Hanover Browsing

Recommended Reading of the Month Ranges from the Sea To Chefs, Cheeses, and the Middle Ages

SOMETIME AGO I received a whacking good sea story from England, and knowing his love for such I turned it over to Mr. Norman Stevenson '05, who has reviewed it in the "Suggestions" column in a fashion which would please the author and any other with a knowledge and feeling for the ships and the sea. It is one of the finest sea stories I have ever read and any who wish to get it can do so by asking their bookseller to order it from England. The publisher is Geoffrey Bles.

After formally reviewing three books sent me for review I shall chat on as usual about a few others that are worth your time.

Portrait of a Chef: The Life of AlexisSoyer, by Helen Morris. Cambridge: At the University Press; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938. $3.

I confess that before I read this entertaining and enlightening book I had never heard of Alexis Soyer, and probably few of my readers have heard of him. Rex Stout and Lucius Beebe may know of him; also historians of the nineteenth century. But he deserves to be known by a far larger audience than the solons mentioned above. Not only was he a famous chef (London Reform Club), but he was eccentric, human, man, humorous, a prodigious inventor, writer of best sellers along culinary lines, friend of. the mighty and the many, organizer of army cooking in the Crimean War (collaborating with the more famous Florence Nightingale), and all in all a thoroughly loveable person.

Miss Morris tells all; all, that is, about the bric-a-brac nineteenth century during the reign of the matronly Queen Victoria. What a prodigious age it was! What dinners! What banquets! What decoration! What clothes! What furniture! What waste! What poverty, humbug, extravagance, and vulgarity! And yet, compared with our age, it seems as peaceful, safe, and secure as the territory somewhat ironically called "Little America", haunted only by Adelie and Emperor penguins, Weddel seals, and the Killer Whales, all harmless, save the latter, and they are house pets compared to the realistic gentleman (I use the word inadvisedly) now ruling many of the chancellories of Europe and Asia. The Victorian age bred men who could eat a meal which would to-day make a hungry tiger turn green just to contemplate it. (See the menu of the banquet given at the Reform Club to Ibrahim Pasha in 1846.)

We used to, and perhaps still do, speak sneeringly of the nineteenth century. Here it is. Read and judge again. The book will hold your interest throughout.

Medieval Panorama, by G. G. Coulton. Cambridge: At the University Press; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938. .$4.

Many are now looking back, with a faint nostalgia in their hearts, for the Middle Ages: an era considered by them one of unity and peace. To-day they can see only chaos, caused by excessive nationalism, a naturalistic deterministic philosophy, jungle economics, and the tendency to "get down on all fours" to settle differences. Whatever merit there may be in this point of view, and I haven't the space here to go into the matter, the fact remains that for several decades, ever since the Oxford Movement of Newman and Keble, more and more interest has been shown in this period.

Without question one of the greatest scholars of this era is Dr. G. G. Coulton. He is not alone a scholar but he has the ability to breathe life into a period we assume, in our ignorance, to be quite dead and without interest. The period which produced Chaucer could not be without fascination. That this knowledge be not restricted to a small group of ineffectual scholars the author has written this magnificent book for all intelligent readers. In it is the knowledge of a lifetime: a prodigious amount of learning disgorged with a charm, a calmness, a restraint, a tolerance, of a gentleman and scholar. The effect of the book for a time is bewildering: so much does it contain; and then you slowly realize that you have been witness to the beginning of a movement toward human enlightenment and freedom, which is, I feel sure, going to be continuous, even if, for the moment, it seems to be a state of paralysis. I do not believe that the cumulative effects of seven or eight centuries can be long blocked by the obfuscating philosophies of a few megalomaniacs. I hold this belief in spite of the fact that modern science has put such devastating weapons into their childish hands. Their puerile philosophies seem gossamer: shallow, silly, cruel, stupid, greedy and mean, compared to the richness, universality, and great dignity of many of the medieval concepts. That was a great age, but let us not romanticize it. It had terrible faults, but there is much reason to believe that our own age, far more barbarous than that of six centuries ago, cannot survive without some of the humanism, reasoning, and Christian ethics of that period. This is a book worthy of the most astute reader. It is a book, rich, complete, and "of a certain magnitude". Dr. Coulton must be a hidalgo: "the son of somebody", and for the price of a football ticket you can have for life all the learning, charm, and beauty possible from the brain and soul of a great man.

will surely want to learn the taste of these cheeses, rather than endure longer the mass-production processed cheeses which we get in quantity in America, and also alas, in England, after he has read this book. Presumably the art of making cheese is dying out: one more thing for Colonel Blimp to lament. With England as it is I should think they would want to hold on to their traditional cheeses. I trust the inference is clear. Cheddar Gorge: A Book of EnglishCheeses, edited by John Squire. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1938. $3. In spite of its subject this is something light again. Ernest H. Shepard, delightful illustrator of Pepys and the fantasies of A. A. Milne, does the subject full justice, in, shall I say, his inimitable way. Various writers which include Sir John Squire, Osbert Burdett, Oliver St. J. Gogarty, Andre L. Simon (author of Bottlescrew Days, a book about wine drinking in 18th century England), and Horace Annesley Vachell, write about Stilton, Cheddar, Chesire, Irish, Blue Vinny, Double Gloucester, Wensleydale, and other famous English cheeses. Now that Fortnum and Mason have left New York, and Charles has recently, having been streamlined, folded up, where can an American lover of English cheese satisfy his desires? Because he

Two good "Westerns".

Mountain Men, by Stanley Vestal. Houghton Mifflin.

Powder River, by Struthers Burt. Farrar and Rinehart.

Both of these tell of the fabulous men who settled the West; fur traders and trappers who could shoot a squirrel so far distant that it was invisible to the naked eye; who could support themselves in a Wyoming winter with nothing but a gun, a ramrod, powder, and half a dozen cartridges; who could beat the Indians in scalping, riding, shooting, and hunting; who could lassoo an eagle in flight; who could swear, spit further, drink more than Robert Rogers; and finally who had the vitality of a horned toad.

HISTORY OF WYOMING

Powder River is in Wyoming and its history marks for me the high spot so far in Farrar's "Rivers of America" series. Anyone, who in "the good old days" read Owen Wister's The Virginian, will want to brush up their interest in the history of this western state, and for sheer interest and easy going I recommend Burt's book for this purpose. It begins with the days of the trappers, then into the cattle and sheep days, and finally to the dude ranching era. Famous Indians: Crazy Horse, Rain-in-the-Face, Sitting Bull, and He-Who Goes-Al-ways-With-An Umbrella, ride gallantly through the pages fighting for King and Country. George Armstrong Custer struts his part at Little Big Horn, and only in my own lifetime, has peace finally come to the beautiful Powder River Country. Someday, as Conrad once said pointing to the Congo, "I shall go there."

For those who can still read about the Spanish "War" I can recommened without reservation Malraux's Man's Hope (Random House). He ends it thus: "For the first time Manuel was hearing the voice of that which is more awe-inspiring even than the blood of men, more enigmatic even than their presence on the earth—the infinite possibilities of their destiny. And he felt that this new consciousness within him was linked up with the sounds of running water in the street and the footfalls of the prisoners, profound and permanent as the beating of his heart."

Let's believe this as we begin the year 1939.

PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE