BY PHOEBE ADAMS
MORTON N. COHEN’S biography of RIDER HAGGARD (Walker, $6.00) is more interesting than the literary reputation of the subject would imply. Afflicted with a bullying Victorian papa and an unheroic lisp, young Haggard was considered the dunce of a large family and hastily shipped off to Africa. There he did very well indeed, holding various posts in the entourage of the lieutenant governor of Natal and meanwhile stufling his memory with the color and racket of life on the edge of Zululand, the solid detail that was later to add something like verisimilitude to the fantastic doings in She and King Solomon’s Mines. Haggard is remembered for these wild, and still read, yarns, but he was no woolly-witted dreamer. His first book, published at his own expense and no profit, was a political treatise on England’s annexation of the Boer territories, and the troubles that he foresaw in 1882 have duly come to pass.
When political common sense got him nowhere, Haggard took to giddy fiction and awoke to find himself famous. His success was not due to any great skill as a writer. Haggard’s prose was competent at best, and at worst, plain ungrammatical. But he wrote about Africa at a time when that continent was much in the news, and he had a knack, which he apparently could neither understand nor control, of writing out of the unconscious depths of his imagination and reaching readers at the same level. Mr. Cohen has resisted the temptation to pursue this aspect of Haggard’s work at length, which permits the reader who is an amateur psychiatrist (and who isn’t, these days?) to diagnose ad libitum, a highly satisfactory arrangement.
Lawrence Durrell’s translation of EMMANUEL ROYIDIS’ POPE JOAN (Dutton, $3.50) is a fine, crisp, witty version of this famous Greek satire. Anticlerical, antisentimental, anti practically everything that the nineteenth century held sacred, Pope Joan is a wonderfully amusing book.
SOME PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGSTHAT WILL NOT APPEAR IN MY NEXT NOVEL (Harper, $3.50) is JOHN CHEEVER’S glory-hole title for a collection of short stories. They vary widely in plot and setting but are all united by Mr. Cheever’s silksmooth, deceptively conversational style and by an underlying point of view about the ways of the world, an attitude that may best be described as well-mannered fury.
HAROLD NICOLSON has written the first volume in a historical series edited by John Gunther and called The Mainstream of the Modern World. Sir Harold’s contribution, THE AGE OF REASON (Doubleday, $5.95), is, naturally, about the eighteenth century. Sir Harold’s book is focused on individuals, an animated portrait gallery through which romp such distinguished personages as Peter the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Cagliostro, Dr. Johnson, and Madame Du Barry. The actions and conversation of these people tell quite as much about their times as any amount of economic analysis and do it more amusingly.
AESOP WITHOUT MORALS (Thomas Yoseloff, $5.95) is just that, the old tales put into brisk modern prose by LLOYD W. DALY and decorated with pleasant pseudo-Greek illustrations by Grace Mascarella.
The text of PERSIAN PAINTING (Skira, $22.50) is a clear, straightforward history of the development of miniature painting and manuscript illustration in Persia from the thirteenth century to the late seventeenth, when printed books put an end to this lovely school. The author, BASIL GRAY, is Curator of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, and he goes at his subject with enthusiasm and a resolute avoidance of technical jargon. The illustrations, from the bouquet of disapproving owls on the title page to the coquettish lady in green at the end, are irresistibly delightful.
The COLLECTED POEMS of ROBERT HILLYER (Knopf, $4.75) suggest that this poet is at heart closer kin to the Cavaliers than to any of his contemporaries. He prefers grace to force, melody to volume, and would probably be a bit embarrassed if one of his readers leaped from his chair with hair on end, moon-mad and Muse-struck. But within his chosen limits, Mr. Hillyer is a master of delicate sound effects, subtle emotional shadings, and technical proficiency.