Books in Brief

Essays on Literature and Ideas, by John Wain (St. Martin’s, $5.75). The author’s major investment in this collection of brief, homely essays is an attempt to define a critical position between the slick transparency of the “ad men” and the complex and “fashionable opacity” of the academics. The middle ground he chooses to occupy yields, typically, the kind of piece one finds as an introduction to a fifty-cent paper bound poetry anthology: safe, polite and thin, a convention of majority opinion culled from the literary handbooks and condensed biographies. Wain on Pope, Byron, George Ade, Orwell, and contemporary British dramatists is never irresponsible and always admirably disinterested. His arguments for art as its own excuse in a “consumer oriented” culture and against prose that aspires to wear “the poem’s guise at last” are sensible. And when he says that he upholds the virtues of generosity and warmth of spirit in a writer, who is to say nay? But the middle ground, for all its propriety and neatness, commits Wain to an imaginative timidity, and his examinations are unexcited, undernourished, and anonymous. Only once does he give over the superficial approach: in a few pages of his essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, he cracks the surface of his subject to reveal a community of relationships in Hopkins, Lear, Hodgson, Chesterton’s Father Brown, and Sherlock Holmes.

From the Silent Earth: A Report on the Greek. Bronze Age, by Joseph Alsop (Harper, $7.50). Joseph Alsop is a political columnist by vocation and an amateur of archaeology by avocation. It is a pleasure to report that this summation of the present state of knowledge on Hellas in the Mycenaean age is as solidly satisfactory as his Liberal journalism is spasmodically irritating. This book is a model of presentation of the latest results of scholarship to an intelligent lay audience. Clearly, succinctly, and with an absorbing narrative style, Mr. Alsop recounts the results of Michael Ventris’ deciphering of the Linear B tablets of Knossos and Pylos; he describes the great changes ensuing therefrom in our understanding of the transitional age from Minoan to Hellenic civilization; and he quietly and modestly assesses the scholarly controversies which have arisen concerning interpretation of the new material.

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Essays on Literature and Ideas, by John Wain (St. Martin’s, $5.75). The author’s major investment in this collection of brief, homely essays is an attempt to define a critical position between the slick transparency of the “ad men” and the complex and “fashionable opacity” of the academics. The middle ground he chooses to occupy yields, typically, the kind of piece one finds as an introduction to a fifty-cent paper bound poetry anthology: safe, polite and thin, a convention of majority opinion culled from the literary handbooks and condensed biographies. Wain on Pope, Byron, George Ade, Orwell, and contemporary British dramatists is never irresponsible and always admirably disinterested. His arguments for art as its own excuse in a “consumer oriented” culture and against prose that aspires to wear “the poem’s guise at last” are sensible. And when he says that he upholds the virtues of generosity and warmth of spirit in a writer, who is to say nay? But the middle ground, for all its propriety and neatness, commits Wain to an imaginative timidity, and his examinations are unexcited, undernourished, and anonymous. Only once does he give over the superficial approach: in a few pages of his essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, he cracks the surface of his subject to reveal a community of relationships in Hopkins, Lear, Hodgson, Chesterton’s Father Brown, and Sherlock Holmes.

From the Silent Earth: A Report on the Greek. Bronze Age, by Joseph Alsop (Harper, $7.50). Joseph Alsop is a political columnist by vocation and an amateur of archaeology by avocation. It is a pleasure to report that this summation of the present state of knowledge on Hellas in the Mycenaean age is as solidly satisfactory as his Liberal journalism is spasmodically irritating. This book is a model of presentation of the latest results of scholarship to an intelligent lay audience. Clearly, succinctly, and with an absorbing narrative style, Mr. Alsop recounts the results of Michael Ventris’ deciphering of the Linear B tablets of Knossos and Pylos; he describes the great changes ensuing therefrom in our understanding of the transitional age from Minoan to Hellenic civilization; and he quietly and modestly assesses the scholarly controversies which have arisen concerning interpretation of the new material.