Shorter notices
What Maisie Knew Henry James (Bodley Head 32s). The appearance of Volume Six of The Bodley Head Henry James is again due to the editing energies of Leon Edel and it is pleasant to see this incomparable novel available in this handsome format. Is anybody not familiar with the figure of Maisie, trying to negotiate the strange territories of the adulterous adults around her, 'really,' as James says in his own preface, 'making confusion worse confounded by drawing some stray fragrance of an ideal across the scent of selfishness, by sowing on barren strands, through the mere fact of presence, the seed of the moral life'? Then now is the time to make amends.
The Waierdrinkers Norman Longmate (Hamish Hamilton 42s). A history of teetotalism—and of the misguided souls who eschewed it—from its vociferous origins in the early nineteenth century until the present day. Mr Longmate, though undoubtedly on the side of licence and goodwill, provides a horrifying catalogue of the poverty and unhappiness caused by alcohol throughout its heady supremacy. The prohibitionists, finally, were defeated; but they did succeed in reducing the intake of abso- lute alcohol , from eighty-nine million gallons in 1914 to thirty-seven million in 1918. No mean achievement and neither, indeed, is Mr Longmate's.
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