BOOKS
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writing an account of the affair. Macdonald would be the perfect author. But
at present this reminder of what I myself would rather forget takes me back to
my opening lament. In eight years the English have done nothing about
providing authors with an alternative to
Encounter,
which is still financed by
(perfectly clean, of course) American money.
It
is hard to believe, and if we
had a Macdonald among us it would probably not be so.
Frank Kermode
INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
A CHILD'S HISTORY OF AMERICA : SOME RIBS AND RIFFS FOR
THE SIXTIES.
By
Charles Newman. The Swallow Press. $8.95 .
All books of any worth have some multiplicity about them,
asking us to respond ro them, perhaps, as both invention and sermon, or
polemic and game, or grammar and prayer, both at the same time. But
Charles Newman's
Chtfd's History ofAmerica
asks for a more multiple and
complicated response than any recent book I know. For one thing, it is an
extraordinarily lovely book, not ostentatiously, like a coffee-table book, but
modestly and functionally, in ways that demand a response. I do not know
how a small press like Swallow can afford to make some of the most attractive
books now published, but they do, integrating lay-out, paper, type, the very
size of the book with its content in a way so artful as to put the large New York
publishers to shame. For another thing, the book is, as Newman acknowl–
edges in his preface, "without genre, " which means, for me, that I respond to
it with nothing of the consistency that I would give to a novel, or a volume of
memoirs. It is, variously, a confession and a kind of baroque invention super–
imposed upon the basic data of experience, a tale by Quixote and a tale by
Sancho, an outline history of the main currents of Western thought, and an
underground history of dangerous ideas, a narration so joyous and buoyant
and extravagant that its roots can only be located in Mark Twain and the
