said it was and more than a bargain at five dollars. It contains for the patient and the intelligent a liberal education in science.

The best one volume book on Scotland I have read is John R. Allan's Summer inScotland. (Methuen, 1938.) The author is a Scotsman born in 1906, and he writes with great charm about the truth as he sees it about the fantastic country north of the Tweed. See also Munro Leaf's Wee Gillis (Viking Press, 1938).

I don't think that Vrest Orton, publisher, lover of books, and type expert, will mind if I publish the following note which I received in September. He writes: "I am grateful to you for a new experience .... for what is more exhilarating at my time of life than to have a new author swing into my ken. When you gave me TheBest of Runyon at your house last month, and exercised on me your well known vintage of persuasion .... the same vintage that makes your reviews mean so much, I took the book and said privately to myself: 'Herb has gone nuts .... he is getting excited over a mere sporting writer—a cheap fiction hack for Collier's.' But I took Runyon and read him and by the Living Horn Spoon you were right and my suspicions were wrong. He is good. He is so damned American that it hurts. I can fancy the English going baffy over him. There is nothing they like so well as to think of us

all as Al Capones. But Runyon is doing something more than making in fiction our urban Americans as real and terrifying as they are in life. He is taking evidence of the genus Americanus of the future .... and I suspect, though God forbid, that in another couple of generations, if the young men of today are a good sample, that we shall all be the kind of guys that Damon Runyon writes about, and we shall all marry the kind of Dolls that flit through his pages and raise more of the same kind of moppets. I hate to say so, but I think Runyon is the prophet of the age."

This letter from Vrest reminds me to tell you of How To Put On and Make Successful THE COUNTRY DANCE PARTY, by Beth Tolman, which he recently published. IT is an attractive little pamphlet which will let you in on American folk dancing and music for only a quarter of a dollar (twenty-five cents).

Thanks, Vrest, for everything, and I hope your press is working again in spite of the hurricane and high water.

PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE