BY PHOEBE ADAMS
The chief problem confronting any biographer of Don Marquis is bound to be the temptation to quote; and, happily, EDWARD ANTHONY, author of O RARE DON MARQUIS (Doublcdav. $5.95), has made no effort at all to resist it. The book is stuffed and bulging with snippets from Marquis’ columns in the New York Sun. fragments of archy and mehitabel, most of the egobiography which Marquis never finished, serious poems which Mr. Anthony overrates, improper limericks sent by postcard to friends who have treasured them ever since, and long fireworks letters about his affairs and projects. One of these schemes, a play about Shelley, Byron, and a lady whom Marquis called “the countess Broccoli, or something,”was pure fantasy. Marquis had no intention of writing any such thing. But his madly nonsensical description of a nonexistent play contains, in one hilarious paragraph, as sound a view of those two gaudy poets as most professional literary critics can manage in a twenty-page essay. Around the edge of Marquis’ own comedy, Mr. Anthony has wedged in the actual facts of his life, which was such a series of disasters that a novelist who loaded them all on one character would be laughed out of business. None of the dreadful things that happened to Marquis seems to have altered his nature in the slightest. He began his career with a unique point of view, combining courteous astonishment at the habits of the human race and satirical clearheadedness about its ideas with an imagination that rocketed unpredictably into realms never previously explored. He kept these qualities to the end of his life, along with quixotic generosity and a saintly patience with his dreary female relatives. Mr. Anthony cannot explain Marquis (it’s doubtful that any mortal ever will), but he displays him admirably. It is always a pleasure to encounter a biographer who knows when to get out of his subject’s way.
EMMANUEL ANATI’S CAMONICA VALLEY (Knopf, $5.95) describes and attempts to interpret the fifteenthousand-odd prehistoric carvings which the archaeologist author discovered and studied in the Italian Alps. He reports that the people of Camonica went about their business relatively undisturbed from sometime before 2000 n.e. to the days of Caesar Augustus, when a Roman legion marched into the valley and set up imperial shop. The carvings with which the Camonicans adorned their rocky territory are no match, aesthetically, for the much earlier cave paintings found in France and Spain; but because they depict, to some extent, everyday doings and run parallel in time to civilizations well explored and even documented elsewhere, they have yielded a great - deal of information about life in pre-Roman Gaul.
Readers who recall that GEORGETTE HEYER once wrote exceptionally amusing and puzzling murder mysteries may be tempted, by opening hints of hanky-panky in the hunting held, to essay her latest novel, A CIVIL CONTRACT (Putnam, S4.50). They will be disappointed. It is woman’s-magazine pastry with an elaborate Regency setting. Togetherness in the curricle, you might say.
GRANT H. PEARSON, a veteran of the National Park Service and now a member of the Alaskan legislature, has written, with the assistance of Philip Newill, MY LIFE OF HIGH ADVENTURE (PrenticeH all, $4.95). No autobiography, the book sticks pretty firmly to sled dogs, bear and tourist problems, and the climbing of Mount McKinley, which Mr. Pearson accomplished with distinction and frankly confessed terror. He had a remarkable talent for falling into crevasses. It is an unpretentious book, but likable on its own terms.
ALAN DENSON has evidently edited LETTERS FROM AE (Abelard-Schuman. $7.50) with great care, providing not only the usual footnotes but also a biographical appendix which accounts for all Russell’s correspondents. Since these ranged from Yeats to nobody, and Russell, a true democrat, wrote as interestingly to nobody as to Yeats, it must have been quite a task. The letters themselves provide a veritable history of Irish letters, politics, and art from 1890 to 1935, but tell little about AE himself. He stuck to criticism, mystical speculation, good advice, and large public questions; gossip and emotion are almost entirely absent from these letters.