Ends of the Earth IT is rare for an unashamed
holiday book to come off as well as Erico Verissimo's Mexico (Mac- donald, 30s.). Mr. Verissimo is a Brazilian writer who lives in Washington, and his book starts out under enough handicaps to send it to the cripples' home. For one thing it is a yonder book; in translation from the Portuguese it has come out in a rash of 'yonders,' the way a child has measles. It is also written in what strikes one at first as an infuriatingly antique and overblown style, less concerned with the state of Mexico than with the state of the author's consciousness. One grows accustomed to it, however, and suddenly finds that from all the verbose discursiveness a most striking and meticulous portrait of the country is emerg- ing. Mr. Verissimo is an intelligent and know- ledgeable guide, and he explains and illuminates Mexico's history as thoroughly as he describes his own -vacation there.
Pagan Spain (The Bodley Head, I 8s.) is less successful. Richard Wright is an American negro writer whose senses life has sharpened almost unendurably to oppression and injustice. He seems to have detested more or less everything he saw in Fascist. Spain (the Catholic absolutism, the stifling sexual morality) from the moment he crossed the border. He visited the stews of Bar- celona, met a white slaver in Seville, and listened to the angry outpourings of an anti-Franco bar- ber, a harried orange-grower, and an oppressed Protestant. I suppose someone has to remind us from time to time that Spain is a Fascist country, and that Fascist countries are loathsome places to live in. But Mr. Wright has remained so much an outsider to it all that his indictment has the flat unreality of a bad Left-wing novel. By far the best bits are a Fascist catechism for young girls which he found, and a breath-taking descrip- tion of a bull-tight, the first description I have ever read in which I had the faintest idea of what was actually going on. They should use it as a preface to the Collected Hemingway.
At the other end of the scale of political con- sciousness is Mary Chamberlin's Dear Friends and Darling Romans (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.). Mrs. Chamberlin is a bright, tough Mid- Westerner who irresistibly reminds one (and her- self, too) of Katherine Hepburn fending off the Latins in Summer Madness. Mrs. Chamberlin fended them off for .three years in Rome, during which time she did not (I am prepared to bet) manage to find out their average wage or the name of their Prime Minister. Should make an ideal birthday present for Maudie Littlehampton. In A Born Free (Collins and Harvill, 25s.), Joy imlamson, the wife of the Senior Game Warden relates how she and her husband reared a lioness ° • maturity as a pet—and then managed the et xtrernely difficult business of weaning it to look- ing after itself in its natural habitat. Elsa, as the "less was called, would share Mrs. Adamson's camp bed during the siesta, suck her thumb as a sign of affection, and sprawl on the roof of the Land-Rover when they went on safari. It was
all
done by kindness, of course. What was much more difficult was making Elsa independent 'teaching her to kill for herself and to get on with leonine playmates. Finally, however, she accustomed herself to both worlds (the first time, it- is believed, that this has ever happened). When the Adamsons returned to the district they them from the depths of the bush and knock uld summon her with a shot, and she would 11l In down with her boisterous and friendly gre,etings. Mrs. Adamson tells the story plainly and well. I was absorbed. Lionesses are not the only creatures which have been tamed in Kenya in recent years. There they also the Mau Mau, and the ways in which Kitson were brought to heel, as related by Frank 3‘1,01toskuiniiIin 2G5sa.zgs and Counter-Gangs (Barrie and were less gentle than those used i,,Y,Mrs. Adamson to subdue Elsa. Major Kitson's '„."") Was to send pseudo-Mau Mau in among roe terrorists to spy on them, and he even managed Pass as a Mau Mau himself at night. It is a rettY horrif in book. Major Kitson and his ,15,111.0pean e2imagnions, who look scarcely out of rgleir teens in the photographs, hunted down ter- rorists in much the same spirit as hunters pursue style game. The Major's embarrassed and facetious Yie does nothing to conceal the fact that his book IS, as liberally spattered with the word 'blood' as \'erissimo's is with the word 'yonder.'
• MICHAEL FRAYN
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