BY PHOEBE ADAMS
IVAN SANDERSON’S BOOK OF GREAT JUNGLES, written with assistance from David Loth (Julian Messner, $9.95), will surprise readers brought up in the belief that these great tropical forests are dark, dank, impassable, infernally hot, and desperately dangerous. As a naturalist, Mr. Sanderson has lived in many jungles, which he defines carefully as a particular type of forest quite unlike the ordinary tropical woods next door, and loves them. They are, he reports, easy to travel in, remarkably healthful, short of dangerous beasts, and comfortable as long as one avoids clothes and boots. In his studious pursuit of all that grows or moves, Mr. Sanderson is willing to climb up, and fall off, almost anything; on one occasion he tumbled down a cliff in a tangle of lianas and found, at the bottom, that somewhere en route the bundle had incorporated an outraged peccary. The whole mess — Sanderson, vines, and pig — rolled into the territory of a pit viper who would accept no apology. The peccary proved a very useful ally in the ensuing war. This affair is typical of Mr. Sanderson’s adventures, all of which indicate that the most agreeable diversion possible is a visit to a jungle and its strange, beautiful, amiable inhabitants. The book is large and full of solid information — personal adventures are only an amusing minor element— and is illustrated with Mr. Sanderson’s sketches, a great variety of photographs, old engravings, and the fantasies of Henri Rousseau.
LEROI JONES, poet and playwright, has written a book called THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL (Grove, $3.95). It is what is usually called a poetic novel, meaning it is selfindulgent. Gaudy metaphors flash across Mr. Jones’s pages, throwing impressive sparks but little heat, for most of them are too indefinite either to convey meaning or to arouse emotion. Even the interminable excremcntal references with which the author enlivens his prose have no power to raise shock or shudder. Insofar as it is possible to follow this cryptographic narrative at all, The System of Dante’s Hell is a perfectly standard autobiographical novel about how awful it is to grow up, lose childhood friends, discover sex (both homo and hetero). serve in the army, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The book sizzles with amorphous misery, and since Mr. Jones is a Negro, one expects it to be blamed, ultimately, on white society. Probably this is indeed what Mr. Jones has in mind, but the book reads like the work of any conscientiously oversensitive young egotist, and one leaves it with the impression that the author would suffer just as much, and would complain just as loudly, if he were white, red, or polkadotted.
I’VE DECIDED I WANT MY SEAT BACK (Harper & Row, $3.95) is a selection of BILL MAULDIN’S recent cartoons, with remarks on the circumstances that produced them. Generally sour, sensible, funny, and wonderfully ingenious in translating large situations into sharp, simple images, Mr. Mauldin now and again trips himself with fits of virtue and high principle, which are simply not suitable cartoon moods.
JOHN SLOAN’S NEW YORK SCENE (Harper & Row, $12.50) consists of diaries the painter kept from 1906 to 1913, edited by Bruce St. John. Sloan wrote primarily for the amusement and consolation of his first wife, an alcoholic intimidated by the big city, and the diaries are understandably gentle and discreet even when the subject involved is one of history’s wilder drunken parties. Despite its calculated reserve, the book contains a detailed and sometimes quite moving record of the problems faced by a serious painter. There was no need to elaborate on appearances, since Dolly had usually seen all the places and people involved, but at times, stimulated by ugliness, stupidity, or exhibition juries, Sloan achieved descriptions of vitriolic effectiveness.
As for low comedy, there is THE CONSORT (Grove, $4.50) by ANTHONY HECKSTALL-SMITH, offered as a terribly daring business, unpublishable in England for reasons of lèse majesté. It has to do with the husband of a most dignified queen who goes adrift in a South Sea island and refuses to leave the palm trees and the hula dancers. The writing is aggressively humorous, and the whole pitch suggests a schoolboy trying to imitate Norman Douglas’ South Wind.