Hanover Browsing

HERE are a few recommendations after a summer of writing, painting, and reading.

Incidentally, and this isn't very important, this is my 25th year as Hanover Browser. I have enjoyed doing it and find it as easy as rolling off a log. I do appreciate the fact that without readers it would not have lasted so long. Here's to you!

Thomas Henry Tibbies died in 1928. But his book, Buckskin and Blanket Days, has just appeared. He was born in 1840 and had wide experiences with the Western Indians. He never spoke with a forked tongue and the Indians liked and trusted him. So what he says about them, the way the whites treated them (not a pretty story), buffalo hunting, and so on, makes for interesting and informative reading. Tibbies was not a trained literary man but his book is stronger for that. Its honesty and authenticity are evident throughout. There are wide time gaps in his narrative. The Civil War, for example, is scarcely mentioned. I understand that the book was written in 1905, and now, more than fifty years later, it sees the light. It is not a classic but it is a faithful and, at times, illuminating picture of pioneer days in the West. The publisher, Doubleday, is to be congratulated on publishing a real find.

Roger W. Straus Jr. is an astute publisher and three of his latest books found real favor with me. The TichborneClaimant, by Douglas Woodruff, was received with deserved acclaim in England. I feel confident that this is the last word on one of the most famous impersonation cases in history. What was most unusual in this case was that it was the judgment of the jury and the judge that Arthur Orton, son of a Wapping butcher, passed himself off as someone whom he had never met or seen. Sir Roger Tichborne. Sir Roger's mother accepted him as her long-lost son. The country, and Tichborne's relatives, became hotly divided, and a long trial for perjury followed the trial for false impersonation. The Times could write, with pardonable exaggeration, that no other subject had engrossed the human mind for so long. Woodruff ends his' book: "The great doubt still hangs suspended. Probably for ever now, its key long since lost amid the irresponsible lawlessness, deceptions and transientaliases, and the homicides, of the mid-Victorian Australian bush, a mystery remains; and the strange enigma of the man who lost himself still walks in history with no other name than that which the common voice of his day accorded him: the Claimant." All readers of mystery stories will find this fascinating.

Coup de Grace, the new novel by the talented Marguerite Yourcenar, is a story of the civil war between the White Russians and Bolshevism. It is artistically done but amazingly brutal in conveying the sad truth about modern Europe. Perhaps the main virtue of the book, aside from its artistic excellence, is that it forces one to see, and to feel, what revolution really means.

Colette has many admirers for she was certainly one of the great writers of this century. Her husband, Maurice Goudeket, in his intimate portrait of her, Close toColette, earns the thanks of her admirers for his admirable effort at making clear something of her enigmatic self. Her genius, of course, still remains a mystery. I agree with Harold Nicolson when he says in the introduction: "I am sure you will enjoy this entrancing portrait, often amusing, often deeply moving, of a woman of genius and courage."

Some of my readers must know Ray Bradbury for his science fiction, especially Fahrenheit 451. In his latest book Dandelion Wine (with a most fetching dust wrapper) he tells the sensitive story of one Douglas Spaulding and the magic of one summer in his youth, 1928, when he became aware of life and its beauties and sadness. Well done. Doubleday is the publisher.

I have been interested in the old West along with millions of others and can recommend three books now before me. First, a reprint of James H. Cook's FiftyYears on the Old Frontier (with a foreword by Frank Dobie). Cook was cowboy, ranch boss, big game hunter and Indian scout, and here reveals the violence which was an essential part of our Western history. Oklahoma University Press published this one and the two following.

The other two are Prairie & MountainSketches by Matthew C. Field, which is a record of a fabulous "party of pleasure to the Rocky Mountains," led by Sir William Drummond Stewart. Field accompanied this trip in 1843 and here published in full for the first time is his account of it.

The last is a re-issue of Stanley Vestal's Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux. This was the first biography of a great American Indian and is still the best.