Hanover Browsing
BILL MCCARTER '19 loaned me Al Laney's delightful book Paris Herald:The Incredible Newspaper (AppletonCentury, 1947) which 'is a nostalgic account of Paris in the fabulous twenties and of this amazing newspaper which recorded these years. The incredible and astounding character of James Gordon Bennett is well delineated, as is also the character of the strange and curiously admirable Sparrow Robertson who died of a broken heart after the Germans took Paris in 1940. I used to hear a lot about Sparrow during some of those long ago summers in the twenties, gone forever, the times and one's youth, but vivid still are memories of the Deux Magots, the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the Paris repercussions (the summer of 1927), the beautiful and misty atmosphere which haunts Notre Dame on an early morning, and all the rest. For those of you who were in your twenties, and knew Paris in those days, this is your book.
Alumni who are interested commercially or aesthetically in the modern American music industry may well find use for The ASCAP Biographical Dictionary of Composers, Authors, and Publishers published by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1948. There are more than two thousand items, biographies of 1870 composers, 303 publishers, and so on.
A. E. Coppard has now reached the age o£ seventy though to me he still remains the young man I used to hear about in Jake Schwartz's Ulysses Bookshop near the British Museum some fifteen or twenty years ago. Like Charles Lamb he was for many years a clerk in a London business firm until he abandoned it for a full time career of writing in 1919. He never had the luck of a Bill Mauldin or a Private Hargrove, or of the man who wrote Gus the Great, all of whom got rich on one book. I fancy Coppard will, be read when these people are forgotten (already?) but he never made the kind of money that he deserved to make, say a hundredth of what the above boys coined in a month. Mr. Knopf, ably assisted by Earl E. Fisk of Green Bay and the incomparable W. A. Dwiggins, has just turned out The Collected Talesof A. E. Coppard which contains thirtyeight of Coppard's best stories. Nobody achieves quite the same quality that Coppard gets in his prose. It is magical, fanciful, evocative, and almost defies description. It is the product of a Machenesque mind saturated in the beauty of life and composed of the wisdom of a poet. If you want to read some of the best prose of the century, something delicate and as pure as morning dew, buy and read this Coppard volume. It should bring balm to your soul.
Harvey Curtis Webster has written an interesting study of Thomas Hardy called On a Darkling Plain (University of Chicago Press, 1947). It is an attempt to present the evolution of Hardy's thought and its effect upon his art. He trys to show that Hardy was influenced by German pessimism, and it is true that Hardy did own a translation of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea. Webster points out that Hardy's inconsistencies kept him from being a mechanistic determinist. If this book turns you once again to Hardy's own work, notably TheDynasts and his best novels, then it will have earned its way.
To me the most interesting town in the United States is Concord, Massachusetts. So I found entertaining, and instructive, Townsend Scudder's Concord: AmericanTown (Little, Brown, 1947)- From the Indian times to the present Scudder tells of Concord, its worthies, its Golden Age, and so on. I found out two new facts (former Comparative Literature 13 men please note ): one, that John Thoreau died of lockjaw following the infection of a cut inflicted while stropping a razor (blood-poisoning and no penicillin), and that Thoreau sold the boat he and his brother took on the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Hawthorne for $7.
David Heald '42 loaned me Charles C. Wertenbacker's brutal story Write Sorrow on the Earth (Holt, 1947) which concerns the Maquis. One of the characters, Dave told me, was based on Robert Capa, War Photographer No. 2. Not for the squeamish.
I have found quite fascinating R. V. C. Bodley, a friend of Owen Lattimore's, author of Wind in the Sahara, and the more recent The Quest (Robert Hale, London, 1947). Bodley lived seven years with the Arabs, and then lived in the East for several years before the war. He was searching for the meaning of life, and though he never found it, even as Montaigne never did, he writes of his search with a most readable style, and in a most charming manner. An excellent book.
