Books

Potpourri

Three brief book reviews

The School for Wives, Robert, and Genevieve, by André Gide. Knopf, $2.75.

Gide is well below par in these three novelettes, in which a wife, husband, and daughter successively give their versions of an unhappy marriage. The theme is Gide’s favorite: the conflict between the “counterfeit,” conformist personality, with its self-deceptions and its cant, and the “real” personality, with its dangerous impulses. The wife gradually discovers that her husband is an unctuous fake and decides to leave him. But her sense of duty wins out and her life becomes a tragic farce. Gide then puts the husband’s case so skillfully that you cannot condemn him unless you accept, as Gide does, the idea of morality as a wholly private affair; and he also brings into the balance the hazards of that idea. The same issue is more crudely dramatized in the story of the daughter.
The Strange Life of Charles Waterton, by Richard Aldington. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, $3.00.

Charles Waterton (1782-1865), an English gentleman, had a habit of scratching the back of his head with the big toe of his right foot ; he stood on treetops to read Plato; he rode bareback on an alligator; he tried to soothe a sprained ankle by holding it under Niagara Falls; and he once climbed the dome of St. Peter’s and left his gloves on the lightning conductor. An ardent naturalist, Squire Waterton converted his ancestral estate into a bird sanctuary. He built himself a pair of wings and tried to fly with them. For thirty-four years he slept on the floor, and he started the day at three in the morning. Waterton always described himself as “the most commonplace of men.”

Aldington’s portrait of this appealing eccentric is marvelously entertaining, and more than that: tact, wit, and stylistic elegance make it a distinguished biography.

The Classical Tradition, by Gilbert Highet. Oxford University Press, $6.00.

This far-ranging study of Greek and Roman influences on Western literature, from Beowulf to Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies, has a combination of qualities that is not often found in works of contemporary scholarship. Along with its awesome erudition goes a very readable prose style, touched with wit and epigram; and a refreshing readiness to venture forthright opinions. Professor Highet devotes four chapters to the Dark and Middle Ages, seven to the Renaissance, five to the Baroque era, and five to modern literature. Among the latter are compact studies of the reinterpretation of the myths; and of the transformations of the myths in the work of O’Neill, Jeffers, Gide, Camus, and others.