Hanover Browsing
MOST people prefer to be confirmed in their views, especially on religion, rather than otherwise, and so many will condemn unread, the controversial book, The Nazarene Gospel, written by the poet Robert Graves and Joshua Podro.
Mr. Graves is the well known author of I. Claudius, King Jesus, White Goddess (an inquiry into the origins of the poetic tradition), and the war novel Good-Bye toAll That, as well as us several books of poetry. Mr. Podro is a Hebrew scholar whose extensive researches into Jewish history and literature provide much of the scholarly substance of the book. So it may be said that this book is a product of the poetic and creative imagination of Graves and the scholarship of Podro. It is certainly an overwhelming book of nearly one thousand pages, but whether it proves its thesis, better and more knowledgeable men than I must decide. I can only say that I found it amazingly persuasive.
The book tends to prove that Jesus was simply a great Jewish teacher, preaching to the Jews, and to the Jews alone. The corollary to this is therefore that all the structure of Christian theology and ethics is a later accretion added by men who were, for the most part, alien to his thought.
Certainly the New Testament is often inconsistent and frequently anachronistic, the result partly of editorial carelessness and partly of the overzealousness of those commentators who, dissatisfied with Christ's actual career, distorted the Gospels to suit their particular needs and the needs of the religion that Paul was determined to found in Christ's name.
Mr. Graves states his case: "All available evidence goes to show that the original Nazarene Gospel was terse, factually accurate and intellectually satisfying to those chosen students of law and the prophets for whom it was primarily intended. But Gentile heretics pirated it, mistranslated it into pedestrian Greek, recast it, and then subjected it to a century long process of emendation. ... Judged by Greek literary standards it is poor; by historical standards, unreliable; and its doctrine is confused and contradictory."
Miss du Maurier's Mary Anne was a Book of the Month Club choice which means that it must have pleased a lot of readers. We gave the book serious reviews. The British do these things better, as witness this: "Miss du Maurier's MaryAnne is an immense piece of historical embroidery, in which you can see every stitch. Mary Anne Clark was the mistress of, among many others, the Duke of York, who commanded the British forces against Napoleon. Her rise, decline and fall follows a pattern which should fit, like tailor-made, the demands of the circulating library, the cinema, and even the musicalcomedy stage."
Doubleday's "Anchor Books" continue to be of absorbing interest. Above all you must purchase and read a collection of Essays by George Orwell, which will introduce you, if an introduction is needed, to one of the finest writers of our time. Also note Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture ofHumanism, G. M. Young's Victorian England, and others equally worth while.
Dr. William Howells, grandson of the novelist, is an anthropologist, and has written in his Back of History, an eminently readable book for the layman about man from his earliest beginnings down to the outset of recorded history.
To go with this, for the younger set, and for the oldsters as well, I can recommend a really magnificent pictorial survey of the earth features (with relief maps on flat pages): The Wonderful World: The Adventure of the Earth We Live On. This is a Hanover House book and would make an excellent birthday or Christmas present for boy or girl.
Corey Ford has found a perfect collaborator in R. Taylor in his amusing (and so true) Never Say Diet (Holt). Having lost poundage this summer, I thought the book struck a most understanding and sympathetic note.
René Lecler's Sahara amused both Bella C. Landauer and myself this past summer. It is really a popular history of the desert and the men who have lived and died there to open this wild area to the world. Our own John Ledyard has a paragraph on page 73.
A grim novel of the past war, which is not exactly hammock reading but, instead, another episode in the long record of man's inhumanity to man, may be found in Manés Sperber's Journey Without End, about guerilla fighting in Poland and Yugoslavia.
George R. Stewart, a friend in California, is a most gifted and versatile writer on the American scene. His last book, which I enjoyed very much, is AmericanWays of Life (Doubleday). This is an account of our land, people, language, religion, food, drink, clothing, shelter, arts, holidays, personal names, and so on. Highly recommended.
