Paperbacks
Bill Platypus
A selection this week which testifies to the range, if not the health, of the paper boom. First. The penguin Book of English Madrigals. (60p) edited by Denis Stevens. This is the kind of book Penguin can do so well, and so inexpensively. It is an attractive selection of madrigal scores for four voices, complete with the original text of the poems. The scores are clearly and neatly presented and, in these days of crisis and transition, what better than to sing a madrigal? Another musical companion has just been published in paper by Faber. The Beethoven Companion (£2.50), edited by Arnold and Fortune, is a detailed but not lengthy exposition of — as they say — the man and his music. There are essays upon Beethoven's general achievement.
as well as upon the development and specific forms of his music. A thoughtful and informative book, as much for Platypus as the musicologist.
Everyman series have just published Conversations with Goethe (50p) by Johann Peter Eckerman. This record of the moods, conversations and habits of Goethe in the last nine years of his life has an obvious significance. But Platypus was inclined to think of poor Mr Eckerman, devoted but harassed, an eager amanuensis who had to deal with constant poverty and depression during his life with the great man. Another faithful record of a ' figure ' is Margaret Anderson's The Unknowable Gurdjieff (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 90p). It is a narration of Gurdjieff's musing and Miss Anderson's meanderings upon spiritual systems and such like; the highest wisdom to some, emptiness to others. But Miss Anderson is wholly convinced, and lends even Gurdjieff's purplest doctrines a personal point.
On the theme of illumination, Quartet have published in paperback Jack Kerouac's Satori in Paris (35p). Satori means 'awakening,' which is what Mr Kerouac does in bed after bed; his adventures are retold in a breathless not to say tedious style, lit only by the consuming vanity of a bad writer. Another account of hipsterdom is Rose Robinson's Eagle in the Air (Penguin, 25p). It is a modern morality tale, about a female black student expelled from college after a sit-in. Each chapter might have been written by a different liberation group; I can't imagine why Penguin keep on publishing such fashionable cant. Platypus is much happier with the Madrigals.
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