The Nile: The Life-Story of a River
by
[Viking, $5.00]
THESE 600-odd pages, coming whence they come, are an overpowering surprise of the happiest sort.
Some of us have persistently doubted that Herr Ludwig’s services to the profession of biography have been quite commensurate with the rewards he has collected for them. He has been, for our taste, overmuch given to extracting the significance of great lives from his own poetic consciousness and holding up the result as the truth of history. It is a marvel of conjuring, his production of the living rabbit from the hat; but it always leaves us with the feeling that the hat is twice as marvelous as the rabbit, which seems to us to have been galvanized from its immediate source rather than endowed with the vitality of an actual Napoleon or Lincoln, Goethe or Bismarck. We of this dissenting minority have obstinately held that the legitimate and, in the long run, the fruitful task of the biographer is to resurrect the illustrious dead as nearly as may be in their own image, and not to re-create them, however brilliantly, in ours, or in that of a Ludwig or a Strachey. In short, let him who fancies himself as an imaginative writer wreak himself on imagined characters. if the dead have no rights, surely we of the living have a right to our authentic inheritance from them.
These and the like serious reservations will find small part to play in the minority’s acceptance of this strange, beautiful, richly rereadable, monumental, conceivably enduring book. The reason is simple and can be starkly put. The author is not dealing with a character who lived and is dead. He is dealing with one outspread before him in space — a character as alive to-day as thirteen thousand legible years ago, and in essentials not greatly changed or changing. His chronology here is a succession, not of years, but of latitudes. His sequence is of topographic features that can be traversed, seen, measured, not of disputed actions from inscrutable motives.
The artistic unity that he gets elsewhere by coloring and by selection — that is, suppression — is here the free gift of his subject itself: for the water that leaves Lake Victoria in equatorial thunder, the water that plunges into Lake Tana from the mountains of Abyssinia, is the selfsame water that, before it finds the Mediterranean, raises the long-staple cotton in the Delta four thousand miles from its sources. Ludwig is writing, in fine, not biography at all, but description on a stupendous scale; and he is a very great descriptive writer indeed.
He begins where the Nile begins. He describes it stage by stage through dwindling altitudes and mounting latitudes. As he surveys its bed, its banks, its hinterland, its folk, he also sketches in the deepening, widening banks of history and of international politics between which it flows. He makes the past almost a part of the topography. The virtuosity that has so often (if unconsciously) sacrificed truth to effect counts here only for vividness and power, and most notably in the brief character sketches of the great heroes and the great victims from Rameses II to Gordon, from Cleopatra to Kitchener. When Ludwig treats the Nile as a person living a life that can be followed from turbulent youth to grave old age, when he gives the river thoughts, purposes, dreams, memories, we take the device, not as a grandiose self-deception, but as a classical personification on a prodigious scale — a rhetorical figure justified in what it actually conveys. By the end of this 250,000word figure of speech we feel as it we had not only traveled slowly through Nubia, Abyssinia, the Sudan, Upper Egypt, and the Delta, but actually lived in them.
The volume is generously illustrated, ideally provided with maps, and distinguished in format. The author is in the main exceptionally happy in his translator, Mary H. Lindsay. The index, though no marvel of accurate reference, is still more painstaking than most. The text, completed before the late rape of Ethiopia, nevertheless searchingly illuminates that ominous event .
What reservations the Egyptologists may disclose on minor points, I am in no position to guess. The book is hardly for them; and in any event they can afford to welcome its existence, for it is bound to spread that atmosphere of interest in which their work will gain in public dignity and hence in public support.
WILSON FOLLETT