Volume 1, Number 11 · January 23, 1964
The Cape
By R.W. Flint
The Great Beach
by John Hay
Doubleday, 144 pp., $3.95
Most habitués of Cape Cod and many readers of 'nature books' know The Outermost House by Henry Beston, the record of a year spent on Nauset Beach near Eastham. Without wishing to lessen anyone's pleasure in that good book. I want to recommend two Cape Cod books by John Hay, his new The Great Beach and its companion volume of 1961, Nature's Year: The Seasons of Cape Cod, which, in my estimation, stand to the Beston as L'Avventura to, let us say, Shane or any good, hearty, panoramic Hollywood western. The true cinéaste knows that his pleasure is deepened by exposure to both styles and doesn't waste much time in invidious comparisons. But he also knows that the 'epic' manner of Hollywood outdoors—those fruity Dmitri Tiomkin chromatics, those world-renouncing, unbegotten, silhouetted heroes—often aims at the easier ways of raping his feelings at the expense of his mind. Here is a passage from Beston:
Review, 1549 words
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