Books in Brief

Orpheus at Eighty, by Vincent Sheean (Random House, $5.00). Stravinski and Toscanini, Franz Werfel, Francis Toye and Joseph Kerman have rescued Verdi from the limbo of organ grinders. Their reassessment of his music opens again all the questions implicit in his life—a meditative life strangely at variance with the swashbuckling music; Verdi was a somber and dedicated Cyrano, for all his swordplay of sound. Carlo Gatti has done the scholarly spadework for historians; now the inevitable by-product of the “revival” appears—saccharine biography fashioned in dull superlatives. Sheean’s book details the political background of Verdi’s life, but leaves the central things unillumined: the retiring man whose music strutted in every theater, the demonstrative music full of hidden depths. Verdi spoke only through the greatest voices of his day and ours; never in his own. His silences have still to be penetrated. G. wills

A Measure of Love, by Iris Origo (Pantheon, $4.50). A quintet of portraits—as distinct from chronological biographies—of five nineteenth-century persons caught in particular circumstances of their lives which reveal the essence of their characters. Some are famous, like Mazzini and Byron’s daughter, Allegra; others are barely known at all. But each comes resonantly to life, for Miss Origo is the truest heir to Lytton Strachey writing in English today, and her books, like his, prove that the biographical portrait need not be just a clutter of compendious detail, but a work of art as composed and impacted as a good novel. After all, what both are seeking is the mystery of human character, and when I had finished A Measure of Love (which contains, among other things, the finest image of Shelley I have ever encountered), I even wondered if there were any serious advantage in imagining human beings any more, when such astonishing ones have actually lived and are only waiting for Miss Origo’s quality of biographer—the Post-Novelist, we might say—to render them, to recover them, with words.

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Orpheus at Eighty, by Vincent Sheean (Random House, $5.00). Stravinski and Toscanini, Franz Werfel, Francis Toye and Joseph Kerman have rescued Verdi from the limbo of organ grinders. Their reassessment of his music opens again all the questions implicit in his life—a meditative life strangely at variance with the swashbuckling music; Verdi was a somber and dedicated Cyrano, for all his swordplay of sound. Carlo Gatti has done the scholarly spadework for historians; now the inevitable by-product of the “revival” appears—saccharine biography fashioned in dull superlatives. Sheean’s book details the political background of Verdi’s life, but leaves the central things unillumined: the retiring man whose music strutted in every theater, the demonstrative music full of hidden depths. Verdi spoke only through the greatest voices of his day and ours; never in his own. His silences have still to be penetrated. G. wills

A Measure of Love, by Iris Origo (Pantheon, $4.50). A quintet of portraits—as distinct from chronological biographies—of five nineteenth-century persons caught in particular circumstances of their lives which reveal the essence of their characters. Some are famous, like Mazzini and Byron’s daughter, Allegra; others are barely known at all. But each comes resonantly to life, for Miss Origo is the truest heir to Lytton Strachey writing in English today, and her books, like his, prove that the biographical portrait need not be just a clutter of compendious detail, but a work of art as composed and impacted as a good novel. After all, what both are seeking is the mystery of human character, and when I had finished A Measure of Love (which contains, among other things, the finest image of Shelley I have ever encountered), I even wondered if there were any serious advantage in imagining human beings any more, when such astonishing ones have actually lived and are only waiting for Miss Origo’s quality of biographer—the Post-Novelist, we might say—to render them, to recover them, with words.