The Land and the Sea
IN a day when magazines clamor for high-pressure or ‘debunking’ articles, American essayists worthy of the name are few and far between.
OF recent books, and of books no longer recent, nothing has delighted me more than East of the Hudson (Knopf, $2.50). J. Brooks Atkinson has written, with fierce integrity, a nakedly personal book about New York and week-end escape for birds and the country. This is something new — a Thoreauvian in Washington Square. Me did not know one could exist there. We did not know of Waldens up the river, in Central Park, in the Newark and Elizabeth marshes, — O desolate preface to New Jersey! — in the dump heaps of Dyker Heights. Mr. Atkinson brings the country to New York and New York to the country. And, as he puts it, ‘everything a man saw was first-hand evidence.’
He went to Manhattan from New England, but he took with him a knapsack and a pair of field glasses. Not many have done that. As dramatic critic of the New York Times, Mr. Atkinson writes ably and currently on sophisticate matters both sides of the curtain. That is his daily task. It is also his pleasure to go about his vivid city with more than pedestrian eyes; to ferry the river, to walk its banks, to live exultantly with docks, streets, markets, riveting, thrushes, parks, the Hudson, noise, theatres, newspapers, whistles, Nyaek, Hook Mountain, Tappan Zee, gallinules, warblers, and snowy arctic owls, ‘rubbing their mysterious civilization against mine.’ Let me insist that helms written a beautiful book, Emersonianly boundless, cheerful, strong.
It touches the last decade, when, in the city, ‘everything was tentative,’ when the radio had first ‘entrenched mediocrity forever.’ The New York of prosperity, power, big business, construction, flux, and change; of magnificence, of filth, of that permanent impermanence which first, impresses the visit ing Englishman, ‘Even skyscrapers were erected, not for immortality, but with facilities built in for rapid demolition.’
The sound of New York: the finely granulated roar that lifts to high windows and reverberates through all the terrifying corridors below. The people of New York: individuals, crowds, the ‘frantic devotion to anything that exploded with a loud cultural report’ —humanism, liberalism, Menckenism. And then, adds the author, ‘when I was desperate for companionship I went to Croton Point, where I could be alone.’
Escape is always exquisite. With great charm and poetry Mr. Atkinson writes of his days and hours up the Hudson. ‘Smoke from a Valley Cabin,’ ‘Birds in the City,’ and other equally romantic intervals in this book flower from the same nobility of mind that produced Far Away and Long Ago and Mr. Henry Boston’s The Outermost House. They are better written and more dearly resolved than the chapters of ‘Skyline Promenades.’ Good writing, Mr. Atkinson believes, is partly the fruit of dissatisfaction. He might have added of good living.
It seems to me that the illustrations of N by E (Brewer and Warren, $9.50) suffer slightly in comparison with those which Rockwell Kent has done for Moby Dick Many of them superb, but all not quite as superb as these others. The book itself is Mr. Kent’s account of the celebrated voyage he made in 1929, in company with two others, from Newfoundland to Labrador to Greenland. Because Mr. Kent is an artist of superior gifts and because he also writes, it is a mistake to assume that he must be a great writer. He is not. But his book is vastly interesting—chiefly as the log account of a passage to Greenland in a boat whose length over all was thirty-three feet. The story of shipwreck on the coast of Greenland seems the best of it. There is occasionally some arrogance, and a touch of swagger. But adventure and courage are present also, and many fine descriptions of natural grandeur. Why not skip the appendix?
DAVID McCORD