Among recently published books that fall within our bailwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
American Talk: The Words and Ways of American Dialects
by Robert Hendrickson; Viking; 230 pages; $18.95.
Conventional wisdom to the contrary, American speech is not becoming homogenized into the accents of the evening network news, according to the author of this cheerful, pleasantly opinionated book. As immigrant English smoothes out through the generations into standard American speech patterns, new arrivals keep refreshing the language with their words, expressions, and accents. Los Angeles courtrooms, for instance, today provide interpreters for eighty languages. Also we have no national movement, such as the French do, to keep our speech untainted by alien influences. (A French company was recently sued by the Ministry of Culture for calling a new product “Ie fast drink.”) Examples of foreign words we have welcomed are far-ranging: kiwi comes from the Maori, for instance; lemming from the Laplanders; kayak from the Inuit.
Separate chapters take up Boston or New England talk, considered the “purest” English in the country; New York talk, which means Brooklynese to most people; “South Mouth,” which Hendrickson considers the most charming of all American dialect groups; mountain or hillbilly talk; black English, including “plantation Creole,” a kind of pidgin devised to communicate with slaves newly arrived from different African countries; “ferhoodled English” (Pennsylvania Dutch talk); and “da kine” talk, or Hawaiian pidgin. The book carries its considerable scholarship lightly, and Hendrickson’s glossaries and examples intrigue the mind and delight the ear.
The New Grove Dictionary of American Music
edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie; Grove’s Dictionaries of Music Inc.; four volumes; $495.00.
Here is a masterful achievement, a well-written, handsomely presented, definitive encyclopedia of American music and musicians. An outgrowth of the twenty-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians published in Britain in 1980, this set not only provides much greater depth on American musical subjects, it also shows greater breadth than its predecessor, giving equal weight to popular, jazz, folk, and “serious” music. The article “Detroit” treats the history of symphony societies and educational institutions there, but although it is accompanied by a photograph of the Motown record company, it contains only one sentence on recent popular music; another article, “Motown,” tells the story behind that picture. Such cultural schizophrenia is probably inevitable, since today’s musical spheres are so disparate, but The New Grove nearly succeeds in overcoming it, treating all subjects with equal scholarly care and thoroughness. The result, a work in which you can read equally instructive entries on Walter Piston and lggy Pop, is truly refreshing, both entertaining and wise.
Young America: A Folk-Art History
by Jean Lipman, Elizabeth V. Warren, and Robert Bishop; Hudson Hills Press in association with the Museum of American Folk Art, New York; 199 pages; $45.00.
The period defined as “young” in this folk-art history is the time between the Revolution and World War I, and the subject illustrated is how life was lived in those years. The authors, led by Jean Lipman (who was collecting folk art when many experts considered it junk), have included early photography and Indian art in the book, as well as the more expected paintings, carvings, quilts, weaving, weather vanes, toys, and trade signs.
Some of the objects shown are astonishing; there is a walking stick, for instance, with a whole railroad train, including the engine, carved along its length. And a quilt, made about 1900, is elegantly appliquéd with Indian pictographs by an unknown Sioux.
But most of the selections are paintings. Families, houses, gardens, and farms are lovingly and proudly portrayed. Suggesting the constant terror of fire are the many pictures of burning buildings and fire-fighting equipment. And the collection of epitaphs, mourning pictures, and gravestone carvings stress how familiar was the grief of losing children, in the country’s earlier years.
There is hardly a page of this sumptuous book that you won’t want to return to again and again.
The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams
by Leonard L. Richards; Oxford University Press; 245 pages, $19.95.
No one has ever been quite sure why John Quincy Adams agreed to become a congressman from Massachusetts after being defeated for réélection as President. His son Charles Francis, who regarded his father as a man “whose feelings I could not penetrate almost always,” felt that it was a dishonor for an ex-President to accept such a lowly job. His wife, Louisa, hated Washington politics and felt she had already put up with enough of it. Adams’s own explanation was that it was his patriotic duty, a sentiment that his family considered pure humbug.
The most probable reason for Adams’s decision to go back to Washington, Leonard Richards feels, is that he had an insatiable passion for politics and that the “calm of retirement” seemed to him, in Louisa’s words, like a “total extinction of life.”
Whatever the motive, Adams took his seat in 1831, a few years after the end of his Presidency, and served in the House for seventeen years, until his death in 1848. Those years are the subject of this fine narrative. In following the issues that particularly concerned Adams, the book is a spirited study of how nineteenth-century politics worked.
Hatred of slavery was Adams’s primary passion, and his stands against the peculiar institution caused Southerners to label him the “madman from Massachusetts” and Northerners to laud him as the “conscience of New England.” His last battle was against “Mr. Folk’s War” with Mexico, and he was in his House seat when he suffered a stroke on February 21 and slipped into a coma. He died two days later. Although Adams might have regarded the praise heaped on his grave with some skepticism, the effusive funeral orations from both friends and foes would also have gratified the tough, abrasive old man.
Gilbert Stuart
by Richard McLanathan; Abrams; 159 pages; $35.00.
He is best known for the unfinished portrait of Washington in which the President seems to be emerging from a bank of cumulus clouds. What the millions of children who first saw it hanging on the classroom wall could not have guessed was that the rosy, powdered, taut-lipped head is as fine an example of the Western art of portrait painting as can be found anywhere. Nor would they have known that it is only one of dozens of similarly brilliant works by the man his contemporaries called the father of American portraiture.
Born in Rhode Island in 1755, trained in England by another formidable American painter, Benjamin West, Stuart first made his mark with a demanding English merchant class and aristocracy. When he returned to the United States after the Revolution (he felt no particular loyalty to either Crown or rebels), he painted a suitably magisterial portrait of Chief Justice John Jay, who introduced Stuart to the President. The Washington commissions put Stuart at the top of his profession overnight—to be painted by Stuart was a sine qua non for every American of wealth or accomplishment for the next thirty years. Only Stuart’s erratic ways of keeping accounts and promises kept him from the financial success that was in his grasp. Nevertheless, we can be grateful for the gallery of faces he left us—Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Jay, Monroe among them and always the versions of Washington that he copied and recopied during his lifetime, as did his daughter Jane after he died in Boston in 1828.
As Stuart grew older, the pace of his commissions barely diminished, and the number of works left incomplete mounted. But the unfinished part only applied to the setting and costume. For Stuart the portrait was the face; picturing the rest was of no interest to him. Once, when told that a sitter’s family was unhappy with the lack of detail in the man’s cravet, he scornfully cried, “What do they think I am, a damned haberdasher?”
This, the first volume in what promises to be a distinguished “Library of American Art,” has a clear, informative text and 101 reproductions. Those in color—more than half—give us the best possible representation of Stuart’s miraculous flesh tones: pink and radiant, they are the closest we will ever come to standing in the living presence of a remarkable generation.
