Potpourri

The charms of James Bond, that allegedly irresistible and unquestionably indestructible spy chaser, escape me, but for those who enjoy IAN FLEMING’S peculiar mixture of ketchup and California champagne I report that his latest work is called ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (New American Library, $4.50), and that in it the unthinkable occurs: Bond commits matrimony.

MAXWELL GEISMAR, critic and historian of American letters, considers the relation of Henry James and his admirers in HENRY JAMES AND THE JACOBITES (Houghton Mifflin, $7.00). Mr. Geismar argues, with detailed and persuasive evidence, that James has been praised for the wrong things by people who revere him for the wrong reasons. Despite its amusing, testy, conversational style, this is an unusual and courageous book, for while it is normal for critics to debate each other’s literary opinions, speculation about the private and emotional reasons which lead a particular critic to hold a particular opinion is very nearly taboo. In addition to rattling the skeleton in the typewriter, Mr. Geismar has a great deal of interest to say about James, and his book is altogether stimulating and frequently surprising.

CARL W. BLEGEN, the archaeologist who excavated King Nestor’s Pylos, has written TROY (Praeger, $6.95) for the Ancient Peoples and Places series. If Professor Blegen had not unearthed Pylos, he would be remembered as the man who directed a splendidly successful excavation at Troy during the thirties, and his description of his own and earlier discoveries there is clear and lively. The book, which admittedly requires of the reader a high degree of interest in Mediterranean prehistory, also includes a fine tribute to Schliemann, for Professor Blegen has little patience with those who claim that Schliemann was a sloppy digger interested in nothing but loot. In terms of his own day, he was a very good excavator, says Professor Blegen, adding, dryly, that most serious archaeologists have “no real objection to finding gold.” ANATHEMATA (Chilmark, $5.75), DAVID JONES’S remarkable long poem which appeared in England in 1952, has now been published in this country. It is an impressive work, designed on a grand scale for a grand subject — the development through human history of the artistic and religious impulses, which Mr. Jones considers to be interlocked if not actually identical and a manifestation of God rather than any invention of His creatures. The poem is sometimes magnificent, sometimes funny, sometimes disorderly, and always difficult. The difficulty arises inevitably out of the enormous sweep of the subject, out of the author’s technical borrowings from James Joyce, and out of Welsh mythology. Mr. Jones, as a Welshman, has every right to employ Welsh myth in localizing his universal theme, and does so brilliantly, but the reader who is unfamiliar with Llefelys and Blodeuedd simply must follow the footnotes that the author very considerately supplies (with pronunciation) if he is to enjoy, much less understand, the poem. And it is enjoyable, ranging from the rolling pseudo-Elizabethan music of

to the voice of a Cockney dry-dock boss, asked to hurry the job:

In his novel SECONDS (Pantheon, $3.95), DAVID ELY has constructed an ironic fantasy about an organization which arranges new lives for men bored with the ones they have. Specifically, the discontented client dies or disappears in New York and reappears, after discreet remodeling, in California, with a new name, face, profession, and income. Despite a certain fogginess about the legal details of what would inevitably be a monstrously complicated hoax, Mr. Ely’s story carries unexpected conviction. The suspense is considerable, and the mean twist at the end is at once surprising and consistent. A new life turns out to be expensive in more ways than one.