Books in Brief

Selected Prose, by A. E. Housman, edited by John Carter (Cambridge, $1.45). Anger is an acid that eats away or purifies—a force making for dissolution in Swift, but becoming a discipline in Johnson. Anger at human folly either destroys sanity or makes it unassailable. The asceticism of anger can be sensed in every fine of Pope, or in every page of Housman’s scholarly prose. Housman, while doing his job as editor and critic, turned the world of scholarship into a symbolic battlefield, on which are displayed man’s ineptness, his perpetual shying from honesty, his inability to endure hardship. Housman knew what an achievement it is—and what price must be paid—“to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not a pudding, in your head.” g. wills

The Cardinal Spellman Story, by Robert I. Gannon, S. J. (Doubleday, $5.95). America’s (as distinguished from America’s) most eloquent Jesuit has given us the most candid and readable biography of a living prelate yet to appear this side of the Atlantic. He might have called this saga of a grocer’s son Horatio Alger Baptized. In the intricate, structured maze of the Vatican, where the eternal cuts across the temporal at every turn, young Father Spellman rose, entirely by his own resources, from the unpromising post of playground director to become the most powerful Catholic ecclesiastic in the English-speaking world since the sixteenth century. Of the many striking qualities that helped carve this astounding career, an unflinching courage is not the least. Cardinal Spellman was one of the few prominent Americans to speak in responsible accents during the anti-McCarthy hysteria; in the Calvary Cemetery strike, his stand against a reddish, exorbitant union could serve as a model for every businessman this side of Herbert Kohler and Ralph Cordiner; and only last December, risking censure by the Revs. John F. Cronin and Thurston N. Davis, he urged all Americans to intensify their anti-Communist programs. If more of our nation’s leaders could absorb some of the Cardinal’s uncompromising, unapologetic patriotism, Americans would be less worried today about losing. n. mc caffrey

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Selected Prose, by A. E. Housman, edited by John Carter (Cambridge, $1.45). Anger is an acid that eats away or purifies—a force making for dissolution in Swift, but becoming a discipline in Johnson. Anger at human folly either destroys sanity or makes it unassailable. The asceticism of anger can be sensed in every fine of Pope, or in every page of Housman’s scholarly prose. Housman, while doing his job as editor and critic, turned the world of scholarship into a symbolic battlefield, on which are displayed man’s ineptness, his perpetual shying from honesty, his inability to endure hardship. Housman knew what an achievement it is—and what price must be paid—“to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not a pudding, in your head.” g. wills

The Cardinal Spellman Story, by Robert I. Gannon, S. J. (Doubleday, $5.95). America’s (as distinguished from America’s) most eloquent Jesuit has given us the most candid and readable biography of a living prelate yet to appear this side of the Atlantic. He might have called this saga of a grocer’s son Horatio Alger Baptized. In the intricate, structured maze of the Vatican, where the eternal cuts across the temporal at every turn, young Father Spellman rose, entirely by his own resources, from the unpromising post of playground director to become the most powerful Catholic ecclesiastic in the English-speaking world since the sixteenth century. Of the many striking qualities that helped carve this astounding career, an unflinching courage is not the least. Cardinal Spellman was one of the few prominent Americans to speak in responsible accents during the anti-McCarthy hysteria; in the Calvary Cemetery strike, his stand against a reddish, exorbitant union could serve as a model for every businessman this side of Herbert Kohler and Ralph Cordiner; and only last December, risking censure by the Revs. John F. Cronin and Thurston N. Davis, he urged all Americans to intensify their anti-Communist programs. If more of our nation’s leaders could absorb some of the Cardinal’s uncompromising, unapologetic patriotism, Americans would be less worried today about losing. n. mc caffrey