Books: Non-Fiction

(3 of 7)

disastrously, roamed Europe, met Shelley and Byron, recovered and cremated the former's body off Leghorn (it was he who snatched Shelley's heart from the pyre and buried it in Rome), fought beside Byron in Greece (it was he who investigated the dead Byron's feet and spread the lie about a cloven hoof), married a Greek chieftain's sister, suffered terrible wounds, corresponded devotedly with Mary Shelley. He later wrote Recollections of the Last Days of Byron and Shelley, an invaluable document. He visited the U. S., swimming Niagara between the rapids and the falls. He bought English estates (marrying once more) and turned country gentleman, social lion, patriarch of the Romantic period. With a constitution "stronger than steel," he lived until 1881 (reading Blake, studying Darwin), and finally had his ashes laid by Shelley's. "The man who best loved Shelley," would have been his chosen epitaph.

Crevecoeur

MORE LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER—St. John de Crève-coeur—Yale University Press ($4). Letters from an American Farmer, published in England in 1782, is a book known to serious students of the period of American history just prior to and during the Revolution. Buried for nearly a century and a half in the cabinets of the Crèvecoeur family, unpublished manuscripts were discovered. Even for casual readers the book has interest and the sort of charm inherent in any narrative that sincerely, accurately and with reasonable adequacy portrays the life of a period, however restricted as to time, regardless of the limitation of its area of action. Moreover, Crèvecoeur had a point of view not frequently presented, that of a loyalist to the crown in revolutionary colonies. No reader will close the book, finally, without a truer mental picture of pioneer days in America. Crèvecoeur was not a historian; he was a chronicler of unrelated episodes. He was an observer whose main interest was not in ideas or causes but in people. His writings before the Revolution contain a picture of the life of the average American community in the middle colonies; his sketches during the conflict picture such communities convulsed by war.

The Author. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, born in Caen, France, in 1735, served under Montcalm, and turned his back on Canada after the fall of Quebec. Surveyor, mapmaker, soldier, negotiator with the Indians, he settled down as a farmer, after his marriage, in the province of New York. He "suffered much for his attachment to his Majesty's government and friends," was driven from his farm and became a refugee, protected with others of his kind by Clinton's army, until 1870, when he returned to France. After the war France sent him to America as consul to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut—a post creditably filled until 1790, when he returned to France on the eve. of its own Revolution, which claimed his remaining years.

Quippant