Books in Brief

My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits, by Alec Waugh (Farrar, $6.95). In these pages recently, Hugh Kenner conjured that “other world, remote now as Angkor Wat,” with which Pound and Joyce had to contend—the literary milieu between the wars. Alec Waugh’s random recollections show the other side of that other world: his acquaintances were lions of orthodoxy (Gosse and Arthur Waugh, vide Kenner), writes of temporary poems, amiable eccentrics (the piece on E. S. P. Haynes is very nice), bookish cricketers and minor celebrities. One of the best essays maps the route by which Michael Arlen journeyed from the twittering London salons to the Oak Room of the Plaza in New York; this reviewer was unaware that Maugham’s Cakes and Ale was a vicious swipe that made an ass of poor kindly Hugh Walpole. The longish memoir of Evelyn Waugh is pleasant but frustrating—one wishes that two such good fellows had gotten along better, especially being brothers and all. Grub Streeters will find heartwarming Waugh’s account of how he wrote Island in the Sun and suddenly found himself comfortably off for life. c. H. SIMONDS

Communism in Vietnam: A Documentary Study, by Rodger Swearingen and Hammond Rolph (American Bar Association, Chicago 60637, $1). Working from a compact, splendid bibliography (primarily of Asian Communist materials) the authors have shown the real nature of the Vietnamese war: another of a long line of proxy wars fought by proxy forces trained in the Soviet Union (or China). As early as page three we learn that “the leadership cadre which developed around Ho Chi Minh prior to and after the founding of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 is probably the longest uninterrupted directorate in world Communism…. Following his early work in the first half of the 1920s in the French Communist Party, in Moscow, and as a Comintern agent for the Far East, Ho Chi Minh, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc, moved on to the specific task of developing the Vietnamese independence movement.” Chapter and verse are detailed by the authors, who also shed some light on the nature of the Soviet-Chinese dispute. The book is a must for anyone who would talk intelligently about the war.

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My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits, by Alec Waugh (Farrar, $6.95). In these pages recently, Hugh Kenner conjured that “other world, remote now as Angkor Wat,” with which Pound and Joyce had to contend—the literary milieu between the wars. Alec Waugh’s random recollections show the other side of that other world: his acquaintances were lions of orthodoxy (Gosse and Arthur Waugh, vide Kenner), writes of temporary poems, amiable eccentrics (the piece on E. S. P. Haynes is very nice), bookish cricketers and minor celebrities. One of the best essays maps the route by which Michael Arlen journeyed from the twittering London salons to the Oak Room of the Plaza in New York; this reviewer was unaware that Maugham’s Cakes and Ale was a vicious swipe that made an ass of poor kindly Hugh Walpole. The longish memoir of Evelyn Waugh is pleasant but frustrating—one wishes that two such good fellows had gotten along better, especially being brothers and all. Grub Streeters will find heartwarming Waugh’s account of how he wrote Island in the Sun and suddenly found himself comfortably off for life. c. H. SIMONDS

Communism in Vietnam: A Documentary Study, by Rodger Swearingen and Hammond Rolph (American Bar Association, Chicago 60637, $1). Working from a compact, splendid bibliography (primarily of Asian Communist materials) the authors have shown the real nature of the Vietnamese war: another of a long line of proxy wars fought by proxy forces trained in the Soviet Union (or China). As early as page three we learn that “the leadership cadre which developed around Ho Chi Minh prior to and after the founding of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 is probably the longest uninterrupted directorate in world Communism…. Following his early work in the first half of the 1920s in the French Communist Party, in Moscow, and as a Comintern agent for the Far East, Ho Chi Minh, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc, moved on to the specific task of developing the Vietnamese independence movement.” Chapter and verse are detailed by the authors, who also shed some light on the nature of the Soviet-Chinese dispute. The book is a must for anyone who would talk intelligently about the war.