Reader's Choice

BY PHOEBE ADAMS

In THE DEATH AND LIFE, OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES (Random House, $7.50), JANE JACOBS, who lives in New York and loves cities in general, takes on practically every authority in the field of urban improvement and redevelopment and leaves the battleground strewn with the wreckage of dead theories. It is an inspiring spectacle.

Mrs. Jacobs begins by demonstrating that the people who are engaged today in city planning derive their notions from a group of nineteenthcentury English Utopians who hoped to do away with cities entirely. They intended to convert urban factory workers into something resembling cottage industrialists, whether they liked cottages or not. “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge,” observes Mrs. Jacobs — a line worthy of G.B.S., except that it would never have occurred to him.

Given such an origin, it is hardly surprising that these now standard ideas about population density, green grass, and open space do not work when applied to actual cities. Mrs. Jacobs produces a long list of horrendous examples, case after case in which the population of a demolished slum, when moved into neat new apartment buildings surrounded by large grass plots, promptly becomes more dirty, more destructive, and more criminal than before. This tale of disaster culminates in the plan to move the inhabitants of one such catastrophic project into a new group of project buildings, converting to a higher rent level the housing that these tenants have been grimly demolishing. Why such a move should be expected to improve conditions is a mystery, and one can only share Mrs. Jacobs’ assumption that the project builders are too stupid to profit by their own mistakes and too blind to look at any city as it actually is.

The great merit of Mrs. Jacobs’ book is that she has looked at cities not as inanimate conglomerations of buildings but as the intricate working organisms that they really are; not as unsatisfactory substitutes for country life, but as necessary and valuable centers of human enterprise, experiment, and thought — of civilization, in fact. As a result of this attitude, Mrs. Jacobs has developed some highly unorthodox notions of how a city must be arranged if it is to remain prosperous, efficient, and safe.

Despite the claims of the greenbelt and garden-city enthusiasts, large open spaces have no bearing on either health or safety; Boston’s crowded North End, officially a slum area, has the best health record and the lowest crime rate in the city. Elaborate cultural and artistic centers cast a blight over the districts around them, as do any other enterprises which concentrate their activity into a limited span of time; the Wall Street section is becoming a problem for this reason. Restaurants and shops cannot survive on two hours of lunchtime trade. When they move out, the business offices, deprived of necessary conveniences, begin moving after them.

Mrs. Jacobs’ suggestions for the proper, effective functioning of city districts are a diversity of businesses which will keep plenty of people on the streets at all hours, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and a dense concentration of people. Every one of these conditions is firmly documented, with instances in which it has produced obvious benefits and instances in which its absence has produced obvious difficulties.

The kind of city planning that Mrs. Jacobs advocates would involve a complete reorganization of official habits of finance, but this is not beyond imagination, for she has worked out a very plausible scheme by which basically sound old buildings could be profitably kept in service, along with private landlords and the useful small businesses which, under the present system, are rooted out like poison ivy in the name of progress. Altogether, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a fascinating book, and one of the few discussions of city life and problems that has ever been based on a sympathetic participation in them.

BERNARD MALAMUD’S A NEW LIFE (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $4.95) is a very well-written novel which ultimately disappoints the reader by being more conventional in subject and attitude than Mr. Malamud’s previous books. The hero is an earnest, and even, at random moments, a priggish, reformed drunk who has taken up college English teaching at the age of thirty and has been hired by a small, rural technical college on the West Coast.

Levin has never in his life done anything right, and he runs true to form in the mythical state of Cascadia, both academically and socially. His troubles with women would be farcical if Mr. Malamud didn’t describe them with such deadpan gravity. Levin has only to lure a lady to a deserted grove and clasp her hand in his to flush a covey of bird watchers from the underbrush. When he takes a high moral stand with his students about grades and cheating, he turns out to be mistaken in the facts of the case. Even the internal politics of the English department, where a war to the death is in progress behind the scenes, remains beyond Levin’s comprehension for months.

Ultimately, the innocent New Yorker wakes up to the extent of rocking several Cascadian applecarts, and he leaves the place (fired, naturally) more certain of his abilities and less certain of a divine mandate to reform the world. The trouble is, a good many heroes have trodden this path ahead of Levin, and Mr. Malamud has not added anything notable to the established pictures of spiritual progress, academic gutter fighting, or provincial stagnation which might disguise the fact.

Traditionally, every novelist begins with a thinly disguised autobiography, but recently either publishers or the writers themselves have become too canny to print these books until the authors have established themselves with something less usual. ADRIFT IN SOHO (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50) may actually be the most recent work of COLIN WILSON, but it certainly reads like a first try at a novel, a comic, enthusiastic account of adventures that made part of the background of the far more complicated Ritual in the Dark.

Adrift in Soho is a book in which something lively occurs on every page but nothing at all ever happens. A mildly discontented youth called Harry comes to London with nothing in particular in mind and falls in with the Soho Bohemian set. An unemployed actor, primarily attracted by Harry’s wad of pound notes, undertakes to teach him how to live on nothing but impudence. This project permits Mr. Wilson to describe a number of odd financial dodges, plus the eccentrics who practice them and the dreary citizens who are their victims.

The book is, in fact, a proper picaresque novel, with a naïve hero and a sophisticated guide and tutor whose services he eventually outgrows. Their travels cover a very limited geographical area, but in Mr. Wilson’s hands, Soho is as various as all England, and a landlady as good as a dragon any day of the week. Landladies are the only consistently unpleasant figures in this crowded gallery of drunks, thieves, moochers, zanies, and loafers, and there may be some connection between this characteristic and the report that Mr. Wilson lived for a time in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath.

ISHI IN TWO WORLDS (University of California Press, $5.95) is a mixture of biography and history, the story of “the last wild Indian in North America,” written by THEODORA KROEBER, whose late husband, Alfred Kroeber, was one of the anthropologists into whose hands Ishi was lucky enough to fall when he came down out of the California hills in 1911. He was the last member of a small tribe of Indians who had been so mauled by white settlers that they finally took to complete concealment as the only possible means of survival.

No doubt Ishi’s story is well known among Indian scholars, but to the lay reader, it comes as a considerable surprise. He was an absolutely genuine Stone Age man, adept at making bows and flint arrow points, working the fire drill, and in general carrying on as though the world had not moved in the last ten thousand years. He didn’t know a word of any language but his own, which proved to be a minor, esoteric item among the hundred-odd Indian tongues current in California. He was thrown into jail as soon as white men got their hands on him, largely because nobody knew where else to put him. The anthropologists of the museum of the University of California, hearing that a small-town sheriff had a wild man in custody, went and rescued the captive, much to the relief of the law. The sheriff was considerably distressed because Ishi had done nothing that entitled him to incarceration.

Since there was no precedent for dealing with a case like Ishi’s, the ingenious museum staff converted him into a live exhibit. This sounds horrible, but was actually a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Ishi (that wasn’t his name-his name was his own sacred property, and he never told it) adapted himself quickly and gracefully to the complications of life in San Francisco. He was delighted to teach Indian arts and history to the museum’s anthropologists. He was on the payroll as a janitor, came and went without restriction, and made friends with a large number of people. His English remained eccentric (Professor Waterman reported, happily, “He has some of the prettiest cracked consonants I ever heard in my life", but he spoke it better than his pupils learned to speak Yana, and would ; probably have learned to speak it well if tuberculosis had not killed him. He seems to have possessed innately fine manners and to have charmed everyone who met him.

In writing Ishi’s story, Mrs. Kroeber has drawn on her husband’s experiences with him and on a vast knowledge of California Indian history in general. She skillfully interweaves the dreadful story of the extermination of Ishi’s people with what he confided of his own past life and with his character as it was revealed to his white friends. This book is remarkably lively and interesting anthropology.

JOY ADAMSON’S first book about Elsa the lioness was such a delight that it is disheartening to have to report that its sequel, LIVING FREE (Harcourt, Brace & World, S3.95), is no better than most sequels. The story of Elsa’s cubs and her life in the wilds is told by Mrs. Adamson with the same simplicity and affection that characterized the first book, and the pictures are charming, but eircumstance has introduced an element of fraud.

While the orphaned Elsa was being raised by the Adamsons, and later trained to live as a wild lion, the presence of her human companions was right and necessary. Once she had been turned loose, however, and particularly when she had cubs which she wished to keep out of sight, the presence of the Adamsons with their cameras and notebooks inevitably became an unnatural intrusion. In order to oblige her readers, Mrs. Adamson was obliged to badger her lioness. There was no other way to write Living Free, if it was to be written at all, but the idyllic charm of the first book could not be recaptured under these subtly hypocritical conditions.

THE EMPTY CANVAS (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $4.50) is yet another of ALBERTO MORAVIA’S explorations of peculiar sexual relationships. His first-person narrator is a man immobilized by what he himself calls boredom, a condition which seems actually to be the result of life without any pressures or requirements. Dino’s mother is rich and indulges her only child with as much money as he needs to set up a studio and paint. The story begins at the point where Dino cannot even put brush to canvas for lack of incentive.

With nothing else to do, Dino strikes up a love affair with a handsome, lackadaisical girl half his age, then quickly decides to get rid of this boring brat. It is only when he discovers that the brat is deceiving him with another, and younger, lover that he takes a real interest in her. As an examination of the idiocies of jealousy, the novel is positively encyclopedic; there are long conversations in which Dino tries to trap his mistress into admitting her misbehavior, and one can fairly feel the poor girl twitching with impatience and sulky contempt. There are intricate, and futile, stratagems with telephone calls and much spying from bar windows and parked automobiles.

But while Dino’s maneuvers in the grip of his demon are convincing, they do not seem to have anything to do with his being, or not being, a painter. He never thinks about painting in technical terms, he never sees anything as shape or color, and for a man who has been daubing about, however unsuccessfully, for ten years, this is odd. Presumably, Mr. Moravia must have had some reason for making Dino a painter, and the failure to reveal it, or to relate the man’s painting to his other actions, gives the novel an unfinished look, as though the author had forgotten just what he originally had in mind.

THE CONTINENT WE LIVE ON (Random House, $16.95) is a beautiful big picture book with text by the naturalist IVAN T. SANDERSON. Mr. Sanderson attacks his vast territory with spirit and ingenuity, dividing it into chunks on the basis of the range of certain characteristic plants and animals. Once he has cut the country into “natural provinces.” he is able to discuss each section as a complex of related, mutually supporting flora and fauna, a method which gives an exceptionally comprehensible view of the ways of the North American world.

The illustrations, sharked up from here, there, and everywhere, are partly in color, partly in black and white, and all delightful, although not, to be honest, all equally well reproduced. As a nonbotanist, i raise the point with diffidence, but, subject to correction, those beach plums on page 116 look like plain old blueberries to me, and I doubt that even Mr. Sanderson could get beach plum jelly out of them.

He can certainly write entertainingly about the wilds, however, having no fear of amusing irrelevance and an almost eerie ability to foresee, and answer, the odd questions that spring up in the mind of the amateur reader. The book includes good maps, a glossary of technical terms, and an index.

LEO DEUEL has edited an anthology of writings by archaeologists under the title THE TREASURES OF TIME (World, $6.00). The authors range from Giovanni Belzoni, who was rooting in the Valley of the Kings as early as 1817, to Michael Ventris, whose decipherment of Minoan script is probably the most spectacular recent advance in archaeological knowledge.

The subjects covered are all interesting in themselves, but the literary abilities of the writers vary considerably. Wallis Budge, annoyed by the determination of the Egyptian authorities to keep relics from leaving the country, makes a badtempered and muddled detective story out of his acquisition of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Flinders Petrie’s meticulous description of unearthing a temple deserves the epithet Mr. Deuel bestows on him: “heroically pedantic.” Leonard Woolley’s story of opening the death pits at Ur remains one of the most elegant and moving pieces ever written by an archaeologist. David Hogarth, digging at Ephesus early in the century, writes a peppery, idiosyncratic account of his troubles with rain, mud, cold, flooded pits, and inadequate pumps. His finds were spectacular, but his theme is the miseries of fieldwork. Other contributors are scattered among these extremes.

The book covers only archaeology in the Near East. Presumably Mr. Deuel, whose introductory comments arE sensible and useful, can repeat this trick for other areas. I hope he will.

ERIC PARTRIDGE, editor of the Language Library, has turned out an amusing little essay, ADVENTURING AMONG WORDS (Oxford University Press, $2.25), on the pleasures and exasperations of trying to discover where words come from and why they mean what they do. He explains the difference between phonetics and semantics, elucidates the dangers lying in wait for the unwarypedant, and tracks down the word “phony” to its Gaelic origins. He makes philology seem like a marvelous game which anyone can play, politely neglecting to mention that the player needs something of Mr. Partridge’s own lightly worn learning if he is not to make a hopeless fool of himself.

ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER’S poem, SIBERIA (Abelard-Schuman, $5.00), has been translated into English by Jacob Sonntag and illustrated by Marc Chagall. Mr. Sutzkever, a distinguished Yiddish poet of Lithuanian birth now living in Israel, wrote Siberia nearly twenty years ago out of memories of a childhood visit to Omsk.

Actually, his parents had fled from Vilna ahead of the German Army in World War I, but the little boy did not realize that, and the adult poet has suppressed all mention of it. Mr. Sutzkever’s Siberia is a child’s dream of winter, all blue light and glittering crystal and tinkling bells, ice palaces balanced on the wind and bon tires blazing in the enchanting and terrifying dark. The images through which these memories are expressed are frequently either surprising in themselves or unexpected extensions of traditional winter motifs.

THE OLD MEN AT THE ZOO (Viking, $4.50) is a fantasy in which ANGUS WILSON imagines England, in the 1970s, falling into war with a FrenchGerman-Belgian trade coalition, apparently over smuggling. The story is told through the troubles of an administrator at the London zoo, a sober young bureaucrat whose elderly superiors drive him wild with their interminable scuffle over whether the zoo shall remain a neat Victorian plaything or be transported to the country and transformed into a wilderness where visitors, properly protected, can view wolves and wildcats roaming at large.

Mr. Wilson has obviously had immense fun constructing his imaginary zoo-which, incidentally, includes an Abominable Snowman among its population — but what all this fanciful uproar is designed to prove is doubtful. The affairs of the zoo are too peculiar to stand as effective symbols of any current political situation, nor do they fall into a clear prophetic pattern, like Orwell’s 1984. The picture of England and France dropping old-fashioned bombs on each other while Russia and the United States huffily pass joint resolutions in favor of peace has a sort of archaic charm, like the battle of Bunker Hill. Mr. Wilson clearly intends the spectacle to horrify, however, and devotes a great deal of effort to the dropping of the first blockbuster. It comes down in the midst of a fireworks display, with fountains, set off by the fabulous old romantic who brought in the Snowman.

Possibly Mr. Wilson is simply the victim of bad timing. At the moment, the weapons of World War II look almost cozy, and no war looks meaningful.