Bookshelf Briefs
HIMMELFARB, GERTRUDE
Bookshelf Briefs Adventures of a Biographer. By Catherine Drinker Bowen. Little, Brown. 235 pp. $4.00. MRS. BOWEN, biographer of Tchaikowsky. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Adams and. most...
...Alfred Nobel wrote the first sentence of a mock autobiography: “His miserable existence should have been terminated at birth by a humane doctor as he drew his first howling breath...
...6.75...
...The two books also illustrate the difference between two kinds of scholarly biographies, both containing the usual paraphernalia of quotations, footnotes and bibliography...
...Adventurous Alliance...
...By Ralph Korngold...
...It was Agassiz, Swiss by origin, whose repugnance to Darwinism came partly from his “racist” convictions (the theory that the races, having been separately created by God, were unrelated to each other) ; while Gray, steeped in the racist experience of America, was attracted to Darwin’s theory because it suggested the kinship of all races...
...Agassiz, Darwin’s bitter opponent, was the more brilliant scientist, the more successful professionally...
...The sense of ambiguity and ambivalence runs through this fascinating biography...
...It has everything —from a sickly childhood, to an over-possessive mother, a father with whom he was in professional competition (to say nothing of the more classical rivalry), the death of a younger brother in his laboratory (it is undecided whether this was the result of his own or the father’s negligence), sexual incapacity and his “one and only wish: not to be buried alive...
...Nobel...
...The Agassiz biography, on the other hand, with an overweening respect for trivia, manages to chronicle his life in great detail without ever mentioning the Origin by name, and with only the most cursory, noncommittal references to the theory that convulsed the world and was the subject of some of Agassiz’ most passionate writing...
...The first, the life of Gray, is thoughtful as well as documented, interesting in ideas as much as facts, capable of developing a line of thought as well as a line of chronology...
...By Louise Hall Tharp...
...Helena is reduced in this study to the level of any other minor curiosity, and the details of his domestic arrangements (gold table service, seating arrangement by formal precedence and a mansion infested with rats) and of his relations with his retinue and with the Governor of the island (Napoleon was as vulgar, inconsiderate and tyrannical as always) are sometimes diverting but never memorable...
...Yet his latest book raises the suspicion that not all biographies, however respectably researched, are worthy of the historian’s labor...
...I wish I could produce,” Nobel wrote, “a substance or machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that wars should thereby become altogether impossible...
...354 pp...
...This is hardly what one expected either from the hard-headed inventor of dynamite and founder of an industrial empire, or from the idealistic sponsor of peace prizes and scientific and literary competitions...
...GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB...
...Napoleon out of power was also outside history, and his character became more petty as his authority diminished...
...505 pp...
...4.50...
...221 pp...
...In the lives of these men are prefigured some of the complexities and ambiguities of Darwinism: Asa Gray, Darwin’s greatest American champion, was the more orthodox, even Evangelical, in religion...
...most recently, Sir Edward Coke, here reminisces and reflects upon her craft...
...Another 17th century writer prefaced his work: “I expect it will be objected against me, that in writing this History, I have sometimes been transported into an Heat unbecoming an Historian: I answer, that it may happen a Man may be angry, and not sin...
...This is not, however, the opinion of the author, whose sympathy for the heroes of the Revolution—for Napoleon as for Robespierre—is unfailing...
...She takes issue with those who regard biography as an inferior form of history fa 17th century historian who apologized for having “deviated and descended from the Dignity of an Historian, and voluntarily fallen into the lower class of Biographers...
...By A. Hunter Dupree...
...Asa Gray...
...And again: “It is rather fiendish things we are working on, but they are so interesting as purely technical problems and so completely technical as well as so clear of all financial and commercial considerations that they are doubly fascinating...
...and with those who think passion has no place in either history or biography...
...Mrs...
...The Last Years of Napoleon...
...429 pp...
...Napoleon in exile at St...
...By coincidence, in this centenary year of the Origin of Species, there have appeared biographies of the leading American protagonists in the Darwinian controversy: botanist Asa Gray and zoologist Louis Agassiz...
...Orion...
...5.00...
...Harvard University...
...7.50...
...Ralph Korngold is another historian-cum-biographer who need make no apologies for his calling...
...Harcourt, Brace...
...Annalists, etc...
...Nobel’s life might be transferred in its entirety into the annals of psychoanalysis...
...Nicholas Halasz...
...Bowen thinks it not demeaning to write biographies, and not sinful to write in heat...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 44
