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WALTER LIPPMANN has said of himself that he is a man leading a double life. As a philosopher he deals with the general problems that are the background for his day-to-day observations of men and events; his journalism, on the other hand, has been a “laboratory in which to test the philosophy and keep it from becoming too abstract.” In fact, the two lives have been one and indivisible; and in THE ESSENTIAL LIPPMANN, a selection from his books and columns made with painstaking care by Professors Clinton Rossiter and James Lare (Random House, $7.50), the writings of theorist and journalist fit smoothly together without any makeshift joint. Indeed, it is just this dual function philosopher and journalist that has given Mr. Lippmann his unique stature as a political writer. Over the last thirty years his column, “Today and Tomorrow,” has come to have the authority of a national institution.

This collection, a large and impressive one, ranges over the writings of more than fifty years. During that time Mr. Lippmann’s politics often varied. He backed Republicans or Democrats the occasion seemed to require, and during the leftist 1930s he looked like an archconservative to the more ardent New Dealers. But however politics may have varied, his political philosophy has remained singularly consistent. He believes in liberal democracy, but this does not mean that he has any mystical worship of the majority. Fifty-one percent of the people, he tells us, do not necessarily have a greater wisdom than fortynine percent. The rule of the majority is simply to save us from the reign of brute force. What is essential to our constitutional democracy is that this will of the majority can be exercised only under the law.

It was this emphasis upon law that made Mr. Lippmann seem to swing far to the right in the 1930s, when many intellectuals, under Marxist influence, thought legal principles and institutions unimportant beside the need to save a failing economy. However, in the late 1950s he was pulling on the other oar and chiding the Eisenhower Administration for not meeting urgent problems of social welfare. Here again, there is no inconsistency of principle; he was simply putting emphasis where it was needed at the time in order to restore the balance in our political thinking.

James Reston of the New York Times has called Mr. Lippmann “the great simplifier.” The phrase, though facetious, is a fine compliment. The art of simplification — an important and difficult one — requires a thorough grasp of one’s materials and a mind that can cut through irrelevancies toward the essentials. With his simple and perspicuous style Mr. Lippmann has achieved a rare mastery of the short column of 1500 or 2000 words. The column always has a single central point, clearly stated and often repeated; qualifying and subordinate points are neatly arranged so as not to obscure the central issue; and when one arrives at the last period, one feels that a “Q.E.D.” could be neatly tacked on.

In making intricate things simple, he has sometimes seemed a pontifical writer to some people. “Pundit” was the invariable epithet Time magazine applied to him. In fact, as this collection shows, Mr. Lippmann has always been a man of great humility of mind; and the words he wrote in 1915 apply very well to himself: “This is what kills political writing, this absurd pretense that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think.” The notes of this puzzled man have probably done as much to educate the American electorate as any other writings in our time.

Young writers tend to make transparent and undisguised use of personal experience. When the experience is out of the ordinary, it may bring a shock of surprise or serve to open our eyes to some strange and unnoticed stratum of society. But sensational material also has its drawbacks for the novelist; it can lack the range and depth of feeling to be found in more familiar human relationships, and in big doses it runs the risk of becoming monotonous, as too much spice will jade any palate.

JOHN RECHY’S CITY OF NIGHT (Grove, $5.95), a first novel, is the story of a young man’s adventures as a homosexual prostitute in the big cities of America — New York, Los Angeles, Hollywood, New Orleans. His story begins and ends in El Paso, but his unsavory career starts in New York. One of the many young fellows, broke and hungry, hanging around Times Square, he lets himself be picked up by a middle-aged man. The experience terrifies but also fascinates him, and, anyway, he needs the money. Thereafter Times Square becomes a regular beat.

When Mr. Rechy is writing in straightforward reportorial style, some of his single incidents and characters emerge in remarkable and lurid life. One of the best chapters has to do with another young man, Pete, who works the same beat and with whom the narrator becomes friends. They combine forces and sometimes go out together with the same client. The pathetic thing about the friendship is the complete emotional confusion and emptiness under their surface bravado. Two small boys lost in the night of the big city, in their loneliness they hold hands, but that is as far as they go. Neither knows where he stands on the question of his sex.

Unfortunately, Mr. Rechy does not stick to simple reporting; his style turns lyrical and subjective in the worst way, and he tries to build a book too big and ambitious for his talent to manage. Inevitably, the sheer sexual mania becomes monotonous, and the characters, interesting for a while as grotesques, become bores. The more soul-searching Mr. Rechy goes in for, the more he leaves doubt that the narrator is not being quite honest about himself or his experience. “No, I’m not what you think I am!” he cries out time and again to the men to whom he is giving himself. The literature of the confessional loses a great deal of its power when the person confessing pretends he was not really involved in what he was doing.

CHARLES WRIGHT’S THE MESSENGER (Farrar, Straus, $3.95), also a first novel and dealing with a similar urban underworld, avoids Mr. Rechy’s mistakes of self-inflation. Spare and quiet in style, less a novel than a series of vignettes, the book carries the reader immediately and easily into the bustle, the sights, sounds, and smells of the streets of New York.

Mr. Wright is a young Negro, born in Missouri but now living in New York. Until recently he worked as a messenger in Rockefeller Center. In some ways, it seems, the job was a privileged one for a budding novelist, since it sent him to all parts of the city and enabled him to encounter all manner of people. The protagonist here is also a messenger with the full range of the city. Mr. Wright does not get in front of his own camera; he is almost the pure spectator, letting his characters walk in and out of his book as naturally as his hero lets them walk in and out of his life. As a novel, it is very slight, but manages nevertheless to carve out a pretty large slice of New York life; and it is all done with an economy of means that would be admirable in an older writer but is little short of amazing in a first novel. Mr. Wright is that rare thing, a natural writer, and it is to be hoped that this novel is a portent of many fine things to come.

What ever happened to the essay? A very good answer to this question, so commonly asked, is provided by FIRST PERSON SINGULAR: ESSAYS FOR THE SIXTIES (Dial, $4.50), a very lively and readable collection edited by Herbert Gold: the essay is far from dead, it is simply undergoing an evolution. Though the old-fashioned rambling essay has now only a few successful practitioners, its place is being taken by a new and exciting form, halfway between reportage and fiction, which employs all the descriptive and anecdotal resources of the novelist’s imagination. And, as could be expected, the more successful writers of this kind of essay — like James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Hardwick — are normally writers of fiction. Novelists today find it harder and harder to go off by themselves and write their novels; they are so involved with the issues that trouble our world that they need, from time to time, to drop the masks of fiction, get on the stage themselves, and speak their minds directly and bluntly.

The new essay is a literary form with immense possibilities. Saul Bellow, for example, writing here about Khrushchev and his two visits to this country, can give his novelist’s imagination free rein in trying to assemble some human picture of the man beneath all the buffoonery and threats. Is the result fact or fiction? One cannot be sure; but in any case it is a portrait in depth suggestive of a more profound human truth than can be found in the tedious analyses by Kremlinologists.

Sometimes the issues that draw the novelist to the essay are so urgent that they may, at least for the time being, turn his best energies away from fiction. Such is the case with James Baldwin, whose finest writing recently has been not in his novels but in his various tracts on the Negro question. Two eloquent essays here, on Negro housing in New York, were clearly the spadework for his subsequent book The Fire Next Time. However, the novelist sometimes ventures into the essay form out of sheer playfulness, as in Mary McCarthy’s “America the Beautiful,” which seeks to refute the common cliché that ours is a materialistic country. From sentence to sentence she seems as surprised and delighted as a child at the next unsuspected and clever thing that will pop out of her mouth.

Nearly all the contributions are so well done that it seems unfair to single out individual names. My only cavil is directed at the editor’s subtitle, which would seem to imply that the collection announces some new and special literary climate for this decade. Ever since the 1920s and 1930s Americans have tended to think each decade must bring forward a new literary generation and bear its own distinct literary physiognomy. If this book is any evidence, the sixties are all variety and no unity. More protest and dissent are in the air now than ten years ago, and the tone of vigorous dissent runs throughout these essays. But the dissent comes from every quarter of the compass, is supported by convictions of every shade and stripe, so that there hardly seems to be any unified climate of opinion among the literati — and perhaps that is all to the good. Moreover, such oldsters in this collection as Mary McCarthy, Nelson Algren, and William Saroyan were formed in an earlier period and can hardly be taken as spokesmen for a new generation.

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE’S PORTRAIT OF MYSELF (Simon and Schuster, $5.95) is a spirited account of an indomitable and energetic woman’s rise to fame as a photographer and her subsequent gallant and successful struggle against a near-fatal disease. As a story of human courage, told simply and gaily, it is a most moving book.

Miss Bourke-White became a professional photographer through a series of accidents. A number of bad investments by her father left the family penniless at his death. One of the few possessions she was able to salvage was a camera with a cracked lens. With only an amateur’s knowledge of photography, she went to work taking shots of the Cornell campus, where she was then a student. The finished photographs, fuzzy and shadowy as Corots, were offered for sale to her fellow Cornellians. To her surprise the pictures were eagerly bought up, and she was in business — for life, as it turned out.

A flair for the pictorial possibilities in industry led her to photograph, at great pains and danger to herself, the steel mills and furnaces near Cleveland. These early photographs came to the attention of Henry Luce, who was just then preparing to launch a new pictorial magazine. Miss Bourke-White joined the staff of Life, and for twenty years she was one of the mainstays of that magazine.

One of her most fortunate talents seems to have been an unusual capacity to infect other people with her enthusiasms. When she was broke and just starting out, she could get camera dealers to lend her equipment, and she could persuade tough foremen to let her hang around dangerous blast furnaces. It was a talent that helped her to wangle her way past many official barriers; she was one of the first Westerners, for example, allowed to photograph Russian industry. And she was even able, when she photographed him, to coax the ghost of a smile into the granite face of Stalin himself.

It was a cruel irony that this woman who was always on the go should be stricken by Parkinson’s disease, which threatened her with total paralysis. But, luckily, before the disease was too far advanced, a new and miraculous surgical treatment had been found, and the operation upon her was successful. Nevertheless, she had, doggedly and painfully, to learn to use her limbs and body all over again. She never quit; and during the long years of her sickness, surgery, and slow recovery, she worked on this book, a testament to an undaunted spirit.

Despite the pressures of wealth and class, a rich girls’ school need not be a hive of conformists. In the school described in MISS BANNISTER’S GIRLS by LOUISE TANNER (Farrar, Straus, $4.50), all sixteen members of the class of 1940 turn out to be weirdly individual. The school is located in New York, geographically in the neighborhood of Miss Chapin’s — which, incidentally, the author herself attended, though there is the usual disclaimer that no actual school is intended. Fictitious or not, Miss Bannister’s has enough colorful inmates to satisfy any reader. This novel does not make any claims to profundity, social analysis, or even to being literature; but as a simple class album, etched in acid, its cattiness is unrestrained and delightful.

Nancy Young, the narrator, is a little bit out of place in the school because her father, a Columbia professor, is not only poor but a New Deal Democrat to boot. Much put upon by her more affluent friends, Nancy is now having her well-earned revenge by writing a report of them twenty years later. The anecdotes of school life are blended very cleverly with the girls’ later careers, so that we see not only the continuities in their lives but the comeuppances that were long in the making. Miss Bannister’s claimed to turn out “the well-rounded girl,” but the most rounded part of some of the girls seems to be their heels. Wicky Adams, for example, class beauty and sexpot, has made a habit of stealing the other girls’ boyfriends. She is a little less dazzling, though, glimpsed as she is pushing forty, with her features already a little bloated by alcohol. Her second marriage has broken up, and the only men she can now steal she deserves. But Nancy does not have a poison pen for all her classmates. Some of them are likable, some pathetic, a few have somber histories. Nevertheless, the dominant mood of the book is flippant and acidulous.

The sixteenth case history, of course, is Nancy herself; and there, as you might expect, the author runs into some difficulties. A catty novelist has unlimited freedom to make fun of other people, but she seems always required for some reason or other to take herself seriously.

Justice has now been done to that much-beleaguered heroine Fanny Hill, who, imprisoned for more than two centuries below the counter, can now emerge into the open daylight of our bookstores. JOHN CLELAND’S MEMOIRS OF A WOMAN OF PLEASURE (Putnam’s, $6.00) is certainly a classic in the only sense of this word that counts — it has endured.

Cleland wrote deliberately to inflame the sexual desire of the reader, and in this he succeeds. To accomplish this is no mean feat when one considers that most modern writers leave the experience of sex ugly and unappetizing. His is honest pornography, and, as such, healthy and wholesome in its instincts, though you might not want to leave it lying around for your young daughter to read. In comparison with the simperings of our girly magazines, his vigor and directness are like a breath of fresh air.

He is also a writer of considerable skill and refinement. Apart from its erotic interest, the novel gives a graphic picture of its age. The situations it depicts must not have been uncommon in 1749, when it was first published. As the countryfolk were being uprooted, many young girls, flocking to London, must have followed Fanny Hill’s profession. Even those who obtained service in more legitimate households might be pressed into much the same condition at the hands of their masters.

Peter Quennell, in his introduction, remarks that Fanny Hill and the other young ladies in her establishment would have shuddered at some of the language in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Georgians may have been earthy in their pleasures, but they pursued them with grace and refinement. But something else in Lady Chatterley might have disturbed Fanny Hill much more deeply — the amount of self-consciousness and intellectualization with which Lawrence surrounds the act of love. For the Georgians sex was to be pursued as a pleasure and not as an intellectual program. What mars a good deal of modern writing about the subject is that it is really about sex in the brain.