Books: Christmas Books: Looking Backward

Even in a decade notable for instant nostalgia, 1974 is a remarkable year. The large books, primarily concocted for Christmas buyers, are marked by more longing to look backward than ever before. The trend may in part be due to the Bicentennial celebration that is shortly to engulf Americans; the first wave of titles about the American Revolution is already at hand. It may be too with the future looking the way it does, Americans (publishers as well as readers) simply want to celebrate, enjoy or just get acquainted with the American past. Whatever the cause, the result this year is more books on cowboys, Indians, Western landscapes, immigrant masses, painters of the American scene and old photographs than have been seen in past Christmas seasons.

A sampling is reviewed below:

$35 AND UP

ANSEL ADAMS: IMAGES 1923-1974.

Foreword by Wallace Stegner. 127 pages. New York Graphic Society. $65. Magnificent examples of the reverential grandeur in Ansel Adams’ photographic art, reproduced under the perfectionist eye of Adams himself. At the age of 72 he is the pre-eminent black-and-white photographer of the American West. Adams’ sweeping vistas of Yosemite and the Sierras, his close-up studies of wood, rock and plants and sometimes people have been repeatedly and justly praised. The purity, directness and technical excellence of his pictures attest to Adams’ belief that “a photograph is made, not taken.” Yet there is also a touch of the mystic naturalist in Adams when he notes, “Sometimes, I think, I do get to places just when God is ready to have somebody click the shutter.”

THE LIFE AND WORK OF THOMAS EAKINS by Gordon Hendricks. 367 pages. Grossman. $45. A graceful and sympathetic, if somewhat languid biography of the famous Philadelphia artist, individualist, teacher (1844-1916). There is some interesting new material including excerpts from Eakins’ own remarkably direct and often charming letters and from contemporary newspaper clippings.

More than 300 illustrations, including masterly sketches and photographs, represent the body of his work. Eakins was a relentless realist in a romantic era: his boxers look apprehensive and his surgeons, in proper dark suits, have blood on their hands. Though the color reproduction of some of the pictures is not as good as it might have been, readers will be delighted again by the sculling and outdoor scenes, and the great late portraits, with their fierce investigation of character.

THOMAS HART BENTON by Matthew Baigell. 278 pages. Abrams. $40. In a painting career that has already spanned more than 50 years, Thomas Hart Benton acts as a kind of troubadour of American painting. His work, well represented in this book, ranges over all regions and periods, from Hollywood sets to Southeastern tobacco farms, from battles between Indians and settlers to World War II. Throughout, in a distinctive style, dynamic, sinuous but often lumpishly awkward, he affectionately illustrates the rhythm, energy and drama of American life.

JERICHO, THE SOUTH BEHELD by Hubert Shuptrine and James Dickey. 165 pages. Oxmoor House. $39.95. Poet James Dickey and Artist Hubert Shuptrine jointly celebrate the whole of the Southland in words and pictures. Shuptrine uses black-and-white and color paintings of such things as beached boats, coon dogs, mountain men, curing barns, old buggies, woodpiles, sand dunes—often on a very large scale.

Dickey uses chunks of poeticized prose to record the insights and sounds and scenes encountered during a meandering trip through the South. Dickey ain’t jest whistlin’ Dixie, but his sentences too often read more like some sort of glorified advertising copy than they ought to. Shuptrine is meticulous, better in black and white than color, and seems to be heavily influenced by Andrew Wyeth. Alas, he cannot really draw life into any human figure. A big, rich, handsome book that reflects much care, some love and a good deal of pretentiousness.

ALBERT BIERSTADT: PAINTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Gordon Hendricks. 360 pages. Abrams. $35. In 1859, German-born Albert Bierstadt packed his sketch pads, hopped on a mule, and headed across the Missouri River. His subject became the great American West, which he later recalled in oil on canvas with the help of his drawings.

In this biography, amply illustrated with color plates, Bierstadt’s West appears to owe much to the techniques of Old World romantic landscape painting:

tawny browns, browsy greens, lambent golds and sometimes a pacific orderliness that seems at odds with the wild beauty of the New World.

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTURY COLLECTION OF CIVIL WAR ART edited by Stephen W. Sears. Foreword by Bruce Catton. 400 pages. American Heritage.

$35. This rare visual record of the Civil War fir.?t appeared nearly 100 years ago in three years of successive issues of Century magazine. Then the originals disappeared, to resurface only in 1973. From Fort Sumter to Appomattox, scores of selected engravings—made from sketches by the period’s equivalent of modern combat photographers—provide a stirring chronology of the seesaw struggle, from gunboats on the Mississippi to forest bivouacs, from homesteads left derelict by battle to the bloody fighting at Petersburg. Art and history have rarely been so well allied.

$25 TO $30

THE EXPLORATION OF NORTH AMERICA 1630-1776 by W.P. Gumming, S.E. Hillier, D.B. Quinn & G. Williams. 272 pages. Putnam. $30. To Europeans in the 17th century, the continent of North America was unimaginably vast, mysterious, savage and alluring. This book brilliantly documents how, bit by bit, often haphazardly, over a period of more than a century, the contours of that continent came to be known. The authors are all experts in Colonial history, exploration and cartography. Working chronologically, they present hundreds of pictures, maps, jottings, sketches made at the time by fur traders, Jesuit priests, land-hungry frontiersmen, famous explorers, pioneer wives stolen by Indians, soldiers, deluded heroes seeking a Northwest passage to Cathay. The text mainly consists of excerpts of actual journals kept by such people and though they vary in quality, they are cumulatively fascinating. This is the kind of book a man could spend a happy winter reading, if possible snowed in from time to time to avoid interruption.

JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG by

Susan E. Meyer. 207 pages. Watson-Guptill. $27.50. James Montgomery Flagg is probably best known to the public for his enlistment poster of a Jehovic Uncle Sam demanding I WANT YOU, for which he used himself as the model. As an illustrator, however, he favored beautiful women as his subjects; some of his best works are portraits of the famous, including Mark Twain, John and Ethel Barrymore. Susan Meyer’s book offers a wide selection of Flagg’s relaxed yet robust drawings, paintings and poster art, and fondly fills in the lively biographical gaps.

BRIDGES: THE SPANS OF NORTH AMERICA by David Plowden. 328 pages.

Viking. $27.50. As the wreckers’ ball —that pendulum that does not keep time—continues to obliterate America’s brick and concrete heritage, bridges may have to support the added burden of Unking the present to the past. In all their various lengths and styles, these vastly expensive monuments to man’s ingenuity and perseverance combine the most basic usefulness with a beauty that commuters have long since taken for granted. Photographer David Plowden provides the pictures and historical text that should restore the balance of awe and respect due these structures.

THE LIVING WORLD OF AUDUBON by Roland C. Clement. 272 pages. Grosset & Dunlap. $25. Excellent reproductions of 64 of John James Audubon’s splendid 19th century engravings of birds juxtaposed against equally splendid 20th century photographs of the same owls, thrushes, hummingbirds and eagles. The fascinating and informative experiment raises the question of which is better: the 120-year-old engraved image or the sophisticated, modern stop-action photo? In making a decision, the reader is likely to pay homage to Audubon.

THE WORLD OF GEORGE WASHINGTON by Richard M. Ketchum. 275 pages. American Heritage. $25. “I am embarked on a wide Ocean, boundless in its prospect and from whence, perhaps, no safe harbour is to be found.” The message has a contemporary ring just now, but its words were offered in June 1775 by George Washington after he agreed to become the first commander in chief of the new Continental Army. With textblocks and many illustrations, plus graceful historical essays, Editor and Popular Historian Richard Ketchum creates a sound and extraordinarily detailed portrait of the man and his times during the years when Washington evolved from prosperous Virginia planter to Revolutionary general to President of the newly established republic. A Bicentennial byproduct of notable quality, the book manages to make this monument human, while reassuringly confirming the traditional view that the Colonies were perfectly right in letting George do it all.

ECHO OF A DISTANT DRUM: WINSLOW HOMER AND THE CIVIL WAR by

Julian Grossman. 204 pages. Abrams. $25. As Harper’s Weekly’s “special artist,” a young Winslow Homer went off with the Union Army to cover the Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, battlegrounds and camps were his Harvard and his Yale. His realistic drawings, oils, watercolors, engravings and lithographs caught the surprise of death, the frenzy of bayonet charges, the despair, loneliness and boredom of men too long away from home. This excellent and informative volume includes nearly all of Homer’s war art, plus maps, photographs and excerpts from the works of such other observers of the War Between the States as Walt Whitman and of course Abraham Lincoln.

THE ROMANTIC EGOISTS edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith and Joan P. Kerr. 246 pages. Scribners. $25. Mr. and Mrs. Nostalgia themselves continue to enjoy more second acts than Novelist Fitzgerald ever thought possible in American life. Beauty, talent, money, frailty and madness —the Fitzgeralds embodied all the surefire elements for keeping themselves alive in our backward glances. Daughter Scottie and the other editors have combed the Fitzgeralds’ personal scrapbooks and albums for this wistful chronology of sepia photos, letters and press clippings that paved the course of glittering successes and tragedies from St. Paul to Paris, Great Neck and Hollywood.

THE TAMING OF THE WEST edited by David R. Phillips. 232 pages. Regnery. $25. Culled from Phillips’ vast collection of several hundred thousand photographs, the more than 200 antique pictures in this volume are meant to chronicle the westward movement of Americans from 1850 to 1900. They also reveal the high points in Phillips’ hoard of negatives: fascinating views of such places as Leavenworth (Kansas) and Socorro (New Mexico). The effect is anything but static. As the pages turn, buildings grow against the empty sky. A sequence showing the Alaskan gold rush becomes a small epic of mud, ramshackle buildings, snow and indefatiable greed.

$9.95 TO $24.95

FARM BOY by Archie Lieberman. 360 pages. Abrams. $22.50. Nearly 20 years ago, Photographer Lieberman began making periodic visits to the Hammers, a farm family in Illinois. The result is this hefty album of totally sentimental snapshots. A good many of them are charming in a slightly selfconscious, soft-focus way. Bill Jr. (the “boy” of the title) grows from fresh-faced youth to fresh-faced fatherhood. Seasons change. Years pass. Seldom is heard a discouraging word. Lieberman’s prose grows steadily sweeter and more touching: “In the barn there were new lambs, and Bill saw to them. He was happy.” Readers hooked on wholesomeness will be happy, but Farm Boy is not recommended for word diabetics.

EDWARD BOREIN: COWBOY ARTIST by Harold G. Davidson. 189 pages. Doubleday. $19.95. Borein (1872-1945) never achieved the celebrity of such Western artists as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. He drifted from cowpunching along the Pacific Coast into a successful career of drawing what he had seen, later hung out with friends like Will Rogers and Walt Disney. This casual, sympathetic biography does not gloss over Borein’s somewhat stiff draftsmanship or his penchant for sentimental vistas that would have embarrassed Hollywood set designers. But collectors of Western memorabilia value Borein for the literal accuracy of his work. And when he applied brush and watercolors to certain subjects—a bucking bronco, a string of Indian ponies—Borein had a rare gift for bringing them back alive.

THE WAY LIFE WAS by Jeffrey Simpson. 146 pages. Praeger. $19.95. This collection of crisp black-and-white photographs illustrates aspects of American life from 1880 to 1915. The dates are more or less arbitrary, a roomy frame for the works of the 16 photographers whose portfolios are included. Some are well known, others relatively obscure. All survive in these photographs, along with their subjects. Eyes stare back from these pages with startling clarity.

Whether they belong to begrimed children in Pennsylvania coal mines, languid prostitutes in the New Orleans redlight district, or impassive Navajos on horseback in the Southwest, they collapse the distinction between then and now.

FLASH GORDON: THE PLANET MONGO by Alex Raymond. Vol. I. PRINCE VALIANT by Harold Foster. Vol. I. Nostalgia Press. Both unpaged. $12.95 each.

Two candidates for cultural immortality, more or less lovingly revived in four colors from what used to be called the funny papers. In Volume I of Flash Gordon, that Yaleman for all seasons progresses from his crash landing on the planet Mongo with delicious but dumb Dale Arden and brilliant but mad Dr.

Zarkov to adventures in the shadowy cave world of the witch-queen Azura, one of the most sinuous vamps of all time. Wielding sword and ray gun (not to mention skull and bones), Flash survives everything that Mongo’s Ming the Merciless can throw at him: sacred droks, octosaks, shark men, iron men, hawk men, even Ming’s insatiable daughter, Princess Aura. Forty years on, Dale still sounds like an escapee from a Campbell’s Soup ad. Flash still does not get around to marrying her. Author-Illustrator Alex Raymond still seems to be some sort of genius.

So, indeed, was Harold Foster. Volume I of Prince Valiant (roughly, strips 1937 to 1940) follows the sturdy young nobleman with the blue-black pageboy from youth through his early squire days at King Arthur’s Court. Affectionate readers may forgivingly understand why the Duke of Windsor called this strip the “greatest contribution to English literature in the past 100 years.” To be continued in Volume II.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS—THEY WERE TERRIBLE! by Otto L. Bettmann. 207 pages. Random House. $10. Otto Bettmann of the Bettmann (picture) Archive adds a needed dash of bitters to the nostalgia craze with this illustrated reminder that in the good old days (circa 1860 to 1910), pigs crowded people off New York streets, untreated garbage brought disease to the suburbs, Chicagoans and Pittsburghers lived in perpetual smog —the word coined by a Glasgow sanitary engineer in 1905. The author’s words and pictures also jolt the modern reader with the horrors of oldtime horse-traffic jams, railroad accidents, street crime, alcoholism, drug addiction and even home cooking. Writes Bettmann of that time: “The masses were forced to subsist on a crude and scanty diet of which tea and bread were staples, supplemented now and then by soup or stew of questionable origin.”

THE WORLD OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN. 400 pages. National Geographic Society. $9.95. Ten authorities on Indian lore have contributed solid chapters to this volume, but their texts run a gauntlet of illustrations, maps and photographs. This makes the package interesting not only to serious readers but also to browsers, who can find something worth looking at on nearly every page: 19th century paintings of Indian ceremonies and battles, color photographs of Indian lands, tools and dwellings. Nearly 600 different tribes (from Abenaki to Zuni) settled in the U.S. and Canada, and the book more or less manages to do justice to this diversity. The general effect is like a slow walk through a large, well-stocked museum.