Books in Brief

Fenollosa and His Circle with Other Essays in Biography, by Van Wyck Brooks (Dutton, $5). The concise, neatly tailored biographical essay which has its masters in Johnson and Hazlitt is wholly welcome, and half the value of this book is in Mr. Brooks’ encouragement to revive so useful and entertaining a form. The eight walnut-rich studies here presented concern Ernest Fenollosa who, like Lafcadio Hearn, discovered for Japanese and Westerner together, the cultural donation of Japan, thereby enriching American art through Whistler, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ezra Pound; Fanny Wright, the friend of Lafayette, ardent feminist, freethinker, utopian, abolitionist, and educator; John Lloyd Stevens, who bought Yucatan in order to explore unhampered the Mayan cities which he discovered; George Catlin who sketched and painted Indian life on the plains; Charles Wilkes who first explored Antarctica; Charles Godfrey Leland, balladeer, humorist and journalist who lived abroad in the grand manner; Maurice Prendergast, the American impressionist painter; and that genius at large, masterful friend, practical ironist, critic, interpreter, and analyst to the forgotten and fine world of Clarence King and Raphael Pumpelly, Randolph Bourne. A major book in the recovery of the neglected cultural heritage of nineteenth century America. G. DAVENPORT

The Untouchable State Department, by Bryton Barron (Crestwood Books, $2.50). The retired State Department official, author of Inside the State Department, turns his gaze to the means by which the Department conceals its errors, protects its black sheep, and consumes its energies in memoranda criss-crossing among forty thousand employees. On a topic that has engendered a whirlwind of incautious accusations Mr. Barron stays cool: those who look for the Communist root of State’s troubles “tend to miss the issue, for our primary concern must be with the policy makers. Soft on Communism many of the latter obviously are, but that is not to say that they are actually Communists at heart.” And Mr Barron performs a salutary operation on that group of people—earnestly convinced by circumstantial documentation—who maintain that the Council on Foreign Relations is an “invisible government”: “I am not certain that my own observations within the Department over a long period of years tend to support this concept of the CFR role. I found that the Department itself, rather than any outside group, serves as the base for the policy planners and that it uses the CFR and similar outfits to help spread the official gospel and the dream of a world socialist state.” Mr. Barron’s expert knowledge appears in little ways, too, as when he mentions that Alger Hiss brought the UN Charter back from San Francisco “in a fireproof safe, parachute attached, in event of disaster en route home.” But wasn’t the real disaster locked in that safe?

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Fenollosa and His Circle with Other Essays in Biography, by Van Wyck Brooks (Dutton, $5). The concise, neatly tailored biographical essay which has its masters in Johnson and Hazlitt is wholly welcome, and half the value of this book is in Mr. Brooks’ encouragement to revive so useful and entertaining a form. The eight walnut-rich studies here presented concern Ernest Fenollosa who, like Lafcadio Hearn, discovered for Japanese and Westerner together, the cultural donation of Japan, thereby enriching American art through Whistler, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ezra Pound; Fanny Wright, the friend of Lafayette, ardent feminist, freethinker, utopian, abolitionist, and educator; John Lloyd Stevens, who bought Yucatan in order to explore unhampered the Mayan cities which he discovered; George Catlin who sketched and painted Indian life on the plains; Charles Wilkes who first explored Antarctica; Charles Godfrey Leland, balladeer, humorist and journalist who lived abroad in the grand manner; Maurice Prendergast, the American impressionist painter; and that genius at large, masterful friend, practical ironist, critic, interpreter, and analyst to the forgotten and fine world of Clarence King and Raphael Pumpelly, Randolph Bourne. A major book in the recovery of the neglected cultural heritage of nineteenth century America. G. DAVENPORT

The Untouchable State Department, by Bryton Barron (Crestwood Books, $2.50). The retired State Department official, author of Inside the State Department, turns his gaze to the means by which the Department conceals its errors, protects its black sheep, and consumes its energies in memoranda criss-crossing among forty thousand employees. On a topic that has engendered a whirlwind of incautious accusations Mr. Barron stays cool: those who look for the Communist root of State’s troubles “tend to miss the issue, for our primary concern must be with the policy makers. Soft on Communism many of the latter obviously are, but that is not to say that they are actually Communists at heart.” And Mr Barron performs a salutary operation on that group of people—earnestly convinced by circumstantial documentation—who maintain that the Council on Foreign Relations is an “invisible government”: “I am not certain that my own observations within the Department over a long period of years tend to support this concept of the CFR role. I found that the Department itself, rather than any outside group, serves as the base for the policy planners and that it uses the CFR and similar outfits to help spread the official gospel and the dream of a world socialist state.” Mr. Barron’s expert knowledge appears in little ways, too, as when he mentions that Alger Hiss brought the UN Charter back from San Francisco “in a fireproof safe, parachute attached, in event of disaster en route home.” But wasn’t the real disaster locked in that safe?