BY PHOEBE ADAMS
EUELL GIBBONS, who has made himself an authority on finding and cooking edible wild plants, passes on his discoveries to the less enterprising in STALKING THE WILD ASPARAGUS (McKay, $4.95). The book is an inadvertent incitement to puttering and loafing, for the urban reader who sets out to emulate the author is going to get fresh air and exercise and also to discover that it is just not all that easy to tell a wild onion from a clump of grass. The number of things Mr. Gibbons has found edible is amazing, and while some of his enterprises, like cattail flour, sound more trouble than anything can possibly be worth, most of them result in truly enticing recipes. If Mr. Gibbons has a fault, it is the usual outdoorsman’s habit of minimizing difficulties. The amateur can take warning from his comment on felling a bee tree: “This excited the bees.”
BRIAN FRILL’S stories of Ireland, THE SAUCER OF LARKS (Doubleday, S3.95), are uncomplicated, directly told tales about children, their aged relatives, and rural eccentrics like the Skelper, who became responsible for a date, specifically, “The Sunday the Skelper Was Arrested in His Pelt.” For all the impression they have made on Mr. Friel, Freud and Henry James might never have lived, and it is refreshing to observe the variety and delicacy of emotional nuances that can be conveyed by an author who ignores these two literary gods.
THE WILLOWDALE HANDCAR (BobbsMerrill, $1,50) is another of EDWARD GOREY’S miniature Gothic melodramas, with the author’s incomparably sinister illustrations. All the paraphernalia of a gaudy virtuebetrayed tearjerker are mixed absurdly into an interminable Edwardian excursion, by stolen handcar, through Bogus Corners, Gristleburg, and Halfbath, with instructive visits to the ruins of the Crampton vinegar works and Mr. Zeph Claggs, who displays “a few of the prizes from his collection of over 7,000 glass telephone-pole insulators.”
PATI HILL’S novel of a first love affair, ONE THING I KNOW (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00), is unlike most of its genre in presenting a heroine-narrator whose erotic temperature never rises one degree above normal. The girl goes through the motions but is basically pretty bored with the whole thing, because her real interest in life is the establishment of her own character; the boy friends are mere accessories to this activity. As a description of a state of mind not uncommon among sixteen-year-old girls, the book is undoubtedly true to life. Miss Hill’s ingenuity in making Francesca likable is impressive. I doubt that anybody could make the girl really interesting.
THE LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY (St. Martin’s Press, $7.00) is a reissue, in one volume, of the two books about the novelist written by his second wife. FLORENCE EMILY HARDY incorporated into her account a great deal of gossipy family history which no one else was in a position to preserve.
NICHOLAS SAMSTAG’S THE USES OF INEPTITUDE OR HOW NOT TO WANT TO DO BETTER (McDowell, Obolensky, $3.50) is a literary tranquilizing pill, not because it is dull, but because it is designed to dissuade people from working too hard, doing too much, getting too rich, and in general missing the forest through counting the trees. Mr. Samstag’s definition of conscience as “the inability to refrain from remembering situations in which you have figured contrary to your life-illusion” is typical both of the author’s acid good sense and of his occasional lapses into a pseudoclinical vocabulary that is not as funny as he apparently believes.
In his introduction, Hugh A. Harter, translator of QUEVEDO’S THE SCAVENGER (Las Americas, $4.00), claims a great deal for this seventeenth-century novel as a landmark in the development of picaresque fiction, as a work of humor, and sometimes realism, and as a remarkable stylistic accomplishment. Undoubtedly, Mr. Harter has done his best to preserve these qualities in English, and the difficulties of translation, not merely in language but in period idiom, were never better illustrated. If “You’re trying to kid me” in the mouth of a seventeenth-century Spaniard strains belief, “Gadzooks” and the like would certainly stop a modern English reader dead in his tracks.