Books: Leif the Lucky to Lincoln

Leif the Lucky to Lincoln

THE MARCH OF DEMOCRACY, Vol. 1, The Rise of the Union—James Truslow Adams—Scribner ($3.50).

No one who has read his books would accuse James Truslow Adams of being a merely theoretical historian, in spite of his recent best-selling thesis, The Epic of America (TIME, Oct. 5, 1931). Conscious of the fact that no historian can afford to theorize too much, that his function is primarily to record rather than interpret, Historian Adams has manfully tackled a man-size job: a recasting in up-to-date terms of U. S. history. Believing that one of those terms is brevity, he has condensedhis facts into two moderate volumes (the second is announced for February).

“The simplicity of the older writing of history,” says Mr. Adams, ”dealing almost wholly with wars and politics, has long since passed. The story of how 13 small agricultural dependencies became the Federal nation of today … is a story which must be woven of many strands. . . . History, like human nature, is vastly complex. There is no one key—economics, religion, politics or what-not—to an understanding of the whole.” Striking a nice balance between economics, religion, politics & whatnot, Mr. Adams in 411 pages carries his complicated tale from its dark beginnings to the red dawn of the Civil War—roughly, from Leif the Lucky to Lincoln. An authoritative but readable writer, he knows how to be detailed without being pedantic, how to simplify without condensing or omitting too much.

First agreeable surprise is the number, variety, excellence of the illustrations— not only maps and pictures of famed fights but contemporary cartoons, handbills, advertisements, facsimiles of newspapers, local currency, early views of U. S. cities—some 174 in all. Calligraphy experts will admire, laymen will be amazed at the legibility of William Bradford’s handwriting (1620). Paul Revere’s engraving of a lively caricature will be a reminder that Patriot Revere was not chiefly known in his own day as a midnight rider. The blandishments of a Continental Army recruiting poster evidently set a style that has lasted into our own day: ”Those . . . who shall embrace this opportunity of spending a few happy years in viewing the different parts of this beautiful continent, in the honorable and truly respectable character of a soldier, after which, he may, if he pleases return home to his friends, with his pockets full of money and his head covered with laurels.” A photograph of Manhattan’s waterfront in 1855 (from a model) is as realistic as a newsreel. Other plums are the 1835 masthead of the Manhattan Herald and an advertisement of a performance of Hamlet (1788), significantly disguised as “a moral lecture, in five parts, called Filial Piety.”

Author Adams’ text, on which these illustrations form an apt and lively comment, will appeal to a public that wants a history to read instead of study. Fellow-historians may find flaws, but to judge from Vol. 1, The March of Democracy will tell all and more than every schoolboy, every U. S. citizen should know about U. S. history.

The Author. By popular acclaim foremost contemporary U. S. historian, James Truslow Adams spends most of his time in England—not to avoid the U. S. scene but to get a clearer, more historical view of it. Biographer of Massachusetts’ famed Adams family but no relation to it, Adams was born of Virginia stock in Brooklyn, is a Manhattanite emeritus. Last January he resigned from the Pulitzer Prize history committee on the grounds of his residence in London. He took his bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, his master’s at Yale, one of his doctorates (of railroads) in Wall Street, retired from business in 1912 to study history. Other books: Founding of New England (1921 Pulitzer History Prize). Revolutionary New England, Our Business Civilization.

Phoenix

THE LETTERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE— With an Introduction by Aldous Huxley —Viking ($5).

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER—D. H. Lawrence—Knopf ($2.50).

Like the ghostly emanations once thought to hover around dead bodies, posthumous books still give their authors a kind of ghostly currency. So frequent and lively have been the emanations from the late prolific Edgar Wallace that his publishers have had to issue a denial that a ghost was writing them and an admission that more are still to come. But in the case of David Herbert Lawrence these two books are the windup of his literary affairs. Any further remarks from the tomb can hardly affect his reputation one way or the other. Until the critic grave-robbers begin digging his dust (as his so-called friend John Middleton Murry did last year: TIME, May 4, 1931),* he and his works are now finished.

Lawrence himself, says friendly Editor Aldous Huxley, cared nothing for even literary immortality. Though he was no journalist, he wrote out of an immediate need for what he felt should be an immediate audience. “It was characteristic of him that he hardly ever corrected or patched what he had written. … If he was dissatisfied … he rewrote.” Consequently his letters read more naturally than most authors’. In this 893-page collection, from which letters to Mabel Dodge Luhan (Lorenzo in Taos) are notably absent, you may follow his eleven-year hegira over Europe, Australia, the U. S., trace the progress of his love-affair with Baroness von Richthofen, first another man’s wife, then Lawrence’s, the tides of his friendships and quarrels, equally didactic and wholehearted. To Lady Ottoline Morrell he wrote: “Today we have a letter from Bertie [Bertrand Russell] : very miserable. He doesn’t know why he lives at all: mere obstinacy and pride, he says, keep him alive.” Middleton Murry shows curious humility in allowing some of the letters Lawrence wrote him to be published. Lawrence to Murry: “You remember saying, T love you, Lorenzo, but I won’t promise not to betray you?’ W7ell, you can’t betray me, and that’s all there is to that. Ergo, just leave off loving me. Let’s wipe off all that Judas-Jesus slime. Remember, you have betrayed everything and everybody up to now.” Critics may dig long before they strike a better summation of Lawrence than one he gives himself: “And my Cockneyism and commonness are only when the deep feeling doesn’t find its way out, and a sort of jeer comes instead, and sentimentality, and purplism. But you should see the religious, earnest, suffering man in me first, and then the flippant or common things after. Mrs. Garnett says I have no true nobility—with all my cleverness and charm. But that is not true. It is there, in spite of all the littlenesses and commonnesses.” Readers of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point who recognized “Mark Rampion” as a sympathetic portrait of Lawrence may have wondered how Lawrence liked it. He wrote to Huxley: “Your Rampion is the most boring character in the book—a gasbag. Your attempt at intellectual sympathy!—It’s all rather disgusting, and I feel like a badger that has its hole on Wimbledon Common and trying not to be caught. . . .”

Though many a U. S. sophisticate has read & snickered over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, either in a pirated edition or in one of the European editions smuggled into the U. S., this is the first “authorized abridged” version. It is authorized by Lawrence’s widow, would never have been permitted by Lawrence himself. For the book, now made respectable by excisions of many descriptive passages and Anglo-Saxon words, has also become suggestive and otherwise pointless. From a glorification of proper love-making and a sermon against sexual wrongs. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence once thought of calling it Tenderness} has become merely an ordinary adulterous tale. The plot of the original and the bowdlerized version is the same:

Connie Chatterley, married to young, handsome Lord Clifford, thought that she was happy until the War crippled her husband. Even then she managed to get along. Clifford was clever, advanced, liberal in his ways. Connie began to have affairs with men. Then she met her husband’s gamekeeper, Mellors. and for the first time in her life fell really in love. When she knew she was going to have a baby she left Clifford, who would not really mind, as he was beginning to have an infantile passion for his middle-aged nurse. The story ends with Connie making plans to go away somewhere, sometime, with Mellors. Aldous Huxley calls Lady Chatierley’s Lover “a strange and beautiful book; but inexpressibly sad.”What he would call this version of it will doubtless never be printed.

Robinson Item

NICODEMUS—Edwin Arlington Robinson—Macmillan ($1.75).

With the exception of Poet Robert Frost and the possible exception of the late Elinor Wylie, Edwin Arlington Robinson is the only contemporary U. S. poet whose excellence is acknowledged by the critical choir. Unlike his colleague, Poet Robinson has at times warmed his publisher’s heart by proving popular. His Tristram sold 85,000 copies, is still quietly on the move. Tristram readers may not all want a copy of Nicodemus, but Robinson readers will.

Of the eleven poems in Nicodemus, seven are reprinted from magazines. Like many a matured poet before him, Robinson has turned to Biblical and historical themes: Nicodemus, Sisera. Gideon, the Prodigal Son, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Ponce de Leon. Most of them are written in Robinson’s familiar, intricately lucid blank verse. Of the lyrics, many a reader will prefer the verses on “Hector Kane.” who, at 85, was still skeptical of the passage of time, died of a stroke in the midst of his skeptic’s boast:

Serene and inarticulate

He lay, for us to contemplate.

The mortal trick, we all agreed,

Was never better turned:

Bequeathing us to time and care,

He told us yet that we were there

To make as much as we could read

Of all that he had learned.

For the Temple

JOSEPHUS — Lion Feuchtwanger — Viking ($2.50).

The late George Alfred Henty. prolific writer of boys’ books, had a lot of good ideas. One of them was to write a story about Flavius Josephus, patriot, renegade, historian of Judea’s downfall. But Henty, who invariably took historical subjects for his tales, was such a Britisher that all his heroes, no matter what their nationality, were little Britishers too. Following Henty’s footsteps, but turning in his toes in a much more realistic fashion. German Author Feuchtwanger has written a novel about Josephus which does its good bit toward keeping the contemporary German historical novel at the head of the procession.

Author Feuchtwanger makes Josephus an impressive figure but does not quite succeed in ironing out his contradictory character into a real Henty hero. When Joseph ben Matthias, priest of the first rank, went to Rome as a young man, he was burning with ambition and patriotic zeal. His mission was to win freedom for three aged zealots whom the Romans had imprisoned for sedition. Thanks to his youthful good looks, to Poppaea, Emperor Xero’s wife, to Demetrius Libanus, the “Schnozzle” Durante of the day. and to political deals he never suspected. Joseph got his three old men set at liberty. But when Joseph got home again he found the country in a turmoil, the radical Avengers of Israel doing the best they could to foment open rebellion against Rome. When war came. Joseph made a hero’s name for himself defending Jotapata, more than lost it by surrendering to the Romans. Shrewd but superstitious Vespasian made good use of Joseph’s advice; when luck made him Emperor. Joseph’s fortunes rose too. His ambition still burned high but his patriotism was no longer national: to the Jews, who treated him as a leper, it looked like treachery. But Joseph had made up his mind to stay alive, to record the downfall of the Jewish state. In Alexandria Joseph found a brief happiness with an Egyptian wife, left it to march with Titus against his beloved Holy City. As the official historian of the Jewish wars Josephus watched the siege and the storming of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, Titus’ triumph in Rome. He saw and suffered it all. put everything in his book.

Books of the Week

SOUTH AMERICAN MEDITATIONS— Hermann Keyserling — Harper ($3.50).

THE THREE JAMESES—C. Hartley Grattan—Longmans, Green ($3.50). Biography of Psychologist William, Novelist Henry and their father Henry James, himself a philosophical theologian whom Author Grattan calls an “unregarded sage.”

NOBODY STARVES—Catharine Brody —Longmans, Green ($2). Announced as the first important U. S. proletarian novel. Reviewed next week.

BRIEF SEDUCTION OF EVA—Mathilde Eiker — Double day, Doran ($2). Drawing-room comedy.

LIGHT IN AUGUST—William Faulk-ner—Smith & Haas ($2.50). Re-viewed next week.

TREEHAVEN — Kathleen Norris — Doubleday, Doran ($2). Needs no introduction.

A MAN MUST FIGHT—Gene Tunney — H ought on Mifflin ($2.50). Literate Ex-Champion Tunney is supposed to have written this autobiography himself.

TALLEYRAND—Duff Cooper—Har-per ($3.75). A solid biography of the slippery French statesman by an up & coming British M. P.

WINGS OVER POLAND — Kenneth Malcolm Murray—Applet on ($3). See p. 18.

MEMOIRS OF HECTOR BERLIOZ— Edited by Ernest Newman—Knopf ($5). See p. 22.

*Huxley calls it “that curious essay in destructive hagiography.”