Short Notices

THE DIARY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION compiled by Frank Moore. 605 pages. Washington Square Press. $7.95.

For those who find the press coverage of Viet Nam--whether from Hanoi or Washington, Moscow or Saigon--to be biased, polemical, inaccurate or incendiary, this volume will prove a purgative historical point. Compiled in 1860 from the pages of Tory, Whig and British newspapers and out of print for nearly 100 years, it is a clip-book of reportage and editorials written during America's own, distinctly pre-Maoist "war for national liberation."

In the Revolutionary press, Tories and Redcoats were inevitably "brutes, whose tender mercies are cruelties," men who would have used germ warfare if only microbes had been discovered. To the Tory and British press, the rebels were just as inevitably ruffians, illiterates, mongrels and cowards who refused to face a fight squarely. During British Cavalry Colonel Banastre Tarleton's fiery raids in New York's rebellious upper Westchester County, Rivington's Gazette reported that "the rebel officers and men quitted their jades, and threw themselves over the fences to gain the swamp." Tarleton "returned to the camp of the rebels, burned and destroyed their whole baggage, and . . . several houses." Actually, the "rebel camp" was the town of Bedford--which Tarleton carefully burned to the ground, barns, cattle and all.

For all the horror and hyperbole, the journalists of the American Revolution nonetheless used incongruously rich and elegant rhetoric to describe (as one account had it) "those difficulties and obstacles which require the most consummate fortitude to surmount." They all tried to sound like gentlemen, a journalistic ambition long out of fashion.

THE UNBELIEVERS DOWNSTAIRS by Maude Hutchins. 157 pages. Morrow. $3.95.

The unvarying theme of Maude Hutchins' novels is the incongruity of love and the indignity of sex. This time it is traced among a genteel New England family in a drafty old house patrolled by the most inquisitive and devious child in present fiction. As her grandfather puts it, Clarissa "is an eight-year-old tape recorder," determined to hear the truth about her identity (father unknown, mother never spoken of). Staked out behind curtains and doors, she stalks the family skeletons with the patience of a gumshoe and then rattles the bones triumphantly in the face of the relative who stands to writhe most at the memory. Auntie--hysterical, nymphomaniacal--finally kills herself. Great-aunt Penelope guards her virginity with a loaded gun. Uncle Willie drops in on the family at 4 a.m. to touch Grandpa for a fiver and then dashes off. Not a bit too soon, either, since he is wanted on indecent-exposure charges and is eventually caught for kidnaping a pretty little boy disguised as a pretty little girl.

Maude Hutchins writes like a lascivious I. Compton-Burnett. Her book is almost all dialogue--voices, echoes, whispers--misunderstood, unheard, ambiguous. Somehow she manages to remain irreverent and even lighthearted about the transgressions she describes. In her eleventh book, she seems more and more like a naughty little girl herself, eavesdropping on man's folly and shouting the embarrassing words for everybody to hear.

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