The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 8

8 THE GUARDIAN Christmas Books Friday November 25 1960 -m SIR KEITH FEILING IN CHRIST CHURCH HALL Essays on twenty-one men from the many thousands who spent a formative part of their lives at Christ Church, Oxford, and who subsequently made history. A polished conversation piece. The Times. 25s MARGARET KENNEDY A NIGHT IN COLD HARBOUR The powerful story of a conscience haunted man during the Napoleonic Wars. It is a most satisfying novel.

The Scotsman. Henri dc Monthcrlnnt Andre Gide RELATIVE TO THE SUN MURIEL SPARK The brilliant successor to Memento The cleverest and most elegant Evelyn Waugh. JOHN WAIN Two cheers for popularisation by Alasdair Maclntyre EVERYBODY assents in principle to the notion that the history of ideas cannot be written as a series of isolated narratives. In practice the history of science, the history of philosophy and the history of art are all such vast enterprises that we congratulate ourselves upon any cross-referencing at all. Moreover the concept of a unitary history of ideas suffers from that vice of the academic mind, the inability to find a starting point.

If we are to study the history of ideas as such we must obviously focus upon a limited period, the seventeenth century, for example. But how can we understand the seventeenth century without the Reformation, or the Reformation without the Renaissance, or either without the Middle Ages Before we know where we are what was to have appeared in the examination syllabus neatly docketed as Special Period 1572-1690" includes the New Stone Age and a querulous voice from the back of the committee is protesting about the arbitrary exclusion of palaeolithic influences. Dr J. Bronowski and Professor Bruce Mazlish have broken through this tangle of nonsense in a splendid NUNCLE AND OTHER STORIES In nearly every case Mr. Wain's sense of the form-theme complex and his power of insinuation essentials of the short story score their Muriel Spark.

Book Society Rtcommfndation. 16 16s THE BACHELORS Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. of all Miss Spark's clever and elegant 3rd printing. 16j 6 excellence and quality comprise this 2s GEOFFREY TREASE THUNDER OF VALMY The story of a friendship and many exciting adventures shared by a peasant and an aristocrat. The tale is set during the first vital three years of the French Revolution.

Illustrated. Us 6d FRANK KNIGHT SHADOWS ON THE MUD A further adventure story in the lives of Derek and Brenda Partridge. The rescue of some boys from the mudbanks of Chichester harbour causes mystery and excitement. Illustrated. 13s 6d Nothing but the truth by Peter Fleming ALTHOUGH indispensable to self- knowledge and indeed to the quest for truth in any form, humility is a i rare quality in an autobiography, From it Mr John Morris's account of i his early life derives strong and unusual attractions.

Hired to Kill (Hart-Davis, 25s) tells the story of a sickly childhood and a scrappy, unorthodox education from which, by way of service on the Western Front, the author drifted into the Ghurkas and saw further action on the Northwest Frontier before being selected to take part in the first attempt on Everest in 1922. Such a career evokes the hero of one of Mr John Masters's rattling and full-blooded yarns, but Mr Morris found himself an imposter in the world of action. In the Army he was not a rebel or even a misfit but he was unable unhesitatingly to accept either the disciplinary or the social standards upon which regimental life depended," and he soldiered on in a spirit (one might almost say) of quizzical somnambulism. The feeling of apartness, of not belonging, was increased by his discovery that he was a homosexual this turning-point in his life is described with the unemotional veracity which distinguishes the whole book. His account of the first Everest expedition, ill equipped and in some respects ill assorted, provides a fascinating footnote to the history of mountaineering.

The interplay of personalities between the knieker-bockered pioneers is charted with wry, compassionate humour, and one remark of Tom Longstaff's well deserved rescue from oblivion. I am," he announced, the expedition's official medical officer. I am, as a matter of fact, a qualified doctor, but I feel it my duty now to remind you that I have never practised in my life. I beg you in no circumstances to seek my professional advice, since it would almost certainly turn out to be wrong. I am, however, willing if necessary to sign a certificate of death." As free from self-pity as it is from conceit, as free from mauvaise honte as it is from frankness," Hired to Kill is an unusual and distinguished essay in autobiography.

Yet at the end of it we are left with a slight sense of emptiness. Mr Morris refers somewhere to a poverty of temperament" which he inherited from his father. Whether it is because of this, or because he so consistently cuts himself down to size, stands so irremovably just outside all the experiences he describes, takes so clinical a view of his past for whatever the reason, his humility turns out to be a source of weakness as well as of strength. We feel that we have attended an autopsy or an exhumation, rather than the re-creation of a young man's life. But the experience (I must emphasise) has been very well worth while.

WINTER'S TALES 'Ten short stories of uniform John O' London's. for children. RUMER GODDEN CANDY FLOSS A delightfully written book which any little girl would welcome with open arms is Rumer Godden's Candy Floss with illustrations as warm and charming as the story Yorkshire Evening News. 10s 6d 9 ROGER PILKINGTON DON JOHN'S DUCATS Another gripping story about the Branxome family. Exploring the river Meuse in their boat they hear a curious tale about stolen treasure and immediately start to investigate.

Illustrated, lis 6d MACMILLAN book on The Western Intellectual Tradition (Hutchinson, 30s), which opens with Leonardo, ends with Hegel, and is highly selective in between. Their method is that of the intellectual biography. Their subjects are very various Machiavelli, Galileo, Sir Walter Raleigh, Montesquieu, Jefferson, the Lunar Society, these are only a few. The emphasis is on inter relationship, especially that of science and the humanities. This is a book which could be seminal for teachers of liberal studies in technical colleges.

And this is scarcely surprising since the joint work on it was conceived and begun in the Department of Humanities in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But in many other places too this book will be an inspiration. The weakest parts of it are the opening and closing chapters. For these resort to generalities about the rise of science and the like which are unilluminating. The rest is not only lucid and delightful, it exhibits immense industry.

The footnotes constitute a guide to secondary sources of great value in itself. I do not doubt that specialists will notice small errors here and there. (In discussing Kant the common mistake of supposing that Kant was entirely ignorant of non-Euclidean geometry Is made.) But these are more than compensated for by the sense of historical context which is never absent. Moreover, in the connections which are established with the political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all kinds of questions about thought and action are raised. This is indeed a provoking book.

All the ends are not neatly tied up, and the reader gets no feeling that the last word has been said. The fake judicial air which is often assumed hv popularisers is quite missing. Many academics would not have hart the humility to write this book. Scarcely any would have written it as well. One of the 191 illustrations from THE WOOD ENGRAVINGS OF JOAN HASSALL (Introduction by Ruari McLean) 3.1s The Next American President SENATOR JOHN KENNEDY'S The Strategy of Peace -Profiles in Courage and his principal economics adviser J.

K. CALBRAiTH'S The Affluent Society -The Liberal Hour BRONOWSKI AND MAZLISH The Western Intellectual Tradition 'This book is written with clarity, modesty and force, all rare qualities in such literature' pete a laslett, Sunday Times Mary Craddock A NORTH COUNTRY MAID 'a cheerful, vital book, full of humour and love of the countryside' the times i18W Russell Braddon THE PROUD AMERICAN BOY 'a searching indictment of racial prejudice' the Scotsman 18s, Gabriel Fielding THROUGH STREETS BROAD AND NARROW 'Here is a true novelist' norman shrapnel, Tlie Guardian 18s. Peter Forster SELF MADE MAN broad and gusty penetratingly observed richard lister, E. Standard Yvonne Mitchell FRAME FOR JULIAN Most memorable and beautifully' economical book'" jeremv brooks, The Guardian Si' a quest fulfilled KAY DICK'S Pierrot 'entertaining skill and virtuosity brilliant' and unforgettable pattl scott. Books fc Bookmen 30s: of Wild Flowers Table Games CIVILIZATIONS Is I Fairly incomprehensible Latest Successes Don't Tell Alfred Conversation with Francois Mauriac Hartley toga and all, and less the mis- givings of the intellectual.

The extracts or complete essays translated range from the writer's thoughts about Munich you like it not, a day will come, you cowardly fools, when the stench from your quaking bowels will be obliterated by acrid smell of your blood to reflections about past love affairs One must love stupidity, as I do, be stimulated by it, as I am, in order to run after young girls, who infinitely the stupidest creatures the As will be apparent these quotations, Montherlant's heroic attitudes are accompanied by certain measure of disapproval of fellow human beings. The hero necessarily alone, and anything which intrudes upon that perfect autonomy is felt as an affront. This of reproof can develop into nagging, but there are also moments when Montherlant forgets himself and scorn in which he holds the majority of his fellow-countrymen and plunges into a discussion of sex or the Chfih NSmeh or Saint-Simon. Then is very much worth while especially given the exceptionally good translation, which these essays have received from John Weightman. The Memoires Intericurs of Fran-: is Mauriac (Eyre and Spottiswoode, have much more unity about them.

They are really a sort of intellectual autobiography, in which their author recounts what writers have most influenced him and how he looks at them. The result is not altogether unexpected for the student Mauriac's work. Pascal and Racine there, of course, and Proust and Balzac and Constant. Mauriac's criti- cism of his favourites is usually enlightening and sometimes moving, his moral judgements that of Andre Gide, for instance have a tension which makes the reader feel himself in the presence of a writer who suffers his beliefs rather than assumes them lightly. This is an impressive book, though it is hard to upon the quality that makes it so.

Perhaps what one remembers is the voice of an extremely cultivated man talking about things he knows and loves. There is an intimacy in this literature which keeps it near to life and removes it far from facility. It if you like, French literary egotism at its best. -by Frank Kermode by character the Marxist slant is not essential, but happens to be the one most acceptable to Mr O'Connor. He also detests the doctrine of the necessary isolation of artists, at any rate in its current forms.

It seems to him to give rise to a disastrous series of errors, culminating in such merely curious abortions as action-painting. He writes best, I think, when celebrating order and precision in the arts, and attacking their enemies. The magic of art burns in its realism, as the divinity of Christ burned in this world." Yet he is perfectly well aware that his own way of life, as he describes it, is tainted by the myth he condemns the isolate individuality (Lawrence's phrase) into which he has been driven is not productive of order and precision, and what he makes is almost as much at the mercy of his own highly personal gestures and obsessions as the work of the painters he dislikes. Mr O'Connor is forced to place a higher value than he really wants to upon those forces in society which anyway seem to be on the side of order hence his defence of prestige-and status-culture, not for what it is but for what it preserves ideas of order. It is the necessary ground of his obscure optimism (which probably owes something to Caudwell).

Mr O'Connor's ideas of order are so imprecisely suggested that we find ourselves in the difficulty I mentioned at the outset. They are no more relevant to him than the Employment Church itself. He seems to conceive of some ideal clerisy, learned, honest, precise, but would certainly not presume to be counted into it from the clerisy as we actually have it, corrupt as it doubtless is, he excludes himself by his own almost wilful incapacity to communicate. He calls himself amateur. What a strange book this would be, after all, if it were decently and determinately written, a professional job It is better, and strange as it is.

charmers Furlong protocol. The old social unity," she tens us, "me sort ot freemasonry which used to be characteristic of the whole Diplomatic Corps was a definite factor making for world-peace." She thinks wistfully back to the days when all diplomatists had the same class background, spoke to each other in French, and followed "the universal code of courteous social formulae evolved by the French." The fact that all this courtesy did not prevent war is not discussed. But she gives a lot of pleasure with her talent for describing people, and her genius for appreciating family life. Trumpets from the Steep is quite different. Lady Diana is scatterbrained, undisciplined, romantic, and anarchic (in an upper-class patriotic kind of way).

It is difficult to imagine protocol getting out of hand in her dizzy ambience. She is less soggy with sensibility than in her earlier books, in fact streaks of an aristocratic hardness begin to appear in her character. When refugees from the London bombing appear in the country and overrun the lovely houses of her friends, she doesn't actually say Let them eat cake," but she makes it clear it is on the tip of her tongue. Her extreme smartness is apt to give the middle class reader a slightly cowed feeling spending the blitz on the eighth floor of the Dorchester, for example, or calling Winston Churchill "Duckling," or milking goats for victory with her long blue-veined hand. Who could aspire to such chic? And who could aspire to having such hosts of friends, everyone a Name Still, leaving spite and inverted snobbery out of it (no easy thing to do with this book), the woman really has got something a kind of Millamant charm.

The Potemkin Mutiny by Anthony THERE is a certain rgutism about French men of letters. They produce, it is true, their novels and their poems and their biographies, but, alongside these more extroverted forms, there is fin increasing area of their creative life which is taken up with themselves What I feel about Wrhat I think about And I have spoken of just egotism because it is often so superbly intelligent. No English intellectual would feel that it was absolutely necessary for him to situate himself in relation to whatever might be thought the significant tradition in English literature at the time he was writing, but French men of letters 'produce sustained meditations on Me and Benjamin Constant or Me and Rimbaud at the drop of a hat. They are better educated than we are, and have more confidence in their ability to add a brick to that stately building, in which they feel themselves so much at home the academy of French culture. Moreover, they have a total confidence in their readers' interest in the details of their lives, loves, and literary quarrels.

In the last notebook of Andre Gide published under the title of So Be It or the Chips are Down (Chatto and Windus. Iris) many of the principal themes of its author's life recur homosexuality, the breach with Claudel, sensuality, sincerity, always sincerity. These jottings are often painful to read one has the impression of an old man seeking to fan within himself the last sparks of life. But they also contain things worth noting. I even believe that at the moment of death I shall say to i myself Look He's dying That is as true a statement as Gide ever made about himself.

Protean creature that he was, and it is ironically con-: firmed by the last lines of the note-i book written six days before death. My own position in the sky, in rela- tion to the sun, must not make me consider the dawn any less beautiful." The author of Les Nourritures Terrestrcs could hardly have had a more suitable epitaph. Henry de Montherlant in his Selected Essays (Weirienfold and Nicnlson, 21s) shows himself to be more concerned with the exterior world. Not that there is less of Mon-: therlant. but what is displayed is more the ceremonial figure of the Philip O'Connor sees a certain need to make a mess of the hook proper attention to the reader's prejudices and expectations would suggest a degree of conformity, a respect for the standards of the British Employment Church," that Mr O'Connor's conditioning will always prevent his achieving.

Should some believer have tidied the book up Probably not, since the muddle Is somehow part of the point. But what is the point Mr O'Connor trails a few clouds of Marxism. Though himself a thorough-going individualist," he despises individualism as a metaphysical variant of property worship. He cannot stop being obsessively interested in his own personality, though the modern notion of personality is, he says, an invention of the British Employment Church with its detailed theology in terms of doing what one doesn't like in order to live decently (an impossible contradiction in terms)." This bogus cult of personality was, as Mr O'Connor says, the object of Lawrence's derision, and it equally recalls what Yeats meant Formidable by Monica "IF you like your memoirs gentle and scented, faithfully preserving life among the notables, and distilling an essence of statesmen and royalty, then Lady Kelly is your pot of pot-pourri. If on the other hand you prefer calculated indiscretion, gossip, and cultivated feelings, Lady Diana Cooper has an added touch of astringency and is probably the better bet.

It is easy for a reviewer tp sneer at both these writers, for Marie-Noele Kelly' is sometimes too earnest and Diana- Cooper too silly for words. But it is too easy, for both have intelligence and formidable charm, as well as being able to write extremely well. And then Lady Diana has a femme fatale aura which keeps female readers avid for tips. The two books Dawn to Dusk (Hutchinson, 25s) and Trumpets from the Steep (Rupert Hart-Davis, 25s) are astonishingly different when one considers both women were treading the same circuit at about the same time. In Dawn to Dusk Lady Kelly remembers her aristocratic Belgian childhood, her coming out into" the world of the twenties, her marriage to Sir David Kelly and her subsequent diplomatic pilgrimages among the European embassies, ending with the successful years as wife of the British Ambassador in Moscow.

A strict upbringing burdened with Jansenist scruples bred a character of intense dignity, formality, and reserve. Photographs in the book show a face of unusual fineness and intelligence, desperately wary of any self-betrayal. One cannot imagine any state secrets slipping out round her dinner-table. She chills one a little by accepting all establishment values unquestioningly, and she has not the slightest doubt about the usefulness of old-school hero, or the and are in from a his is tone the he Co 21s) now of are and hit is, Illustrated. 18s.

The Days were too Short MARCEL PACNOL 25s. a tempting collection of Christmas books Any good bookseller will show them to you or order the one you want if it's not in his shop WHAT BETTER PRESENT, ANYWHERE, than the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. A bedside book for life. For the gift that stamps you as generous and discerning, there are Oxford books it will be a pleasure to pay for: the Concise Oxford Dictionary (cloth and leather binding); the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music; the Oxford Companion to English Literature; the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes; the Oxford Book of Carols; Complete Shakespeares from 155; Jane Austen's novels at 15s each. And the Oxford Atlases, Oxford Bibles and Prayer Books.

And, of course, The World's Classics superb value at prices from 6s to 10s 6d. New in this honoured series are E. m. forster's The Longest Journey and JIM corbett's Man-Eaters of Kumaon and The Temple Tiger. 18s.

21s. 21s. 18s. NANCY MITFORD 15s. Max S.

N. BEHRMAN Illustrated. 25s. RICHARD HOUGH LYN IRVINE Illustrated. 16s.

HAMILTON BATSF0RD BRITISH BATTLES SERIES 21s The close-up of a famous sea-fight complete, detailed and THE LISTENER The Motorist's Weekend Book Edited by MICHAEL FROSTICK and ANTHONY HARDING A miscellany of essays, epigrams, cartoons and photographs. I do not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who regards motoring as a pleasure. 25s Lord Strathcarron, THE FIELD Companion Volume to BAROQUE IN ITALY 35s I The author makes a good job of telling us where we may discover the best Baroque." THE BOOKMAN BATSF0RD The Oxford Book INDETERMINACY" is a useful word to have by one when trying to explain what happens when Mr Philip O'Connor takes a look at modern society the situation is one of Heisenbergian complexity. I'm used," he says in his new book, The Lower View (Faber, 16s) "to being considered fairly incomprehensible." As I see it, the reader is presented with a curious choice, for if he accepts Mr O'Connor's arguments he will be obliged to despise the book, and this will make him anxious about accepting the arguments. But there is also a good chance of his contempt preceding his acceptance.

Mr O'Co avowedly self-obsessed," is at small pains to make his meaning clear, and will scarcely blame anybody for deciding he has better things to do than sort it out. Since the book is full of sentences so carelessly composed that their sense is only to be guessed at, of notions half-expressed, of analogies imperfectly presented, of misquotations, mis-spellings, and solecisms, it isn't unduly harsh to call it ill-written in fact the author says this himself, and his self-accusation of a swelling inaccuracy (' intellectu-alism' incipient) in my communication is accurately phrased. His mental activity seems to be of so restless a kind that he cannot train sentences the way he wants them to grow there is always another illustration, or another qualification, that he would like them to coil around before stopping. So also with the shape of the whole book. It begins as more autobiography a pregnant mistress, a job as gardener to a refined spinster, tramping casual wards, the success of the first book but turns into a set of reflections on modern culture, with a series of very odd interviews with famous writers and artists thrown in sideways.

(The best of these is the account of Frances Cornford.) One FORBIDDEN SEA-FRUIT -by Martin Page- CHRISTIANS believe that man's imperfection and unhappiness was caused by our ancestors eating the forbidden fruit. Melanesians believe that they lack the power and material goods of white men because their ancestor speared a forbidden fish. As. a Christian can overcome his original sin only with the help of Christ, so a Melanesian can only overcome his with the help of white men. The difference is that while Christ is accessible, white men have so far been inconsistent and unapproachable.

In Mambu (Methuen, 42s), K. O. L. Burridge describes the unhappy triangle of relationships, from which this belief has come, between the Administration, the missions, and the natives. It is the first proper account of Cargo Cults, the ritual attempts to force white men to co-operate in the search for salvation and unlimited supplies of Western goods.

Of the several sad books which have recently described the social and psychological disruption Western influence has created among primitive people, this is the most penetrating and one of the most convincing. Unlike many, it is also well written and anthropologically sound (although the echoes of Malinowski can become oppressive). But one wonders how Dr Burridge is able to give 100 pages to a general description of Tangu without explaining either the kinship structure, the political organisation or the village structure. Illuitrated by B. E.

Nicholion Text by S. Ary and M. Gregory Some 550 British wild flowers, drawn mostly to life-size, are illustrated in 95 colour plates. Numerous diagrams 30J ALL PRICES ARB NET Field with Geese HAMISH THE SPLENDID MISERY A study of the American President's powers by JACK BELL A helpful and highly entertaining commentary on the American political scene." Timet Lit. Sup.

25s HOW TO BE A PARENT DENYS VAL BAKER A hilarious manual of child upbringing by a father of seven. Illustrated. (J MORE ALICE' YATES WILSON A new Alice story. "This will be the high-spot of many a child's Christmas." Books and Bookmen. Illustrated.

2t 6d and for Crime KILLER'S PAYOFF ED. McBAIN Utterly readable." Spectator. NEGATIVE VALUE JOHN BOLAND John O'London's. 12s 6d each T. V.

DOARDMAN The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren lona and Peter Opie this captivating book as well as being a valuable social study, it is one of the most exhilarating anthologies of our The Times LAterary supplement 35J Board and FROM MANY R. C. Bell describes 91 games, the oldest was played some 5,000 years ago, the latest by American troops in the last war. 'His clear expositions and many delightful illustrations invite, almost demand, Birmingham Post 21s Bitter Herbs a little chronicle Marga Mlnco describes her schoolgirl life in Nazi-occupied Holland. no book has succeeded more brilliantly in capturing the atmosphere, of those brutish The Sunday Times 29 line drawings 105 fnA The Oxford History of England: Volume XI The Reign of George III 1 J.

Steven Watson and sustained THE OKTOW DICTIONARY QUOTATIONS plumb 1760-1815 a constant in Ihe Sunday limes 35S The Oxford Ibsen AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE THE WILD DUCK ROSMERSHOLM Translated and edited by J. VV. McFarlane In one volume 251; Acting editions (text of ateS only) in paper covers 5s each.