Reviewed in Brief

The Unpublished Opinions of Mr. Justice Brandeis, by Alexander M. Bickel (Harvard, $6.00). Professor Bickel reverently sets forth, with explanatory remarks, eleven memoranda and draft opinions written by the late Justice Brandeis but never previously published. Since this procedure entails disclosure of casual private comments on pending cases by his fellow Justices, its propriety is open to serious question; but posterity is indisputably the gainer. In these pages we spy upon the Court as it formulates its opinions—much as a researcher might study the digestive processes of a dog through a plastic “window” in its stomach wall. The frequently political motives of Brandeis and his circle (including his quondam law clerk, the young Dean Acheson) are candidly, even proudly, revealed. Best of all, perhaps, by unconsciously “downgrading” the Supreme Court (from superhuman to painfully human), this book may speed the day when its vast new appetite for unabashed law-making will be curbed by an aroused nation. w. A. RUSHER

The American Novel and Its Tradition, by Richard Chase. (Double-day Anchor, $.95). No summary can do justice to the brilliant detail of Mr. Chase’s argument, but his gist, roughly, is this: whereas the European novel from Defoe and Richardson through Flaubert and Tolstoi and Verga has been concrete, and concerned with individuals in relation to particular places, societies and mores, the American novel has tended toward the abstract, and been concerned with individuals in relation to nature, with only a minimum of material or social furniture around him. It is a shrewd and wide-containing view of the most distinctive American novels from the Leatherstocking Tales to Nightwood, and I only wish Mr. Chase had added a chapter to suggest how many European novels in the past few decades (Proust’s, for instance, or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’) have, by his definition, become American. That, and perhaps, too, how an American novel like The Pilgrim Hawk has unobstrusively revealed the direction a coming synthesis of both European and American tendencies may take. r. phelps

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The Unpublished Opinions of Mr. Justice Brandeis, by Alexander M. Bickel (Harvard, $6.00). Professor Bickel reverently sets forth, with explanatory remarks, eleven memoranda and draft opinions written by the late Justice Brandeis but never previously published. Since this procedure entails disclosure of casual private comments on pending cases by his fellow Justices, its propriety is open to serious question; but posterity is indisputably the gainer. In these pages we spy upon the Court as it formulates its opinions—much as a researcher might study the digestive processes of a dog through a plastic “window” in its stomach wall. The frequently political motives of Brandeis and his circle (including his quondam law clerk, the young Dean Acheson) are candidly, even proudly, revealed. Best of all, perhaps, by unconsciously “downgrading” the Supreme Court (from superhuman to painfully human), this book may speed the day when its vast new appetite for unabashed law-making will be curbed by an aroused nation. w. A. RUSHER

The American Novel and Its Tradition, by Richard Chase. (Double-day Anchor, $.95). No summary can do justice to the brilliant detail of Mr. Chase’s argument, but his gist, roughly, is this: whereas the European novel from Defoe and Richardson through Flaubert and Tolstoi and Verga has been concrete, and concerned with individuals in relation to particular places, societies and mores, the American novel has tended toward the abstract, and been concerned with individuals in relation to nature, with only a minimum of material or social furniture around him. It is a shrewd and wide-containing view of the most distinctive American novels from the Leatherstocking Tales to Nightwood, and I only wish Mr. Chase had added a chapter to suggest how many European novels in the past few decades (Proust’s, for instance, or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’) have, by his definition, become American. That, and perhaps, too, how an American novel like The Pilgrim Hawk has unobstrusively revealed the direction a coming synthesis of both European and American tendencies may take. r. phelps