FICTION

Complicated Camelot

The Story* is much the same Camelotian idyll as that told by Scribe Malory and Poet Tennyson, except that relations and motives are made infinitely clearer and the characters might be leisure-class folk of our own time and place, invested with more than the usual emotional intensity, ready wit, nice manners and good intentions.

Toward the end Sir Lancelot says, ". . . though Galahad is unusual, I doubt if he will ever become typical," which might be as aptly said of many a strapping young idealist now studying sociology at Columbia or Stanford instead of chivalry at Camelot.

Lancelot is speaking of his only begotten son, a natural one who was more or less forced upon him by the first Elaine. There was never a fonder father nor prouder, nor ever one more vexed by his offspring's priggishness. For when Galahad left Camelot to seek (as legend soon had it) "the holiest thing in the world," and hence the Grail, it was not so much the quest that lured him as the necessity for a quest that drove him. He had just learned of his irregular birth and, to cap that, of his father's guilty love with Guinevere--wIth Guinevere, embodiment of all perfections, inculcatrix of his brightest ideals, his spiritual mother and above all, King Arthur's wife! Galahad rode oft, snorting, but not without a lecture from Arthur himself upon the presumptuous folly of children judging their parents. Galahad not only vexed Lance lot but naturally embarrassed him greatly in the early days, before Guinevere's first blind jealousy abated. She would not listen to Lancelot's story, honest as the day, of how on his very first visit to King Pelles, that old stickler's bold-spirited daughter had offered her self to him as wife or mistress, she cared not which, in frank passion for his sombre scars, grace and fortitude; how upon his next visit, when he went reluctantly at his liege's bidding to complain of dusty hay which had given Arthur's horse the heaves, Elaine had tricked him into her chamber by an ambiguous message and there made a plea, and a display, of such pitiable devotion that no generous man, whatever his integrity, could have denied her. Nor was it remarkable that Guinevere stayed skeptical, with reports of the lusty brat's [Galahad's] activities constantly reaching the court. She dismissed Lancelot, who thereupon went mad, and she never bade him return until her life was at stake before the perfectly accurate charges of jealous and mighty Sir Meliagrance. The interim was Elaine's one happy season. When Lancelot was found in the forest and brought, bound, into young Galahad's new bloodhound kennels, she nursed the grizzled giant back to sanity. Galahad, who grew to rival his father at arms, kept him at her castle for several years of half-happiness, though Lancelot never ceased to love Guinevere. This Elaine, honest, fearless, beautiful, has caught her author's sympathies in the net of her dark hair (though she wore it cut short) and is the tale's real heroine, dead of loneliness (but not repining) at the end. Guinevere and Arthur leave us more or less hand in hand, she feeling that, of the three men whom she tried to improve--Arthur, who cheerfully sidestepped; Lancelot, who fought and loved nobly but then fell; Galahad who rode away in righteousness--the last was her masterpiece. Lancelot finished his days in a monastery, more bluntly honest than ever and utterly perplexed by the last tra-edy his honesty precipitated, the suicide of the "lily maid" of Astolat, the second Elaine, whose proposal, made in tenderest neurotic innocence, so astonishingly echoed her unhappy namesake's.

The Author is that college professor who last year, with The Private Life of Helen of Troy, amazed people by demonstrating that a scholar, musician, poet and dramatist can also be a novelist-of-manners in the richest veins of language, wit, philosophy. Galahad, as superbly and warmly humanistic as its predecessor, proves that the latter was no mere tour de force nor a long-polished secret gem, but an inspired creation the like of which may be expected yet again. The subtitle of Galahad is a very fair sample of Erskine wit: "Enough of his life to explain his reputation." The strength of the irony is as the strength of ten because Author Erskine exercises restraint, discretion, grace instead of horseplay. Member of the English faculty at Columbia University, facile, dignified, popular, 47, married (1910), Author Erskine's most recent public act of moment was reading a memorial poem at the Phi Beta Kappa sesquicentennial last month (TIME, Dec. 6).

--GALAHAD--John Erskine--Bobbs Merrill ($2.50).

Poetic Scenario

ANGEL--Du Bose Heyward-- Doran ($2). Liquor, religion and love all come hard in the Great Smokies. Poet Heyward, who summers there, has tried a distillation of these three, achieving a glorious color but not much kick. Angel Thornley, the hillbilly preacher's girl, bathes at misty dawn beneath a rainbowed waterfall. Her father sets the sheriff on her lover, Buck Merritt, moonshiner, and marries her off to a mountaineer to make her an honest woman. After several years of cussing and slamming the door of their shack, the mountaineer blows himself up working on a road gang. Buck Merritt gets his pardon just then and comes back for Angel and Little Buck. The primitive feelings of mountain people are conscientiously concentrated, but drama is not felt, as it was in Poet Heyward's other story, Porgy (1925), about a purple-black beggar of Charleston. He has let the beauty of his new locale run away with him. What he should have written was an idyl. What he has written is a poetic scenario.