PARNASSUS CORNER: A LIFE OF JAMES T. FIELDS, PUBLISHER TO THE VICTORIANS,

By W.S. Tryon '23.Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, TheRiverside Press, 1963. 384 pp.; Bibliography and notes 44 pp. $7.00.

"Fields did not create the Augustan writers, but he did create the market for their wares and thereby the acceptance of their ideas and the acknowledgment of their resulting fame. However vulgar it may seem to sensitive intellectuals, to turn away from the activities of this businessman, to ignore his contributions to literature is to deal dangerously with the facts and to substitute mythology for history."

Professor Tryon here states in the very foreword of his biography of James T. Fields not only his warrant for telling some gardener's facts about what made it possible for New England to "flower" in the middle of the 19th Century, but he does more. He demonstrates throughout the book how much of what fills the pages of literary history got there because of the manipulation of public taste to suit the personal idiosyncrasies, financial ambitions, and cherished purposes of an individual man. This is the stuff of biography: to present honest evidence of the significance of a single man within the context of his times. How is it that Carlyle puts it in his Burns? "You shall show what and how produced was the effect of Society upon him? What and how produced was his effect upon Society?"

The fact that Fields' adoration of Charles Dickens helped to stuff the pocket books of both men is no shock to a biographer. The human race metabolizes on mixed motives. But the fact that Fields so loved literature that he made it the joyous means of earning a very good living played a major role in forming the literary taste of America in mid-Century and, what should impress the friends of liberal arts anywhere, it provided stimulating comfort to the souls of those who produced, whether as authors, as critics, or, God save the mark, as teachers. One may well quote again from the last sentences of the book, in speaking of the tributes paid at the time of his death to this father of American promoters, where the author says: "Yet above all else he would have been pleased most by their accounts of his genial personality, his cheerfulness, standing, for these were the things he most believed in, toward which he had directed his whole existence, and which had returned to him, like the favored child of Fortune he was, the spiritual satisfactions of the good life."

Parnassus Corner is a massively-informed and documented story of the head gardener in the flowering of New England. It is also a monument of scholarship on the side not of the piece work pedants nor the faculty recruiting pens, but of the devotees of the record of human performance.

Professor of Biography