BOOKS
507
printed one of Hemingway's first books on his own Paris press;
look at Malcolm Cowley. The brief biographical notes which
Carpenter provides at the end of the volume include the informa–
tion that Cowley "punched the proprietor of the Rotonde in the
jaw, and wrote
Exile's Return
(
1934) about the Lost Generation."
Then Harold Loeb, who edited a little mag and served as model
for Robert Cohn in
The Sun Also Rises.
Or poet Robert McAlmon,
who typed for Joyce and self-published his work before setting up
an imprint to do Hemingway and fellow Paris Americans; he
told his version of the story in
Being Geniuses Together.
But isn't that
where we came in?
HERBERT R. LOTTMAN
MORAL GEOGRAPHY
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES: AN
INTERPRETATION OF DUTCH CULTURE IN THE GOLDEN
AGE. By Simon Schama. Alfred A. Knopf $39.95
Culture means
things,
first of all, and how a given people
view them and use them: popular manners. "When I write of
culture I don't mean Culture," says Schama, making a lot of the
lowercase, and there is little here about theater or poetry or music.
In a modern city he would visit the supermarket, not the art
gallery or the opera house, and this book is like a supermarket of
seventeenth-century habits of mind or what he calls "moral ge–
ography." A British historian of lively mind now at Harvard
University, he has elaborately recreated the world behind Dutch
painting in its golden age. This is not art history, and though the
book has 314 illustrations, all black and white, mainly from little
masters of the age, and they illustrate the text, for once, and are
not illustrated by it. This is a picture of a living world: prisons
and voyages, myths and household habits, especially
cleanliness, sex and marriage, children, midwifery,
homosexuality and prostitution.
