Reader's Choice
BY PHOEBE ADAMS
SHELBY FOOTE’S THE CIVIL WAR (Random House, $12.50) began to appear live years ago, and its end is not yet in sight, although the second volume is. The present installment covers the period from Lee’s victory at Fredericksburg to Grant’s appointment to supreme command in the North. Between these points stands Gettysburg, which is described with such meticulous attention to action, terrain, time, and the characters of the various commanders that I understand, at last, what happened in that battle. (At least I think I do, which in itself constitutes considerable progress.)
Mr. Foote, who was a novelist until the Civil War pre-empted his energies, calls his book a narrative, presumably because a historian is not expected to write fiction and is expected to produce at least one theory about the cause or relationship of events which differs from all previous theories on the matter. Mr. Foote, not having any detectable theory to advance, cannot be called a proper historian and has tactfully put himself outside such consideration.
He is actually a splendid historian. He has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist’s skill in directing the reader’s attention to the men and episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be bettered, and there are a dreadful number of facts to be presented. If there is anything about the Civil War that Mr. Foote has not discovered, from the price of flour in Richmond to the origin of the nail with which General Hancock was shot, it must be undiscoverable. He follows Lincoln’s troubles with ambitious politicians in Washington and Davis’ troubles with bigoted states’ righters in Richmond, and points out the effect of these feuds on both armies. He quotes continually from the letters and diaries of soldiers on both sides, so that the large-scale description of events is peppered with the small, sharp recollections of men who heard the mockingbirds sing around a midnight ambush, or gawked over the fortifications on Cemetery Ridge while the Confederates dressed their line under fire. Mr. Foote’s one obvious fault is the habit, which should be called the “Flowering of New England disease,”of introducing each man with a sentence that includes his age, education, place of birth, family history, wife’s name, wife’s family history, children, if any, political allegiance. status at West Point, and debts in one brain-numbing lump.
It is not really surprising to discover, in the bibliographical note, that Mr. Foote’s models include Homer and Tacitus, and that he considers himself “obligated also to the governors of my native state and the adjoining states of Arkansas and Alabama for helping to lessen my sectional bias by reproducing, in their actions during several of the years that went into the writing of this volume, much that was least admirable in the position my forebears occupied when they stood up to Lincoln.”
THE WEST IN DESCENT
In contrast to Mr. Foote, narrator, C. NORTHCOTE PARKINSON says of his EAST AND WEST (Houghton Mifflin, $5.00), “I write as an historian.” As a historian, then, Mr. Parkinson has a theory to discuss, a positive world view which he hopes will serve some purpose in a time when “to understand the East-West conflict is vitally important.”
Mr. Parkinson begins with the obvious fact that all past civilizations have ended in decadence. “The energy dies away, the arts become sterile, policy becomes timid, and the outposts are abandoned. And it is this decay which creates the vacuum into which another and more virile civilization is drawn. As between East and West, it is clear that their periods of high civilization have never been simultaneous. Instead, there have been alternate periods of ascendancy, the decadence of one coinciding with the highest achievements of the other.” Mr. Parkinson presently adds that this alternation of power between East and West has been, in the long run, stimulating and beneficial to both.
All this is to be found in the introduction. The main text, by way of supporting the case, begins with the Old Kingdom of Egypt and charges through the entire history of the Eurasian continent. In covering a period stretching from 3000 b.c. to the present, the author has necessarily practiced selection and condensation, which is not the most persuasive way to document a large, amorphous thesis, since almost any given episode used to support a statement turns out to be only a partial version of the known facts. It is impossible to accuse Mr. Parkinson of stating what is flatly not so, but he continually gives the impression that he has left out a great deal that is so. This condition has the odd result of making the argument for Mr. Parkinson’s view of history less convincing than the unsupported view itself, stated baldly at the start.
Something in Mr. Parkinson’s style suggests exhortation to be up and doing, so that one constantly awaits directions to achieve that important understanding of the EastWest conflict. It never comes. Granted that power in the East and power in the West are outer points in the swing of the same pendulum, it would seem desirable to work out some method of judging where we are on the arc. Mr. Parkinson has this possibility in mind but does not get beyond deciding that the West is at the moment in decline; he considers old-age pensions, abstract art, and the high price paid for antique paintings sure signs of decay. But how much decay, he does not undertake to estimate.
KNICKERBOCKERED IDEALISTS
SHADOW OF A TIGER (John Day, $4.95) is CLYDE BRION DAVIS‘ last novel, finished shortly before his death. Davis was one of those unlucky, or possibly lucky, authors who write a single remarkable book with which all their subsequent work is unflatteringly compared. Gilbert and Sullivan had the same trouble, and Gilbert once threatened to retitle an opera Not Good As the Mikado. Shadow of a Tiger, then, is not as good as “The Great American Novel —”, but this still leaves Davis quite a bit of territory in which to be at least respectable.
The book is first-person narrative, autobiographical to some extent because the hero is born in the Middle West during the 1890s and becomes a chimney sweep, boxer, artist, and newspaperman before going off to the First World War. Davis did all these things himself, and his dcscriptions of chimney sweeping in particular have breathtaking authenticity. George, his hero, is a wellintentioned, directionless egotist who combines intelligence and naïveté to an almost unbelievable degree.
I am perfectly willing to believe in George as an abstract possibility. As a working character, he does not convince me at all. He has the look of something concocted, designed to represent a whole generation of Americans - knickerbockered idealists raised on Sunday school, prohibition, purity, and the works of Harold Bell Wright, and ultimately rather staggered by emancipation from these restraints. Other people have written novels about youths of this same time and type, and everything that happens to George proves to be very like what has happened to other Georges in other books by authors ranging from Booth Tarkington to Theodore Dreiser.
EGYPTIAN TREASURES
TUTANKHAMEN (New York Graphic Society, $15.00) is such a handsome book, so thick with goldsplashed color plates, so richly heavy in the hand, that one instantly suspects the text will be airy burblings designed merely to fill up the space not occupied by the pictures, which include seventy-five color photographs of tomb furniture by F. L. Kenett. The idea is unjust. The illustrations are precisely that — visual evidence accompanying the prose of CHRTSTIANE DESROCHESNOBLECOURT, who is an archaeologist, an Egyptian specialist, and chief curator of the National Museums of France.
After describing the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb and disposing of the old nonsense about a curse falling on the discoverers, Mme. Desroches-Noblecourt embarks on the story of the Pharaoh’s short rule and early death. Explaining the circumstances of Tutankhamen’s reign requires an explanation of the reign that preceded it, that of the monotheistic, anticlerical Akhenaten. He in turn is inexplicable without some understanding of Egyptian religion and society as a whole, for Akhenaten belonged to a royal house that had previously shown an inclination to sun worship and a decided distaste for the power of the Theban priesthood.
Thanks to erratic records, Egyptian history is full of gaps. Even the relationships of members of the royal family are frequently inadequately described in the surviving writings, a state of things aggravated by the official practice of incest, which made it possible for a woman to be half sister and aunt to her own children. In sorting out the available information and arranging it into a coherent story, Mme. DesrochesNoblecourt has been forced to make some unprovable assumptions in order to proceed at all, but her guesswork is plausible and conscientiously identified as speculation. In addition to historical knowledge and a wide, affectionate acquaintance with modern Egypt, the author has a fine visual imagination. When she describes Tutankhamen’s coronation, she has the courage and good sense to leave the pageant uncluttered by the scholarly reservations of “ probably,” “it seems likely,” and “the Amarna tablets would seem to indicate — ” She rolls it on in glorious Technicolor, and it makes delightful reading.
OUR CULTURAL IMPOVERISHMENT
NORMAN MAILER announces, in regard to THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS (Putnam, $5.00), “This book has an existential grasp of the nature of reality, and it is the unspoken thesis of these pages that no President can save America from a descent into totalitarianism without shifting the mind of the American politician to existential styles of political thought.” Since Mr. Mailer believes that President Kennedy has no imagination whatever, it follows that he cannot have the imagination to shift the mind of the American politician in any direction. The Presidential Papers proposes to compensate for this lack.
In this argument, Mr. Mailer has ignored a simple fact of politics. Any imagination a President, or would-be President, has, had better be kept strictly to himself. It is the business of a successful politician to appear to embody the imagination of the electorate. Mr. Mailer understands this perfectly well when he gets around to Hitler, discussing him as the embodiment of the worst elements of German fantasy. His concern over Mr. Kennedy’s imagination appears to be an ex post facto notion, designed to give importance to a collection of magazine pieces, some brilliant, some trivial, all essentially the oddments turned out by a novelist who is not writing a novel. The presidential angle portentously recalls the Beerbohm cartoon of “Walt Whitman, inciting the Bird of Freedom to soar.”
EPIGRAMS
THE NEUROTIC’S NOTEBOOK (BobbsMerrill, $2.50) is a collection of remarks by MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN on everything from anxiety to vice. (I cannot find a topic under z.) They are short, precise, and funny, partly because they are coldly accurate about matters generally prettied up in public, and partly because of the unexpected juxtaposition of ideas that are, taken singly, quite ordinary and harmless.
“We climb mountains because they are there, and worship God because He is not.”
“The neurotic always believes that his enemies are more sincere than his friends — and more sensible.”
“We all have a pretty clear understanding of goodness, but it seldom applies to the situation we’re in at the moment.”
“Anything one man can do well, a good team can botch.”
These epigrams go off like a string of firecrackers, getting noisier the longer they are in action. They resemble nothing except, remotely, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, which defined longevity as “uncommon extension of the fear of death.”
AZTEC CHRONICLE
In the late sixteenth century, FRAY DIEGO DURAN, a Dominican friar brought up in Mexico and presumably assigned to missionary work there, wrote a history of the country before the coming of Cortes. The manuscript lay about unpublished until the nineteenth century, when hardworking scholars got it more or less into print. A cut and edited version of this work has now been translated into English by Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas and appears as THE AZTECS (Orion, $12.50), for the friar’s own title remains a bewilderment.
An introduction by Dr. Ignacio Bernal identifies Fray Diego, explains the history of his work, and discusses its probable sources. Duran spoke Nahuatl fluently. It is very likely that he had access to Aztec history books, which Dr. Bernal believes were less rare in the friar’s day than they have since become. Since Aztec writing was a kind of shorthand memory-jogger rather than a word-for-word text, an Indian expert was needed to interpret it. Such an expert presumably accounts for the long and disconcertingly elegant speeches attributed by Duran to the various heads of the Aztec state. Just how Duran got his entire chronicle into shape, Dr. Bernal can only conjecture, but that it was, and is, an extraordinary work is plain to the most casual reader.
The history begins in the fog of legend with a divinely led pilgrimage from somewhere in the north. It moves gradually into the clear light of reality and recounts a game of power politics and territorial aggrandizement. for a century before the coming of the Spaniards, that would have impressed Machiavelli himself. It also makes the Spanish conquest not less spectacular, but less improbable. The Aztecs had never learned to bribe their satellite allies with the equivalent of Roman citizenship, and the vast territory they controlled was largely populated by people who hated them.
Duran appears to have taken his text literally from Aztec chronicles, which protested innocence of aggression and complained of the ingratitude of Aztec subjects in a thoroughly familiar style. An occasional digression gives the viewpoint of a rival city, denouncing the Aztecs as wily, greedy, bloodthirsty thieves. Another type of digression is the friar’s own opinion, which pops up now and then in irate asides about wanton murder and children of the devil.
In general, and not, according to Dr. Bernal, merely because of the cutting it has undergone, Duran’s text sticks to the Aztec view of things with something close to sympathy. His official reason for recording the barbarous unchristian past was sound, if not generally admired by his clerical colleagues: he thought the Aztecs could not be truly converted until they had been truly understood through their own ideas about their history. His deeper reasons must have been a passionate interest in his subject and a sneaking admiration for his Indians. On the evidence of his book, they both deserved it.