BY PHOEBE ADAMS
When I went to school I was taught, as a matter of unquestionable fact, that while the Romans were inferior to the Greeks in most matters, they excelled in colonial administration, engineering, and the carving of individualistic portraits. It is a great satisfaction to discover, from a study of GISELA M. A. RICHTER’S PORTRAITS OF THE GREEKS (Phaidon, $75.00), that on the last point I was misinformed. Miss Richter’s three-volume work amounts to an illustrated census of the surviving examples of Greek portraiture, which are, it must be admitted, for the most part in the form of copies found in Italy. The Romans had a convenient mania for decorating their houses and gardens with busts of famous Greeks, and reproducing these from Greek originals must have been a lively and profitable trade. Lest it be thought that this makes the pieces Roman, Miss Richter points out that devices for the accurate reproduction of sculpture were in use by the first century B.C., that portraits of the same individual bear a strong resemblance to each other, and that it is therefore reasonable to assume they were made with a high degree of fidelity to a Greek original. The enormous number of illustrations in the book demonstrates that Greek portraiture, while never as idiosyncratic as Roman (presumably no Greek would have tolerated the wart on Cromwell’s nose), achieved quite as vivid a re-creation of character. Even the necessarily imaginative heads of such long-gone worthies as Homer and Hesiod have a quality of personal, specific life. Aside from the quantity of information it contains, the book is valuable because it assembles in one spot works which, scattered as they are in museums strewn over two continents, are ordinarily seen in isolation from each other.
UNDER FIVE SHAHS (Morrow, $7.95) is the autobiography of General HASSAN AREA, a progressiveconservative monarchist (if there can be such a thing) whose long military and diplomatic career encompasses the whole history of modern Iran. As history, particularly of Iran’s wartime tightrope walk between Axis and Allies, the book is dense with detail. It is also peppered with items like General Arfa’s recollection of the time he was sent, evidently about age fifteen and an unsatisfactory student, “to stay with a schoolmaster who was a strict disciplinarian. However, after a few Weeks I eloped with the professor’s wife. . . .”
During the years he lived in Santa Fe, OLIVER LA LARGE wrote, among other things, a weekly column for the New Mexican. Extracts from these columns have been assembled and edited by Winfield Townley Scott under the title of THE MAN WITH THE CALABASH PIPE (Houghton Mifflin, $4.95). The pipe man was an invention, a huffy intellectual with a nonrunning car and a great deal to say against La Farge’s campaigns to arouse proper respect for Indians, preserve Santa Fe’s old buildings, suppress billboards and Texans, and fill up potholes in the main street. The column’s other character was a Hopi gentleman called the Horned Husband Katchina Chief, whose opinions are beyond summary. They must be read, but not in the presence of people who object to loud laughter.
JANINA DAVID’S A SQUARE OF SKY (Norton, $4.50) is the memoir of a childhood spent largely in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War. It is well written, but suffers from the fact that the horrors of life in the Warsaw ghetto have been told, written, filmed, dramatized, and melodramatized until there is simply nothing new to be said of them. Nevertheless, Miss David’s book is worth attention, for she has the gift of arousing interest in the people she describes, and her life before the outbreak of the war involved a number of odd and amusing episodes.
The outbreak of that same war found NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS in England, trying to figure out how the tight-mouthed, businesslike islanders could ever have produced a Shakespeare. Kazantzakis’ travel books are all brilliant and highly subjective, but in ENGLAND (Simon and Schuster, $5.00), the crisis in which he was caught up led him to observations of a more practical nature than usual. The result is a fascinating and still relevant description of the country and the people.