Books: Short Notices: Oct. 20, 1967

RICKENBACKER by Edward Vernon Rickenbacker. 458 pages. Prentice-Hall.

$7.95.

Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was a daredevil racing driver and America's World War I ace of aces, later applied his bravura to business when he took over Eastern Air Lines. He survived a dizzying number of auto and plane crashes, one of which led to his spectacular 24-day nightmare in a rubber raft in the Pacific in 1942. Unfortunately, Pilot Rickenbacker's prose does not fly; it won't even roll. The irascible old individualist makes his life sound dully plausible and pat.

Moreover, he fails to relate incidents that would help to explain why in his day he was both fervently admired and damned. Nowhere in the book, for example, is the story about the separate microphone that he used at Eastern's management meetings, enabling him to cut in on speakers with withering sarcasm ("You're not managers; you're leeches!"). Nor does he discuss his espousal of such right-wing causes as the repeal of the income tax and U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. Captain Eddie, now 77, has been awarded 14 honorary doctorates and 55 major decorations for merit and bravery, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. Clearly he deserves another honor: a better biographer.

MEMORIES by C. M. Bowra. 369 pages. Harvard University Press. $7.95.

At the art of autobiography, no one betters the British, who prefer to live in the past and talk about it. Now 69 and Warden of Oxford's Wadham College, Sir Maurice Bowra seems to have spent a lifetime as a classical scholar preparing to write his memoirs. His sentences, too many of them balanced on a median "and," move at the stately pace of an Oxford processional. His assurance is majestic. It assumes that the reader will want to hear everything about him, from his encounter with the novelist Henry James, who asked politely if the young Bowra were still at school ("I replied that I was") to the disposition of a fellow don's remains: "When Frederic Harrison died, he left us his ashes, together with those of his wife, in an urn to be placed in the chapel. After some debate it was agreed that, as he had not been a Christian, they could not go in the chapel but might go in the ante-chapel." In this book, a very private and very special world of British scholarship is not so much revealed as apostrophized.