BY PHOEBE ADAMS
HAKLUYT’S VOYAGES, that wonderfilled anthology of reports on “Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation . . . any time within the compasse of these 1600 Yeeres,” has been long out of print; understandably, for trade in its full twelvevolume version can hardly have been brisk since the invention of the airplane. It is a great satisfaction, therefore, to lay hands on a onevolume condensation of the Voyages (Viking, $8.50) edited by Irwin R. Blacker. Here are the great tales of Tartary and Muscovy, the journeys of Hawkins and Drake and Frobisher and Raleigh, the battles of the Armada and the Spanish Main, and the futile hunts for a northeast or northwest passage to Cathay. Professor Blacker’s selections have been chosen, as he explains in the introduction, to illustrate the expansion of geographical knowledge in the Elizabethan Age and to show a world exploding into vast, exotic reaches before the delighted and inquisitive gaze of exceptionally able men.
Two other classics of exploration have come into paperback circulation: RICHARD BURTON’SPersonal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (Dover, 2 vols., $4.00) and JOHN STEPHENS’Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (Dover, 2 vols., $4.00). These are both outright, unabridged reprints. The Yucatan books retain the engravings made by Stephens’ companion, Frank Catherwood, whose delicate, careful drawings of objects that defied every rule of nineteenth-century artistic propriety prove he was just as astonished and delighted by the Mayan ruins as Stephens himself. The American, Stephens, was a thorough observer, a patient, quietly humorous traveler, and although technically an amateur, by no means ignorant of the archaeological knowledge of his time. The Englishman, Burton, prowling around Muslim holy cities got up as a pious local doctor, was an opinionated pepper pot whose pages, lively enough anyway through the vagaries of Middle Eastern temperament, acquire an extra sizzle from culinary complaints, satirical denunciations of the British government, macabre anthropological detail, slapstick humor, discourses on comparative religion, and an enormous love of anything odd, unexpected, or violent. Burton is the more obviously appealing writer of the two, but both these books most certainly deserve their great reputations.
THE AMERICAN SCENE (Knopf, $8.95) is a selection of essays and letters by H. L. MENCKEN, edited by Huntington Cairns. Mencken’s hellfire sermons against the dishonesty, hypocrisy, cowardice, and general silliness of his countrymen still throw sparks, although many of his targets have changed their outward forms considerably since he last shot at them. But nobody is perfect, and when the sage of Baltimore announces that “poetry is essentially an effort to elude facts, whereas prose is essentially a means of unearthing and exhibiting them,” one can only murmur, Boobus Americanus.
THROUGH DOOMS OF LOVE (Harper & Row, $4.95) is a first novel by the poet MAXINE KUMIN. It is not at all what is implied in that sinister phrase, a poetical novel. The prose is sharp and direct, the plot a geometrically lucid demonstration of the struggle between parents and children. Jo, a nice girl full of reforming zeal, has picked up at college a set of liberal ideas which are perfectly good in themselves. She proceeds to apply them to her father’s pawnbroking business, to which they are irrelevant. The ensuing blowup is entirely believable. That the book is obviously true but never truly moving is the author’s own choice; she has elected to avoid all excess, and has succeeded just a trifle too well.
The work of PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE, a somewhat enigmatic literary man who committed suicide in 1945 (possibly because his extreme political independence had made him enemies in every party), has recently enjoyed a sort of resurrection in France. His novel THE FIRE WITHIN (Knopf, $3.95) evidently deserves this belated interest. It starts poorly, with an excess of heavy-handed moralizing, but develops into a thoroughly convincing portrait of a mildly criminal, lost-dog type, which is, if the outcries of police officials and schoolmasters are to be believed, becoming more common every day.