Books in Brief

The Soviet High Command, 1918-1941, by John Erickson (St. Martin’s, $15.00). A model of research and analysis, Erickson’s military and political study ranks with the works of Fedotaff, White and Garthoff. It is a lengthy book (668 pages, but it maintains high interest by detailing the development of Soviet military doctrine and military power and their relation to politics. Erickson makes it clear that an artificial separation of Communist political and military matters is a distinction without validity. It is without validity because Soviet actions have denied it validity by combining military and political action. This work may well be a classic, w. d. jacobs

The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts, by Marianne Moore (House of Books, $8.50). Two phrases from Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), “the sad-yellow-fly, made with the buzzard’s wing,” and “the shell-fly, for the middle of July,” appear in Miss Moore’s poem“Spenser’s Ireland” (What Are Years? 1941), and now the connoisseurship that chose these words has extracted enough dialogues from the same book—extracted, rearranged, tidied up—to make a charming gaslit play, a minuet of coincidences and disclosures of parentage, a high tea of luxuriously turned Victorian conversation as polished and bevelled as Ivy Compton-Burnett and as nostalgically moral and spirited as Elizabeth Gaskell. “Does it hold the attention?” Miss Moore asks in her preface, “Does any of it apply?” We forget that much of Victorian sentimentality is very welcome, if only to savor in velleity, to our raucous frankness, our scalding realism. And if Miss Moore wonders if Maria Edge-worth’s moral perceptions apply to our age, one can only reflect that they apply to any age. Scott and Ruskin, whose moral fibre was of steel cables, loved these novels. It is a triumph to have caught so much of the Edgeworth tone and setting with dialogue alone, and as an exercise in a mode not one’s own (Miss Moore has written neither a novel nor, heretofore, a play) The Absentee is a splendid example of craftsmanship.

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The Soviet High Command, 1918-1941, by John Erickson (St. Martin’s, $15.00). A model of research and analysis, Erickson’s military and political study ranks with the works of Fedotaff, White and Garthoff. It is a lengthy book (668 pages, but it maintains high interest by detailing the development of Soviet military doctrine and military power and their relation to politics. Erickson makes it clear that an artificial separation of Communist political and military matters is a distinction without validity. It is without validity because Soviet actions have denied it validity by combining military and political action. This work may well be a classic, w. d. jacobs

The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts, by Marianne Moore (House of Books, $8.50). Two phrases from Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), “the sad-yellow-fly, made with the buzzard’s wing,” and “the shell-fly, for the middle of July,” appear in Miss Moore’s poem“Spenser’s Ireland” (What Are Years? 1941), and now the connoisseurship that chose these words has extracted enough dialogues from the same book—extracted, rearranged, tidied up—to make a charming gaslit play, a minuet of coincidences and disclosures of parentage, a high tea of luxuriously turned Victorian conversation as polished and bevelled as Ivy Compton-Burnett and as nostalgically moral and spirited as Elizabeth Gaskell. “Does it hold the attention?” Miss Moore asks in her preface, “Does any of it apply?” We forget that much of Victorian sentimentality is very welcome, if only to savor in velleity, to our raucous frankness, our scalding realism. And if Miss Moore wonders if Maria Edge-worth’s moral perceptions apply to our age, one can only reflect that they apply to any age. Scott and Ruskin, whose moral fibre was of steel cables, loved these novels. It is a triumph to have caught so much of the Edgeworth tone and setting with dialogue alone, and as an exercise in a mode not one’s own (Miss Moore has written neither a novel nor, heretofore, a play) The Absentee is a splendid example of craftsmanship.