65

# BOOKS

## A Summer Miscellany

THE small but comprehensive volumes of the Viking Portable Library continue to be the best things that have come out of the current fashion of literary omnibuses, and two of the most recent volumes are among the best of the series. Malcolm

Cowley's "Portable Faulkner" is not merely an anthology of selections but a new kind of Faulkner book, made by piecing together things from the old ones. The various volumes of Faulkner's fiction combine to make the Balzacian history of an imaginary Mississippi county, in which a group of Southern families are shown in their successive phases and in their relations with one another between 1820 and 1945. Mr. Cowley has unscrambled this chronicle, a complicated and elusive one, and illustrated it, period by period, by an arrangement of certain short stories with a few episodes from Faulkner's novels, and he has prefaced it with an interesting essay on the criticism of Southern history implied by Faulkner's account. Faulkner has himself supplied a guide to the genealogy of one of his families, the Compsons. The book is therefore a real contribution to the study of Faulkner's work.

Bernard De Voto's "Portable Mark

Twain" is also excellent, and a pleasant surprise. The name of Mark Twain, in the past, has always, for Mr. De Voto, been a stimulus to hair-tearing polemics, with an emphasis that, in my opinion, has falsified the picture of Mark Twain a great deal more than it had ever been distorted by the writings of Van Wyck Brooks and others, whom Mr. De Voto has been so frantic to correct. But in his selection from Mark Twain for this "portable," he has exhibited, it seems to me, a really impeccable discrimination. There is a lot of Mark Twain that is worth reading besides the pieces included here, but if any anthology could be

justified in calling itself "the best of Mark Twain," it would be Mr. De Voto's volume. He has eliminated the routine clowning of the professional American humorist as well as the more arid products of his author's serious moods, and put in nothing that is not first-rate Mark Twain in one or another department of his writing. (The selection from Mark Twain's letters includes several not before published and several now published in corrected texts.) For the foreigner or the young student who wants to read up Mark Twain, this would be the perfect presentation.

In his introduction, Mr. De Voto makes quietly such points as were valid in his overwritten and overacted book "Mark Twain's America" and discusses Mark Twain's work with good sense and good taste. He is unsatisfactory, as always, on the subject of Mark Twain's personality, because he persists in trying to explain what was morbid and despairing in him as the result of accidental reverses and of the trend of external events instead of seeing him, as Mr. Brooks did, as himself involved in the conflicts and afflicted with the ailments of the American life of the time, and this essay sends us back to Brooks, to admire again, after twenty-five years, the masterly insight and grasp of "The Ordeal of Mark Twain," and to discover that the critical sifting of the good from the less good in Mark Twain's work had already been done by Brooks with an

instinct at least as sure as that of Mr. De Voto.

"THE SCIENCE AND ART OF PERFUMERY," by Edward Sagarin (McGraw-Hill), is a popular book on the perfume industry which makes entertaining reading if you like to read about how things are made and why people like them made as they are. The historical chapters are sketchy, but the rest of the book is full enough to satisfy curiosity, and unusually lucid where chemical processes and technical methods are concerned. A number of strange facts come to light, some of them rather painful. It seems that civet is extracted from the civet cat by shutting it up in a cage too small for it to turn around in and tormenting it to stimulate the secretion, and that the tiny Asiatic musk deer, which is too fleet to be hunted with dogs and climbs to heights which are inaccessible to hunters, can then only be caught, through its love of music, by the lure of someone playing the flute. The aesthetic-emotional side of perfumery makes it an attractive subject. Mr. Sagarin has a charming description of the perfumer, exquisitely trained to distinguish between innumerable smells, sniffing at strips of blotter; and he prints the "gamut of odors"— including both a treble and a bass— drawn up by the great perfumer Piesse, who actually, like the aesthete in Huysmans, created an "odophone." There are also the findings of some recent ex-

cobean

66

JULY 27, 1946

When these men
praise a book

IT'S A BOOK
WORTH
YOUR TIME

### Eisenhower:

"I have read *Men and Power* from cover to cover. I found Henry J. Taylor's story not only fascinating but absolutely factual and correct regarding any features of the situation in Europe of which I had any first-hand knowledge. This is an honest book by an honest man."

-General Dwight D. Eisenhower

### Baruch:

"Men and Power is a fine contribution to our thinking, written by a clear-headed American. It is a breathlessly interesting book which should be read by anyone who wants to understand the men of today and the events of tomorrow. Start reading what Henry J. Taylor has to say and you will find it too important to put down." -Bernard Baruch

### Lippmann:

"A remarkable example of sharp observation and a kind of telling exactness in the use of words. Having been over some of the ground myself, I realize what a gift it is to be able to describe things so effectively."

-Walter Lippmann

### Marquand:

"In his capacity as a skilful and indefatigable interviewer, Mr. Taylor has talked frankly with most of the current makers of history. His book is a pageant of characters set against a changing background ... a book which few persons could write, since few observers have seen as much ... as its writer. A chronicle that reads like a breathless novel, though all of it is true."

-John P. Marquand

### Read-

HENRY J. TAYLOR'S

MEN
AND
POWER

A Book-of-the-Month Club
Recommendation

At all bookstores $3.00

DODD, MEAD

periments which go to show that ordinary people are incapable of smelling or tasting for themselves but can be led to imagine that they smell or taste whatever is suggested to them by the color of a fluid or substance; and a discussion of the possibilities of substituting more attractive smells for the natural ones of shoe polish, paint, and glue.

Mr. Sagarin discusses the sexual appeal of certain elements of perfume such as musk, but he fails to explain the reasons that human beings delight in odors that are derived from flowers and trees. The point is that we enjoy these odors because our relatives, the apes, lived on fruit and other vegetable products. It would be in order for him to quote the passage from the book called "Animals Are My Hobby," by Mrs. Gertrude Lintz, the trainer of the gorilla Gantua, in which she tells how she watched him, one day he escaped, among the palmetto tufts, "finding every now and then a fresh blossom which he would pluck and admire with a smacking of his lips, and then eat slowly, savoring its unfamiliar perfume." It is probable that animals, such as dogs, whose original food was flesh derive a satisfaction, from rolling in carrion, of precisely the same kind that human beings derive from dabbing themselves with jasmine. All perfume is a sophisticated play on the primary animal instincts of self-nourishment and self-reproduction.

RANDOM HOUSE has republished in two volumes the "Diary of Samuel Pepys" in its most nearly complete edition: that of Henry B. Wheatley, first published in 1893, which has long been out of print. In regard to the passages omitted, Wheatley wrote that, though it might be thought "that these omissions are due to an unnecessary squeamishness," this was not "really so, and readers are therefore asked to have faith in the judgment of the editor." But the context of the expurgated passages seems to indicate that they are mainly concerned with the details of Pepys's diseases, and in any case it is difficult to see why they should not be included today. In the meantime, however, it is an excellent thing to have the diary available again. The volumes are well printed, though bulky. The frontispiece is an inferior drawing of Pepys, evidently made for this new edition, where one of the authentic old portraits would have been much more to the point.

IN the issue of July 13th, "The Condemned Playground," by Cyril Connolly, was wrongly announced as

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67

having been published by Harper in-
stead of by Macmillan.

—EDMUND WILSON

BRIEFLY NOTED
FICTION

BELL TIMSON, by Marguerite Steen
(Doubleday). Miss Steen's earlier
novels, even though some of them
were very bad, generally gave the im-
pression that she would eventually
produce a first-rate piece of fiction.
This story, about a brash, courageous,
and completely insensitive woman
whose whole-hearted devotion to her
two daughters ruins their lives, is not
first-rate, or anywhere near it, but it
is written in such vigorous, if rather
unbuttoned, prose that the reader will
probably once more expect Miss Steen
to do better next time.

SUMMER IN APRIL, by Donald Mac-
ardle (Lippincott). A smoothly
geared story, told with amiable light-
ness, about a spoiled fifteen-year-old
brat of a girl who has a love affair
with an older man. The author man-
ages to make the affair credible and
even a little touching. There is a
patently contrived ending, but the
novel is easy to read, and probably
just as easy to forget.

DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID, by Octave
Mirbeau (Didier). There must be a
good many things this poor old world
needs more urgently than a transla-
tion of the Mirbeau classic that pro-
vided thrills of sophistication for read-
ers of the past generation. The story,
written with great style and almost
unrelieved pessimism, is a bitterly
ironic and highly spiced indictment of
employers of domestic servants in the
eighteen-nineties, and that, my dear,
was a long, long time ago.

GENERAL

THE FUTURE IN PERSPECTIVE, by
Sigmund Neumann (Putnam). A
historian's analysis of world events
from 1914 to 1946. This political
"Only Yesterday" concentrates
mainly on the peace which was, to
maul slightly a phrase of von Clause-
witz, only a continuation of war by
other means. Professor Neumann,
who taught in Germany and Eng-
land and now teaches at Yale, doesn't
claim to have an answer to the prob-
lem of the future; he merely allows
international affairs to pass in long
review in a way that may stimulate
the reader to form a conclusion or
two of his own.

AN AMERICAN YEAR, by Hal Borland

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68

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(Simon & Schuster). A book of the seasons that records, in pulsing prose, the mutations of nature as observed in the American landscape. Mr. Borland, one of the better practitioners of the almanacker's art, is the man who writes those editorials in the *Times* which begin with something like "Now the brown thrasher is in the wood, and the sharp frosts of spring give way to..." His book, a good anodyne for these troubled days, is illustrated with fifty bucolic prints by well-known American artists.

PEOPLE IN QUANDARIES, by Wendell Johnson (Harper). Semantics, the octopus science, continues to spread its tentacles. This is a study of human maladjustments, from homosexuality to stuttering, and their relation to language and symbols. It is an extraordinarily interesting book, and simple enough for most laymen, though not for those who can't concentrate on what they read (probably a sign of maladjustment in itself).

WE DROPPED THE A-BOMB, by Merle Miller and Abe Spitzer (Crowell). Mr. Spitzer was radio operator of the Great Artiste, one of the three B-29s that took part in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. This is his story of the two missions, as told to Merle Miller, who has possibly touched up the dialogue here and there. It is not only a dramatic account but, more important, a thoughtful one, in that it tells how the men of the crews feel about the more solemn aspects of what they did. Apparently, none of them are yet disposed to think lightly of the efficacy of the bomb, in spite of the post-mortem opinions of certain groundlings.

### MYSTERY AND CRIME

THE HIDDEN PORTAL, by Garnett Weston (Doubleday). A good deal of confusion is caused in Spanish Morrocco during the war by a story that the Carthaginians once dug an underwater passage to Gibraltar and left it full of treasure. An Englishman, a German, an American, and a Spaniard all look into the matter and get into a curious tangle, which is finally straightened out by a ship's captain named Purkeypile, an untidy old party of eighty-five. Unusual and fairly exciting.

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JULY 27, 1946