FICTION

Sensitive Women

THE GREEN FOREST--Nathalie Sedgwick Colby--Harcourt Brace ($2). The "green forest" herein is a world of the spirit which Shirley Challoner entered one day at a concert with David Findley, a young doctor. Between them sat Shirley's husband, heavy and lit eral. Shirley and David could not have each other then because Shirley was going to have a baby. Years later, at the time of this story, Franklin Challoner is buried but his daughter keeps David and Shirley apart again. She drags Shirley to Europe in pursuit of Tony Morrell. Tony, a painter's son, has broken their engagement because he too has known Shirley and David's "green forest," and be cause Franklin Challoner's daughter is not the kind of person who understands "green forests." When Tony was kind to a harlot, Frank lin Challoner's daughter felt insulted.

Before they reach Cherbourg, Franklin Challoner's daughter is infatuated with a Latin-American diplomat who combines the qualities of a grandee and a, waiter. She is quite "over" Tony. When they reach Cherbourg, all she wants is revenge. But Tony does not no tice her proud posturing. His eyes are upon Shirley. He has to tell Shirley about David. David, back in New York where she might just as well have stayed with him, is dead.

The writing brings up a problem about sensitive women. A sensitive woman can be either a bore, an embarrassment or a blessing. Or all three. Shirley Challoner, a blessing, would never have writ ten this book. Authoress Colby is sometimes tiresome, sometimes embarrassing, yet she created Shirley Challoner and the "green forest." The whole point of the book is to delight people who can understand that "Debussy is the wettest music --passion done in silver point," and similar subtle apperceptions. Yet between subtlety and forced fancy even "understanding" readers will detect many a disheartening difference. The girl's face "banged shut." About babies: "There might be sky-blue ones, or indigo ones, or even some navy-blue ones." Lovers are close for a moment, and the episode calls to mind not merely Beatrice and Dante but Saint Paul and God! In short, The Green Forest is an enchanting spot badly messed up by artificial planting.

Authoress Colby, wife of onetime U. S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, has publicly stated that her husband is not represented by any character in her book; that he is "far too colossal a person to be encompassed in any single book" (TIME, Jan. 24).

Devildom

THE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT AND DEMONOLOGY--Montague Summers--Knopf ($5). Witches and sorcerers were the starved souls and anarchists of their heyday--from the 12th Century to the 18th. They existed, feared by King and peasant, fought by Pope and priest--at first in furtive bands, then in leagues more potent for evil than the once dread Maffia. What were they? With a definition the author rips off the cloak of Devildom and leaves his subject naked as a pair of tongs: "A sorcerer (or witch) is one who by commerce with the Devil has a full intention of attaining his own ends." Never mind the magic, what did the witches and sorcerers indisputably do? Their deeds fill this bulky volume--with a bedlam of blasphemy, with a scourge of poisoning, kidnaping and organized crime that swept Europe, with an orgy of self indulgence that reduced the witch and the sorcerer themselves, in some cases, to pitiable lunacy.

At a pen pace that is breathless and occasionally incoherent the author pours out a mass of material which should fascinate the materialist and terrify the romantic. Witches, it seems, did not fly picturesquely through the air on broomsticks. They smeared each other with an irritant ointment, danced and leaped high with sticks between their legs, thereby exciting themselves for the orgy which closed all witches "Sabbats" (Congresses). Withal, they zealously professed a kind of religion, a perverted Gnostic creed that postulated the Devil equal part-creator of the universe with God and more ready to reward his adorants with the things of this world than was the self-styled "jealous" Father.

To all who have supposed witches and sorcerers mere figments of the imagination, they are here presented as a social class more debased than the modern criminal, more obstinately convinced of the efficacy of their anti-social theories than the modern Communist. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and other shrewd Elizabethans were, it is suggested, no fools when they gave to Devildom the large place it occupied upon their stage. Much which later authors have deodorized is here presented "high"-- that some may avert their noses, and others sniff like connoisseurs of Roquefort.

NON-FICTION

Man of Love

The Story of romanticism in European music, of solo piano concerts, of pianists who exploit brilliant personalities for their art's sake, begins with the father-in-law and in-opera of Richard Wagner, the inventor of the symphonic poem, the demon-angel of European music for 60 years, Franz Liszt,* artist, lover, Franciscan monk.

And Franz Liszt's story begins in 1811 on the plains of Hungary. His father, superintendent of a noble's estate, sees a frustrated dream realized when the frail six-year-old plays from memory, with never a lesson, an entire lengthy concerto. The child is taught at home, overworks to the verge of death but survives to take his virtuosity, the marvel of that countryside, to Vienna. Beethoven, old, deaf, impoverished, whose portrait presides over the Liszt piano at home, consecrates the spindly little acolyte with a kiss.

Aged 12, Franz is Europe's sensation. Fat George IV pats his curls at Windsor.

Caroline. He enters a sombre adolescence, a tall boy troubled with pious ecstasies during wide tours of the Continent. The brooding vanishes (age 16) under the combined influences of hard work, Olympian acclaim and an angelic pupil, Caroline de Saint-Cricq. Her father, a count, banishes the rapturous tutor, who will never forget his only wholly spiritual mistress. . . .

Marie. Aged 24 he steps out of a post-chaise in Geneva with the very elegant and accomplished wife of the Dauphin's master-of-horse, the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who has hurled Parisian grandeur, standing and children aside to pursue her politico-literary writing in a passionate lovers' exile. George Sand joins them, with her pipe and trousers. They are a household of gypsy esthetes, with Liszt's virtuosity so famous that he has but to give a concert or two to provide their wants for a year. A fawning barber in Milan whispers the common verdict: "The first pianist in the world in both fantastic and inspired playing." Countess Marie bears three children. Cosima, the second, is named after Lake Como where in their idly amorous wanderings they have glided in a shallop to the music of little bells at night.

Many floods devastate Hungary. He rushes off to raise 25,000 gulden in a month, ten concerts. Thousands mass to drag his carriages. Women follow him from city to city dressed as men. In Germany they cherish his cigar stubs and preserve the dregs of his cup in vials. He takes women as his necessities dictate, never an inferior one--a brazen gypsy near his home; a superb German actress who offers herself in French verse penned on her fan; dark Lola Montes, the dancer, to escape whom he has to lock her door, pay for breakage and flee.

This is how he looks: "a thin figure with narrow shoulders, his hair falling over his face and down his neck, an extraordinarily spiritual face." He is "the iron-fingered smasher of pianos," a towering dark eagle who banishes from the platform everything but him self and his music.

Carolyne. Traveling in his regal coach he refreshes himself with Shakespeare and Dante. He meets a poor young German, Richard Wagner, and finds him great. Persuaded to take root at Weimar as kapellmeister he resolves to immolate himself on the altar of Wagner. First there is his break with Marie. "If we do not attain happiness," he writes, "it may be because we are worthy of some thing better." There is his debut as a composer. And there is a concert at Kiev where a powerful, swarthy Russo-Polish Princess, Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, dedicates her life to him and carries him off to her estate in South Russia. While she smokes cigars and writes theology, he develops the new theory of his friend Berlioz into "harmonic painting," the technique of his own Twelve Symphonies. Their love combines the fervors of great art and intense piety. The swarthy Princess, un able to divorce her husband, accompanies him to Weimar where, during his 12-year leadership of a great esthetic revolt, she is his constant inspiration, "my beautiful eyes and my beautiful eagle's clutch . . . the Heaven of my soul."

Richard. Equally embellished, and, if possible, more deeply sincere is the correspondence between Liszt and a small volcanic man, needy and in exile, "shooting forth sheaves of flame," at Zurich. "O, my beloved Christ," writes Richard Wagner, "I am your serf." Liszt replies that on the contrary it is he who serves a genius without parallel, a friend forever. From Tannhauser to Tristan Liszt exhorts, encourages, supports and loves Wagner, bringing forward the operas as they appear, producing them despite angry opposition and at much expense of money and effort. His own productive period is upon him--the Twelve Symphonies, the Sonata in B-Minor, the Faust-Symphony, Dante-Symphony, the Mass of Gran and two supreme "portraits," of his mistress Carolyne and of himself, pictured as a classic Orpheus. But seeing Wagner through, forcing his acceptance, comes second to no concern of his own, and the strife thus fomented costs him his position. Unknowing, Wagner writes a letter cruel with poverty. It is one of the moments that teach Liszt his ultimate artistic wisdom: "God crucified is Truth."

Cosima. Countess Carolyne is granted her divorce and goes to Rome for its papal certification. Liszt follows, but the divorce falls through. They both seek religious seclusion, she to finish her life avoiding fresh air, smoking ever blacker cigars and delving into ever more tenuous theology; he to take minor religious orders and continue his perennial tours with Rome as little his home as Bonn, Weimar, Zurich, Paris.

Liszt's services to Wagner at last bear fruit in the latter's patronage from the young king of Bavaria. But they have broken since Wagner took from Liszt's disciple, Bulow, Liszt's daughter, Cosima. Not until the opening of Wagner's theatre at Bayreuth is Liszt reconciled, by the knowledge that Wagner now married to Cosima loved her as Franz reborn.

Still traveling, still drinking cognac despite his gout, still beseiged by women of spirit and culture despite his years and cassock, still "plundering" pianos (including discordant ones from which he wrings satanic dissonance), Liszt lives on until 1886, three years after Wagner. Stricken with pneumonia, he heaves his huge frame erect on the bed, dies with the word, "Tristan!". . . At Bayreuth, laden with wrinkles and homage; Dame Cosima, aged 87 still preserves the tradition in the flesh.

*FRANZ LISZT (L'Homme d'Amour)--Guy de Pourtales, (Translated by Eleanor Stimson Brooks)--Holt ($2.50).