Cornell Alumni News - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

BOOKLIST:
• A selected list of books recently read
by Professor Kenneth W. Evett, art, with
notes and comments written for the John
M. Olin Library Reader's Report:
MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN!
A BIOGRAPHY by Justin Kaplan. Simon &
Schuster. 1966.
In this fine book, biography and literary
history are combined with unobtrusive but
firm literary criticism. It covers the period
in Mark Twain's life from the time he
moved east in his thirties until his death,
and it is a moving, revealing account.
I wasn't aware that Clemens' life was
significant of so many important aspects
of American experience. He represents us
with enough courage, frailty, foolishness,
intelligence, and wit to make us both
conscious of our limits and proud of our
accomplishments. An insatiably curious
wanderer, he went from Hannibal to Virginia
City, San Francisco, Elmira, Buffalo,
Hartford, New York, London, Heidelberg,
and Florence and became the independent
wide-ranging American. His nostalgia for
lost innocence, his ambiguous attitude
toward capital and labor, his ever-renewed
faith in panaceas and get-rich-quick
schemes, his love of status, his ambivalent
attitudes toward European culture, are all
familiar American concerns. However, the
paradoxical dualities of his life—his two
names, his public piety and private bitter
disbelief, his tamed family morality and
rutty bawdiness, his role as national jester
and lonely bereaved parent are his own.
Of all his talents, the one most mysterious
and heart-warming is his humor. That
sovereign power to transform the pitiful
and absurd realities of life into a comic
dimension is surely his true Promethean
gift.
SAINT JAMES IN SPAIN by T. D. Kendrick.
Methuen. 1960.
The landscape of Spain is so potent—
bare, dry, harsh, rosy, golden, pink, and
Evett
olive green—the place names so evocative,
Spanish painting so powerful, the space
there so grand, the sky so luminous, and
the people so grotesque or beautiful, that
any book having to do with that country
arouses my interest.
This witty account of the legend of
Saint James in Spain has all the fascination
of a good British mystery. Kendrick
describes the four basic tenets of the Santiago
Creed and then proceeds to test their
credibility in the light of historic research.
Along the way he investigates such curious
phenomena as the lead books of Granada,
the Marian war in Seville, and the false
chronicles of Dextro and Maximo, all
the while keeping an eye on the Vatican
and assessing its role in the various controversies
associated with the Saint James
legend.
Whether this is good historical writing,
I don't know, but it is certainly entertaining
and it recounts one of the great mythic
inventions of the West against the background
of Galicia, Leon, Castile, Aragon,
Andalusia and La Mancha—the dirty, incomparable
land of Spain.
CAN YOU FORGIVE HER by Anthony
Trollope. Oxford. 1938.
The fictional beings invented by Trollope
in those pre-dawn writing sessions of
his long productive life have for me a
sturdy resistant reality. His ample imaginary
world is occupied by all kinds of
memorable persons who carry on their
struggles within the firm limits of Victorian
morality and caste. The tension between
his characters and this clearly defined
English social structure is the vital
spark of Trollope's novels.
In Can You Forgive Her, as in most
of his work, the author carries on several
plot strands at once. More or less improvising
as he goes, sometimes lecturing the
reader or commenting directly on his characters'
good and bad points, sometimes
wandering off to describe some favorite
hobby (fox hunting) or phobia (British
politics), Trollope generally rolls along
at a good steady gait, his writing sustained
throughout by an astringent but
tolerant sense of humor.
This volume hinges on the self-induced
dilemma of a beautiful and spirited girl
who suffers from moral pride to the point
of folly. Her painful education in selfknowledge
and humility is the major subject
of the book. A sub-theme (the beginning
of the Parliamentary novels) has
to do with Plantagenet Palliser and his
wife, Lady Glencora. We also meet a realistic
but affectionate widow, some low
political types, a manure-proud farmer,
and other vigorous personalities.
Can You Forgive Her may not have a
diamond-hard formal structure and it may
not plumb the very depths of the author's
psyche (after all, he was a respectable
Victorian postal clerk) but it does have
the breath of life.
REDEMPTION OF THE ROBOT by Herbert
Read. New York. Trident. 1966.
Sir Herbert Read makes the un-American
suggestion that the way toward the
moral regeneration of the human race
and universal peace is through an educational
process based on art. Initially
such an implausible notion hardly seems
interesting, and the early parts of the book
drag along under a burden of the reader's
incredulity. However, patiently building
up his argument, quoting from numerous
sources—Plato, Rousseau, Freud, Schiller
Pestalozzi, Gropius, to name a few—Read
finally commands attention to his views.
He believes that children should be educated
in "reference to things." Learning
to organize things in patterns of harmony
and proportion according to inherent aesthetic
need gives the child pleasure. Associating
the creation of order with pleasure,
the child begins to develop an inner
discipline in which the organization of experience
through art activity—dance, music,
and the visual arts—eventually leads
to a moral judgment based on the awareness
that positive, form-controlling acts
are good.
The ordering patterns of children are
archetypal and universal. When they sink
into the subconscious, they not only constitute
a bond with all other children but
determine further patterns of response.
An education based on the constantly renewing
process of free aesthetic choices
would help to save society from the degrading
effects of automation and destructive
aggressions. Read identifies the
creation of orderly patterns as life-affirming
and loving as opposed to equally