So Much More

After fifteen years at the College I thought I knew it well. But the two years I had as reviews editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine helped me to know it better in a most important way. Dartmouth's best-kept secret must be its having among its alumni a whole bunch of intellectuals of the first rank, as well as creative types experts in any field you care to choose and many articulate leaders-of opinion. I knew, of course, that we had all those kinds of people in the faculties of the College and the professional schools (and reviewing their books, and getting them to write reviews, was my concern as well), but I was not prepared for the richness and variety of the life of the mind that this assignment allowed me to savor.

I owe too much to Dartmouth, love it too dearly, to be willing to risk any misunderstanding of what I have just said; so I want to expand on it. I knew, of course, that there were many notable intellectuals and distinguished professional people in the alumni body. Honary degrees have been awarded to one or more of them at almost every commencement I have been to. Some of them have been familiar names for years Carlos Baker, Francis Steegmuller, Richard Eberhart, Budd Schulberg, to cite a few who come to mind without any thought at all. I took it for granted that graduates from every class had gone into university teaching. Dartmouth is, after all, a place that for decades now has offered its students exceptional resources for the cultivation of the intellect; there is no way that such an institution could fail to produce graduates of international standing. But somehow I had fallen into a trap.

Dartmouth's very distinctiveness as an institution tends, I think, to make the generalizations about it particularly potent; and if you make the mistake as I did of allowing those generalizations to become too general, you end up underestimating the place woefully. What generalizations? That Dartmouth is "jock" and provincial and bourgeois, for one/two/three. That its "significant positive impact" on society comes overridingly

from Dartmouth alumni whose minds have been to some extent touched by the liberal arts and whose characters have been to some extent formed by four years in an honorable, if somewhat homogeneous, community but the vast majority of whom go into the middle management of the business world and the professions that interact with it, rather than to the cutting edge of either. That if it has any fame as a center of learning, a place where the intellect comes before everything else (as distinct from a place that is a superior institution of higher education not by any means the same thing), that fame is of recent vintage.

Allowing those generalizations to obscure everything else does a tremendous disservice to an institution that is so much more than the sum of the generalizations about it. And because my stint as reviews editor brought me into contact with so much of that so much more I will be forever grateful for having had the chance to hold the job. And my gratitude led to my thinking I should jot down a few thoughts about the experience, and so share it.

The reviews editor is hit first by the frequency with which the Dartmouth Family produces books! In the 26 months from my initiation into the reviewing business to the present day (even though I am now two months into my "retirement," I keep an eye on things while the search for my successor goes on) 165 books have arrived on my desk. (That works out to one every five days.) 85 of them have received, or are due to receive, a full review; and the other 80 have been, or will be, written about in the "Dartmouth Authors" section. This seems to me quite extraordinary for a College of our size the smallest in the Ivy League.

One of the principal ways in which the reviews editor earns his stipend, by the way, is in making the judgment calls between full reviews and D.A. notices. It is sometimes far from easy. Is a given book of sufficient general interest to warrant a 500-word essay, or is its subject matter so specialized, its appeal likely to be so limited, that a short paragraph of destription by the reviews editor himself is all that makes sense? Besides the basic decision-making, there is also the reading and writing that go into the "Dartmouth Authors," and there are four other kinds of work that keep one's conscience clear in depositing the paychecks: deciding who should write a review; persuading him/her (or the second or third or fourth or fifth choice) to write it; letting publishers have copies of the printed reviews; and tracking down the books in the first place.

A great deal of that last chore is done for you. Most authors want to see their books reviewed as widely as possible, and they arrange for their publisher to send a copy to the Magazine. Indeed I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that many major publishing houses (and most university presses) don't need a nudge from their authors: they regard alumni magazines as obvious reviewers. But some publishers are tight-fisted or inefficient, and some authors are too modest, or too busy, or uninterested in a Dartmouth review; and then the reviews editor, having been alerted to the existence of a new "Dartmouth book" by another alumnus, perhaps, or by a display in Baker Library has to get on the blower or to the typewriter and haul in a copy.

I know quite clearly how to rank these six tasks in terms of pleasure received. Certainly the most tedious, least pleasurable, is supplying publishers with copies of reviews; which is doubtless why I carried a backlog of such obligations into retirement. (I will get them out soon.) Next to the bottom of the list is the tracking down; and then comes the "Dartmouth Authors" grind (though I have to admit that I've been forced to read into some fascinating books I otherwise wouldn't have dreamed of opening); and after that the business of deciding on that "what is of general interest" dividing line. Which leaves at the top of the list the really enjoyable (even if it's occasionally frustrating) work of figuring out who should be asked to write a review, and then finding the right persuasive words with which to put the question.

It was those last two tasks that brought me the enlightenment and exhilaration I mentioned earlier the discoveries that have altered and expanded my view of the Dartmouth Family. I've turned to associates in Blunt who know the alumni body well (people such as Mike McGean, Nancy Elliott, Ad Winship) and to long-time teachers who keep in touch with those they've taught (colleagues such as Charlie Wood, Bill Slesnick, Jim Cox, Jere Daniell); and they have given me leads to remarkable people I would never have known about otherwise, alumni or members of the faculty who have the expertise (often in a subject other than their principal specialty), taste, judgment, and eloquence that a good review calls for and a good book deserves.

The constant need to find high-quality reviewers has also made me more enterprising than I would ordinarily be in "making connections" within my own 15-years-a-growing circle of friends and acquaintances within the Family. So I recall some especially pleasing pairings of book and reviewer. One such was that of having an alumnus's book about the emotional.trauma of severe physical injury reviewed by an orthopaedic surgeon at the Med School who is both a brilliant teacher and an amputee. And I remember fondly tracking down the right person to review Dikkon Eberhart's multi-faceted novel Paradise by calling on the data bank in Charlie Wood's memory and finding, out about a medico alumnus out in Utah, who knew and cared about all the facets. (Before I had the sense to ask for help, the response to "You wouldn't happen to be interested in Medieval Christianity and sailing and the topography and native peoples of the state of Maine, would you?" had been one form or another of "Damn right!")

I think of asking Dick Eberhart to review his classmate Richmond Lattimore's latest (alas, last) book of poems; of getting a Norwich landowner and livestock tender, Leonard Rieser, to review the latest set of essays from Noel Perrin about owning land and tending livestock in Thetford; of getting Bernard Nossiter '47 (at that time New York Times bureau chief at the United Nations) to write about Arthur Macy Cox's book about "the superpower game." I recall too the surprise of discovering that John Kemeny is a devotee of detective stories, something so intriguing that I decided that, even though it will have to wait until he's invented True Basic, and done several other more urgent things, his was the review I wanted of a bibliography of detective stories set on college campuses, compiled by an alumnus and his Dartmouth undergraduate son. The JGK review is one long-time-a-coming legacy I am leaving behind; the other is an essay on the first volume of Daniel Webster's diplomatic papers that Ronald Spiers '48, the College's highestranking alumnus in the Foreign Service, is preparing during the very occasional moments free from administering the State Department.

The list could go on and on. Tracking anglers both knowledgeable and articulate enough to do justice to Dana Lamb's The Fishing's Only Part of It; getting Edmund Muskie's presidential campaign manager to review his classmate Jeffrey Hart's book about the fifties; finding out what a wealth of talent there is among Dartmouth's Maineiacs; assigning to Frank Smallwood's book on third-party candidates the man who I subsequently discovered had helped draft the legislation about campaign financing that made possible the kind of campaign John Anderson ran in 1980. In the process of all the inquiring and phoning, I came to realize that Dartmouth alumni are senior professors at just about every major university in the country, from Columbia on one coast to Stanford on the other; that some of them hold endowed chairs at such prestigious places as the Harvard and Yale Law Schools; that umpteen alumni are at the tops of their various fields in journalism, science and technology, administration of all kinds, diplomacy, medicine, public affairs, etc., etc. That list too could go on and on.

There will be some frustrations ahead for my successor, as well as all the pleasures. It turns out, for example, to be very difficult to get one poet to write about another (and what a treasury of poetry there is in the Family). And you have to give to reviewers so many books you would love to hold on to for yourself. And I can report that in trying to find reviewers for thrillers, I had no success whatever in turning up any alumnus or faculty colleague who would own up to being, or ever having been, a spy. But all that means is that I didn't find the right person to ask for a lead.

"Where Every Prospect Pleases"

VIEWS AND VIEWMAKERS OF URBAN AMERICA: Lithographs of Tozvns and Cities in the United States and Canada, Notes on the Artists and Publishers, and a Union Catalog of Their Work, 1825-1925. By John W. Reps '43, University of Missouri Press, 1984. 586pp., $89.50.

This is a wonderful book! The pricetag (though entirely justified by what you get for it) will put off all but the wealthy and the fanatical, but this review is intended to encourage its readers to see that copies are purchased for their local libraries. Quite apart from any other consideration, it is a splendid example of high quality book production, a delight to look at, and, notwithstanding its considerable bulk, a pleasure to handle. Its design makes the narrative chapters easily readable (not, by any means, something to be taken for granted with a 9" x 12" page) and the catalog section is a model of its kind. The numerous plates are handsomely printed and the various charts and lists of data incorporated in the text are set out with unusual skill and taste. What the book has to tell us is so well told that one is left with the feeling that form and content come closer to a perfect union than we have any right to expect in this imperfect world.

What we are told is, one gathers, just about all there is to be told about the "views" of American and Canadian towns and cities, thousands of which were drawn (the catalog lists 4480 of them, depicting more than 2400 different communities), and hundreds of thousands printed and sold, most of them during the second half of the last century. To begin with, such pictures did not amount to much more than drawings of a town's skyline the view one would get from the best existing piece of high ground near the community but from about 1860 on, the various artists increasingly used a technique long employed in Europe, and drew the places as though seen from an imaginary vantage-point high off the ground. They gave their clients a "bird's-eye view" and how extraordinarily effective the results could be! Has Boston, for example, ever been seen to better advantage than in the gorgeous 1877 lithograph which adorns the book's dust-jacket? No wonder civic pride was called forth, and no wonder that substantial sales were the publishers' reward in such cases.

Professor Reps, who teaches city and regional planning at Cornell, gives us ten chapters setting forth in elegant prose the entire history of the phenomenon, dealing with the context in which the business of view-making flourished, with the technology involved, and the marketing techniques, the commerce, the artistry, the public's response, and the current usefulness of studying the 4480 survivors. And in a section I found particularly fascinating (for I have a great fondness for the commemoration of the lives of obscure and forgotten enrichers of our culture) he writes brief biographies of 51 of the view-makers whose work he deals with in the book.

For the lay person there is a particular attractiveness in the way in which what I take to be impeccable scholarship is offered to us in a text which endearingly reveals so much of the scholar's personality. The extent to which the creation of this book was a labor of love for a deeply knowledgeable and engagingly humane man is very apparent. I could cite many sentences that made me wish I knew John Reps as a colleague; here are two from the preface: "Nothing would please me more than to find a description of a print now unknown to me accompanied by the slightly triumphant or mildly reproachful annotation, 'not in Reps.' Nothing would please me less than to hear from a museum whose staff ignored my questionnaires asking about their holdings but now reporting that it has long owned some lithograph that I failed to record." I like that kind of unabashed pride and candor.

I find myself struck by the fact that there is no present-day equivalent of those prints that were so very popular, hanging in their elaborate frames in parlors and offices all over the nation in our great-grandparents' day. In a 1930 article based on an interview with one of the last survivors among the men who made them, a journalist observed how the viewmakers' monopoly had by then been broken: "Now the airplane cameras are covering the territory and can put more towns on paper in a day than was possible in months by hand work formerly." But in fact one never sees a photographic city-view on the walls of anyone's home, and hardly ever in anyone's office or waiting-room. Perhaps it's a decline in civic pride or municipal boosterism that accounts for it; but my hunch, reinforced by the enjoyment of discovering this book, is that it's at least as much the result of the absence of the hand and eye of the artist (however minor) that takes away that touch of magic that made all the difference.

Finally, if your local librarians are reluctant to shell out $90 just on an enthusiastic layman's say-so, you might refer them to the expert evaluation of the book in The New York Times Book Review for April 15, 1984. That it was written by another Dartmouth alumnus, Professor William Morgan '66, is a, for us happy, for them irrelevant, coincidence.

Peter Smith, Director Emeritus of the Hopkins Center, with this delightful essay, "So Much More," and equally delightful review of Reps' Views, winds down, in appropriately dignified fashion, his term as reviews editor for the Magazine. His tenure as editor has added dimensions of pleasure for those of us here on the Magazine staff, for Peter s sense of what life is all about and how it should be enjoyed has left its mark on all of us. I suspect that the term "style" doesn't adequately account for his erudition or grace, but then again, those latter terms don't begin to describe the only man I know who looks just right wearing no belt and a slightly rumpled shirt.