BY PHOEBE ADAMS
EVEREST (Sierra Club, S25.00) is a large book full of dazzlingly lovely color photographs of the mountain and the high country around it. The pictures were taken by members of the American Mount Everest Expedition, an enterprise that required 900 porters to get it up to climbing level and that reached the summit of Everest by a previously untried route up the west ridge. The book’s text, by THOMAS F. HORNBEIN, concerns this west ridge route and the preliminary minueting among members of the expedition over who would try it out and with what equipment, for in spite of all those porters, there never seemed to be quite enough oxygen tanks to go around. The climb itself was tough and becomes, in the telling, very exciting. But no prose can rival the effect of the pictures. They persuade me, for the first time, that climbing mountains is not a sign of mental aberration.
With the noble intention of inducing large numbers of people to read the play and enjoy it, ROUBEN MAMOUUAN has devised “a new version” of Shakespeare’s HAMLET (Bobbs-Merrill, $5.00). The thing is, predictably, an inconsistent and exasperating disaster, for although Mr. Mamoulian professes to have worked only on hopelessly archaic words and to have spent great effort on preserving the meter of the verse, he has in fact succumbed to Bowdler’s disease and altered several matters (like the scuffle at Ophelia’s grave) for no reason except that they offend his genteel notions of Hamlet’s royal dignity. He also has a deficient understanding of the mechanics of poetry. He supposes poetry is merely a question of counting feet, a delusion that leads him to change the slow, time-is-passing amble of “I he bird of dawning singeth all night long” to the thumping canter of “The bird of dawning sings throughout the night.”
MURIEL SPARK’S play, DOCTORS OF PHILOSOPHY (Knopf, $3.95), is so amusing, so thick with crackling, laughable dialogue that it hardly matters that the theme — the helplessness of men confronted by the superior determination and wiliness of women — has already been worn rather thin by Bernard Shaw. Miss Spark’s view of the situation, however, is not that of Shaw; she considers, it appears, that male insignificance is normal, proper, and right, and she proves it by calling all her male characters Charlie. The play’s action concerns a scholarly couple afflicted with an omniscient housekeeper, a learned lady cousin who makes passes at the husband, a frivolous lady cousin who makes passes at anybody, and a daughter who gets prematurely pregnant. These troubles produce explosions of ill-tempered common sense which are funny in themselves and become even funnier because in the world of the theater common sense is traditionally not applicable to such a situation as the Delfonts’.
The title of THE FRENCH (Braziller, $4,00), by JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL, is a misleading translation. Mr. Revel does not write of the French in general, but of one aspect of French political practice that annoys him almost beyond endurance: the collapse of any organized liberal opposition to the essentially authoritarian Gaullist regime. In his fury, the author attributes the condition to everything from simple cupidity to complicated historical neurosis, and never quite convicts any of his villains. But the details that he assembles as reason for his outraged complaints are interesting, unexpected, obviously knowledgeable, and support his general thesis, if not his specific indictments, very well.
WALTER BAGEHOT (1826-1877) was an economist, political theorist, and literary man, writing voluminously in all these fields. His Literary Essays (Harvard University Press, $17.50), edited by Norman St. John-Stevas, fill two volumes of The Collected Works. Bagehot’s approach to his subjects was calm and unpretentious. Because he was not original in the way of Coleridge or Arnold or Ruskin, his work conveys information peculiarly his own. He did not intend things that way. Bagehot was a brighter than average Victorian but decidedly a Victorian, and the assumptions that underlie his cautious defense of Shelley or his preference for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King over the “unhealthy” Maude reveal a great deal about nineteenthcentury thought and attitude.