BY PHOEBE ADAMS
LA BÂTARDE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $6.95), which has become a highly praised best seller in France, is the autobiography of VIOLETTE LEDUC, a writer whose previous work has been virtually ignored. Miss Leduc is a Lesbian, worried by what she considers her extreme ugliness, and writes, assuming the translation of Derek Coltman does her style justice, very well. The book reminds me of the time I worked in a mental hospital, where the worst of several available disasters was to be cornered by a patient — the kind put there merely because the family had become unendurably bored with his conversation — and compelled to listen to a life history told without humor, without discrimination, but with the absolute conviction that the speaker was the center of everybody’s universe, and with total recall. Miss Leduc’s melancholy, self-important, interminable reminiscences take me right back to the dusty plush parlors of Batsbelfry Hall.
Count ERIC OXENSTIERNA, Swedish archaeologist and historian, describes the civilization of pagan Scandinavia in THE NORSEMEN (New York Graphic Society, $8.95). The book is thick with pictures of archaeological trophies and is of particular interest in its account of where the Northmen traded — Newfoundland to Baghdad — and what they brought home. On noncommercial history, the author tends to take the romantic view and frequently neglects to mention that other authorities do not invariably share it.
Books on early Scandinavian history come and go quietly, as a rule, read by scholars and Viking buffs and never even mentioned by anyone else. THE VINLAND MAP AND THE TARTAR RELATION (Yale University Press, $15.00) has, however, attracted an inordinate amount of attention from people whose only interest in the matter is a sentimental attachment to the phrase Columbus discovered America. Actually the book has no direct bearing on the discovery of anything. It is full of information, bizarre or learned or both, on medieval bookbinding, papermaking, handwriting, mapmaking, the habits of bookworms, and Tartary under the khans. The Tartar Relation is the report of an Eastern missionary; the Vinland Map is the world map which accompanied and illustrated this manuscript. The great interest of the map is its representation of the western Atlantic Ocean, in which Greenland (spelled with an “o,” as it is in church documents of the early ninth century before the Norse reached Iceland) appears with the south coast drawn so accurately that an older map by someone who knew the place is an irresistible assumption. The fact that Greenland is represented as an island, at a time when circumnavigation seems utterly incredible, would lead one to suspect modern fraud if R. A. Skelton’s chapter on medieval mapmaking did not reveal the cartographer’s working principle: when in doubt, make an island. Beyond Groneland the map shows another island, of improbable shape, labeled Vinlandia; the accompanying legend states that Vinlandia was discovered by Bjarni and Leif and visited by Bishop Eirik Gnupsson. Mr. Skelton and his colleagues, Thomas E. Marston and George D. Painter, have determined, after seven years of investigation, that the map was drawn somewhere in the upper Rhineland (Basle, possibly) around the year 1440. This decision makes it the oldest known map to show anything on the western side of the Atlantic and establishes that knowledge of the Norse voyages to America was not confined to Iceland. (Anyone who wishes to bone up, quickly and readably, on this whole complicated area, can find one old saga, The Tale of the Greenlanders, in the Everyman’s Library edition of Heimskringla, decently translated by Samuel Laing; the William Morris translation, beloved of libraries, is awash with selfconscious archaisms that would have frightened Malory. Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas, by Gwyn Jones, covers the other antique account of westward explorations; the two schools of thought on the reliability of these Icelandic records are represented by G. M. GathorneHardy’s The Norse Discoverers of America and Halldór Hermannsson’s The Problem of Wineland. Discussion of practical sailing routes occurs in Farley Mowat’s Westviking, and an amusing, imaginative, persuasive reconstruction of the Northmen’s thinking and temperament in Eric Linklater’s The Ultimate Viking.)
DYLAN THOMAS once started work on the libretto for a musical film about bicycles and horses. He didn’t get very far, but what he wrote has now appeared as ME AND MY BIKE (McGraw-Hill, $5.00). It consists of both lyrics and directions for the action, and is so gay, silly, and deft in its satire that the noncompletion of the project almost draws tears.
My nomination for the most unnecessary book of the year goes to THE STORY OF AMERICA AS REPORTED IN ITS NEWSPAPERS FROM 1690 TO 1965 (Simon and Schuster, $19.95), edited by Edwin Emery. A paperback the size of a tabloid, this object is unwieldy, illegible, inadequate for any serious study, and quite useless as entertainment.
JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH’S text for HERBAL (Putnam, $17.50) pleasantly combines superstition, semi-fact, plain nonsense, and quotations from once-learned medical authorities with a minimum of serious information about plants—just enough to deter the gullible from trying mandrake stew. The real purpose of the book is not botanical instruction, but reproduction of the handsome woodcuts, which originally illustrated a sixteenth-century work called Commentaries on the Six Books of Dioscorides, by Pierandrea Mattioli.
GEORGES ROUX’S history of ANCIENT IRAQ (World, $8.50) is a courageous book. Mr. Roux, who modestly denies that he is a scholar, has written a history of civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley from its origin to the end of cultural and political independence in the Hellenistic period. He begins with the nature of the country — an area with an odd tendency to become either desert or swamp — proceeds to people via Stone Age implements, and then charges through to Alexander the Great. Cities come and go, kingdoms rise and fall, gods change their names, archaeologists and philologists disagree about dates and meanings. Mr. Roux, organizing all this information, creates a picture of a region which for three thousand years maintained its peculiar cultural coherence. Mesopotamia is commonly dealt with in blocks, by specialists on Sumerians or Assyrians or Babylonians. Mr. Roux has covered the whole show and done it well, but the book requires more than a languid interest in the subject.