BY PHOEHE ADAMS
MARTHA BACON’S PURITAN PROMENADE (Houghton Mifflin, $3.95) is social and literary history presented in exceptional style. It is not usual for improvement of the reader’s mind to be accompanied by a steady run of chuckles, but this is the case with Miss Bacon’s studies of more or less literary New England ladies. The first is the eighteenth-century phenomenon Phillis Wheatley, who “reached the nadir of the human condition. She was a slave, a Negro, a woman and a poet.” Phillis, whose story involves certain wry inferences about Boston society, seems to have been a gentle and kindly creature, but most of Miss Bacon’s other ladies can best be described as formidable. Catharine Beecher flatly defied the established theology of her time; Delia Bacon rattled New Haven by accusing a juvenile clergyman of tampering with her honor —female honor being a ludicrously delicate object in the 1840s; and the Gallinippers, young gentlewomen who by all the rules should have stuck to their tatting, published a scandal sheet which cheerfully libeled half the faculty of Yale. Lydia Sigourney, “the sweet singer of Hartford,” merely succeeded in enraging Jane Welsh Carlyle, a feat too easy to warrant much respect. Without belaboring the point, Miss Bacon suggests that the collapse of the gruesome religious beliefs fostered in New England by Jonathan Edwards was considerably hastened by spirited, heretical females, and produces enough evidence for the idea to make one grateful that the girls did not turn their attention to abolishing the republic.
Under the guise of writing about THOSE CURSED TUSCANS (Ohio University Press, $4.95), the late CURZIO MALAPARTE composed a book-length anathema against church, state, caste, and custom. It contains some sharp, grim sketches of life in the ragridden town of Prato, where Malaparte was born, and some amusingly cynical reflections on saints, but on the whole it tells little about Tuscany or anything else except Malaparte. This half-German, quondam-fascist author lived in the wrong period.
He would have been much more comfortable in the heyday of the anarchist movement.
FIJI: ISLANDS OF THE DAWN (Ives Washburn, $4.50) is the kind of travel book that makes one long to take ship at once for the spot in question — in this instance, the Cannibal Isles. LEONARD WBBERLEY met no cannibals in Fiji, but he found a rich supply of local legends, picturesque history, attractive people, and practicing fire walkers. He describes all these items with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of a man who has had nothing but a good time and wants to share it.
In ARABIA FELIX (Harper & Row, $5.95), THORKILD HANSEN describes a much less enviable journey-the eighteenth-century Danish expedition which was the first attempt by Europeans to make any kind of scientific investigation of the Arabian peninsula. The expedition suffered from lack of advance information, negligence in Copenhagen, and the quarrels of two wellborn but ferociously jealous scholars. Besides the learned doctors (a Swedish botanist and a Danish philologist), the expedition included an artist, a medical man, a surveyor, and a general servant. Six men bound for Arabia, and only one ever to return. In addition to the heavy mortality in the party, much of the material collected was lost, or destroyed through official carelessness. Mr. Hansen, a Dane, is driven to continual apologies for the conduct of the whole affair, but in fact, given the novelty of the enterprise and the inexperience and occasional unsuitability of the explorers, the expedition did well. Their story is melancholy but fascinating, for it has dramatic shape, presenting the principle of survival of the fittest in clear-cut terms of honesty and adaptability. Niebuhr, the man who made it, was neither a proper scholar nor remotely a gentleman; he was a farm boy from the Friesland swamps, peaceable, sensible, unpretentious, tactful, and devoted to his job. The best man, in short; and he won.
JOHN GOULD of the Lisbon Falls Enterprise contributes another collection of State of Maine comedies in THE PARABLES OF PETER PARTOUT
(Little, Brown, $3,95). Mr. Gould is not the world’s most polished writer, and his mind runs persistently to the humorous aspects of hard cider, but at his best he is very funny on such topics as the dog with the deer’s head, the cow that walked to Canada, the purchase of a lobster, and Mrs. Wilcox’s sit-down sink.
CHARLES DE GAULLE is one of a dwindling number of traditionminded political leaders who can, and do, insist, without embarrassment or immodesty, that their countries would collapse without them. The troubling possibility that General de Gaulle may be right is reason enough to take another look at his version of recent history, reissued in one volume as THE COMPLETE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE, 1940-1946 (Simon and Schuster, $12.50). The book includes the material published between 1955 and 1959 as The Call to Honour, Unity, and Salvation. How President de Gaulle will describe the eighteen years which have followed “Salvation" is a matter of considerable interest to several Western capitals and countless theologians.
BEGINNING AGAIN (Harcourt, Brace & World, $4.95) is the third volume of LEONARD WOOLF’S autobiography.
I have not read the earlier books and can judge Mr. Woolf only by what appears in this volume, which reveals him as a man of intelligence and sensibility and also almost entirely devoid of personal ambition. At about the age of thirty, with no particular future in mind, he fell in love with the brilliant and to him exquisitely beautiful Virginia (it is a pity that most photographs make her look like a kindly horse), married her, and thereafter devoted himself entirely to helping, protecting, and nursing a woman whose great abilities as a writer were combined with the steady threat of madness. The chief interest in Beginning Again lies in the description of Virginia Woolf’s mental illness. The book’s primary charm is the unfailing tenderness with which Mr. Woolf writes of the wife he adored but understood no better than her doctors.
ARTHUR H. LEWIS, author of LAMENT FOR THE MOLLY MAGUIRES
(Harcourt, Brace & World, $5.75), grew up in Pennsylvania and as a boy heard of the Mollies from men who had lived through the reign of mayhem established in the coal country by that secret society of Irish malcontents. It is a well-told story, erratically documented, and Mr. Lewis leaves one question unanswered and almost unraised : what did the Mollies think they were doing?