Books in Brief: A Roomful of Hovings

A Roomful of Hovings, by John McPhee (Farrar, $5.95). As all the bellbottom Teeny-weenies say—oh wow! the thing is this. Thomas P. F. Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and one-time, fun-time Commissioner of Parks, is a Joy Boy of the Great Tradition, a grown-up, midst-of-middle-aged Holden Caulfield, reeking of dark, pungent passions and possessed of a nearly delirious love of the throw-away theatrical gesture —the deliberate shuffle, that unhurried swagger which is the hallmark of the authentic cosmopolite. He is, to use his own word, “cool.” And so, too, is this collection of profiles which originally—and appropriately—appeared in The New Yorker. Mr. McPhee has chosen as subjects for his brief biographies a number of indisputably unusual men who, beside Mr. Hoving, include Temple Fielding, author of the Fielding Guides to Europe, Robert Twynam, caretaker of Her Majesty’s tennis courts at Wimbledon, and Euell Gibbons, who crashes through the forests of Pennsylvania and eats off the land, things like weeds, dandelions, plant roots, stems and pebbles. In a word, cool. And despite the fact that the Roomful is not quite a passionate bower of heroes, the people in it do make for pleasant and chatty company. On the train. In the plane. On the way to grandmother’s house. Cool.

KC

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K. C. Chawkins

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A Roomful of Hovings, by John McPhee (Farrar, $5.95). As all the bellbottom Teeny-weenies say—oh wow! the thing is this. Thomas P. F. Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and one-time, fun-time Commissioner of Parks, is a Joy Boy of the Great Tradition, a grown-up, midst-of-middle-aged Holden Caulfield, reeking of dark, pungent passions and possessed of a nearly delirious love of the throw-away theatrical gesture —the deliberate shuffle, that unhurried swagger which is the hallmark of the authentic cosmopolite. He is, to use his own word, “cool.” And so, too, is this collection of profiles which originally—and appropriately—appeared in The New Yorker. Mr. McPhee has chosen as subjects for his brief biographies a number of indisputably unusual men who, beside Mr. Hoving, include Temple Fielding, author of the Fielding Guides to Europe, Robert Twynam, caretaker of Her Majesty’s tennis courts at Wimbledon, and Euell Gibbons, who crashes through the forests of Pennsylvania and eats off the land, things like weeds, dandelions, plant roots, stems and pebbles. In a word, cool. And despite the fact that the Roomful is not quite a passionate bower of heroes, the people in it do make for pleasant and chatty company. On the train. In the plane. On the way to grandmother’s house. Cool.