Hanover Browsing
Two New Books on Rural New England; Rothenstein's Memoirs; A British Classic on World War I
THE STEPHEN DAYE PRESS specializes in country books, and especially in books about New England. This spring there appeared under their imprint two naturals for anyone collecting, or interested in reading, books about these northeastern states.
NEW ENGLAND TOWN MEETING:SAFEGUARD OF DEMOCRACY, byJohn Gould. Stephen Daye Press, 1940. $1.
John Gould is a Brunswick, Maine, man who here within a compass of 61 pages adequately describes the phenomenon of a New England town meeting. The nu- merous photographs are certainly as re- vealing if not more so than the expository material, and anyone who knows New England will recognize his neighbors and friends wherever he may live. "It's a small world, after all."
"Absolute independence," the author writes, "characterizes Town Meeting. No one tells a Yankee how to vote, no one dictates; and only another Yankee can persuade. In a world where Democracy perishes, and in a country where self-government occupies every thinking mind, it is startling and refreshing to find New England Town Meeting alive and able in the hands of a tight-fisted people who keep their heritage well."
This is the ideal, and the real comes pretty close to it. The Town Meeting described is that of Harpswell, Maine, but this could be matched in hundreds of other New Eng- land towns.
OLD VERMONT HOUSES: THEARCHITECTURE OF A RESOURCE-FUL PEOPLE, written and illustrated by125 photographs taken by the author,Herbert Wheaton Congdon. Stephen Daye
Press, 1940. $3. The oldest frame house standing in Massachusetts was built sometime before 1640; the oldest frame dwelling in Vermont dates from 1763 and is in Bennington.
Mr. Congdon was employed by the Robert Hull Fleming Museum to make photographs of old Vermont buildings. He was specially fitted for this task as he is a trained architect as well as an excellent photographer.
The Stephen Daye Press had long contemplated a book on old Vermont houses, and so as inevitably as b follows a in the alphabet, this book came into being quite inevitably and naturally.
It is an excellent book which can be read with great delight and profit by all literate Vermonters, and by anyone interested in Colonial architecture in New England.
The pictures and the text are adequately welded together, and unlike many books of photographs these are well reproduced on smooth paper without ostentation or flourish.
When I was in college we used to frequent the Candle Glow Inn across the river for tea, toast, buttered scones, and so on. Here you will find two photographs of the Hatch-Peisch house which was our old friend, the C.G.I. Mr. Peisch removed several layers of plaster and paper where we used to dine and laid bare one of the most beautiful panelled rooms in Vermont. (The same where the old Round Robin used to gather for their initiation dinners. Do you remember, Bill?) The staircase, which may be safely negotiated only by a person weighing under fourteen stone, is also reproduced.
This is a book which will long hold a permanent place in the literature of Vermont architecture; you can safely invest the modest price asked for it.
SINCE FIFTY: MEN AND MEMORIES, 1922-1938, Recollections of WilliamRothenstein. The Macmillan Company,N. Y., 1940. $5.00.
Many have read Sir William's two former volumes Men and Memories in which he discusses with considerable acumen and charm his contemporaries in the world of art and literature and many other things besides.
In this third volume of his "memoirs" he carries on in a similar manner. Max Beerbohm, Sickert, Tonks, Augustus John, Earl Baldwin, Ramsay Mac Donald, Barrie, Binyon, Robert Bridges, John Jay Chapman, Degas, De la Mare, and so on through to W. B. Yeats and Ignacio Zuloaga comment, or are commented on. Sir William for the most part has a light touch, and though not as witty as the "incomparable Max," one reads his pages without boredom; in fact with considerable elan.
I, for one, am sorry to see that Rothenstein, best in his portraits, has come to the end of his tether so far as writing memoirs goes.
I used to know his son John, now curator of the Tate Gallery, who once oc- cupied my rooms in Berlin while I was trekking via Sassnitz-Trelleborg to Stock- holm, and unless my memory errs he left with a pair of my pajamas. However, I have been amply repaid for these in the pleasure I have had from reading his father's books.
For all artists, critics, and memoir readers!
Next fall I shall hope to have a list of the best books on the European War, but as this column will not be published for several weeks, and as Hitler may change the map of Europe considerably before then (temporarily change, I trust the wording should be), I deem it inadvisible to recommend any books now. I did get a lot out of the Penguin volume by Harold Nicholson Why Britain is at War, D. N. Pritt's Must The War Spread and Gunther's revised edition of Inside Europe will be of some help.
A book I found of real, genuine, and lasting value" so far as war books go is a compact and readable book published in England by Brigadier General Spears called Prelude To Victory. This is a study of the Nivelle offensive in 1917, which, if you will recall, was a disastrous and tragic failure. I know of no single volume which covers so well the drama, tragic and comic, of modern war. He who reads this book will know more about war as it is fought by men and machines today than any book I know of, and I have read a lot of war books. Spears was liaison officer between the French and the British armies, and he states clearly problems which must still exist for them today. One can only fervently hope that Generalissimo Gamelin has profited by the mistakes of his fellow generals in the First Phase of the New Thirty Years' War. f dare proclaim this a classic on war, and if your library does not have it try to get them to purchase it, or better still order it from your own bookseller. It will only take a matter of six weeks to get it. It has the intensity of a Greek drama, and the interest of a great novel. I consider it my find of the year.
Another book which may have been easily underestimated, but which I think will live, is Henry L. Mencken's nostalgic story of his childhood in Baltimore from 1880 to 1893, called Happy Days. This, together with his The American Language, his Making a President, and his Prefaces, will remain part of the best literature of our time. Mr. Mencken is a great reporter, and a fine scholar, but in Happy Days, he takes on the stature of a genuine creative writer.
You will also like, I think, William McFee's Watch Below, a strictly honest account of life on tramp steamers in the years before the'war. McFee is not a romanticist; he is ail engineer (U. S. Fruit Company ships) who retired to write. He was a good engineer, and he is a thoroughly sound and competent writer. Here I find him just about at his best.
Already out of print and hard to get in a first English edition is Fraser Darling's A Naturalist on Rona, Oxford Press, 1939.
Professor Darling is well known to naturalists for his now famous book AHerd of Red Deer, and in his Rona volume are the "essays of a biologist in isolation," that is, on the lonely and isolated island of Rona, in the Outer Hebrides. As he states: "An island is more than a speck in the sea to a naturalist—it is usually a metropolis of the animal world and a busy port of call for a variety of migrants. The island naturalist is a gnome-like harbour-master and city chamberlain, setting down everything in his little book." In this instance: birds, seal, the red deer, and so on. This is the work of a great naturalist and writer.
Also recommended: Silver Woods by Constance Goddard. Cape, London. A brave story of three girls who inherited and carried on a farm and what became of them.
Any book by Katherine Anne Porter.
Nimrod of the Sea or the AmericajiWhaleman, by William M. Davis. A reprint of this famous American whaling classic issued by Lauriat in Boston in 1926. This book portrays the whaler as he lived and worked in 1846 when over seven hundred vessels under the American flag scoured the seas in search of whale oil.
New England Blockaded 1814, by Henry Edward Napier. Published by the Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, in 1939. This is a journal written by a young lieutenant in H. M. S. Nymphe.
Space forbids further comment, and so farewell, a pleasant summer, and a golf score in the eighties!
ELDER STATESMEN AT MEETINGS OF DARTMOUTH SECRETARIES ASSOCIATION Secretaries of the classes of 1879, '78, '77, and '76, left to right: Rev. Clifford H. Smith,William D. Parkinson, John M. Comstock, Dr. Henry H. Piper.
