FICTION

Saxon Dawn

THE KING'S HENCHMAN--Edna St. Vincent Millay--Harper ($2). Folk who must bide their time to hear how Composer Deems Taylor upheld his end of a notable collaboration, will wonder, reading this play, which was written first, his music or the Millay words? If she followed him, he must have written right beautifully. If he followed her, the music needed little more than orchestrating. In the speeches set down here, scarcely a line falls upon the ear without touching a clear note--a misty whitethorn treble, superstitious minors, full-throated, Beowulfian bass. Had the Metropolitan singers at last fortnight's premiere (TIME, Feb. 28) only recited these lines, there must still have been an impressive part of the long hush, the volleying applause and the 37 curtain calls that acclaimed "the greatest U. S. opera."

As a matter of fact, this is the play which Composer Taylor set to music. To fit the music Miss Millay had later to modify her lines to libretto form.

King Eadgar and his thanes (so the play goes) have feasted until dawn in the smoky barn-hall at Winchester. The roast boar's head is hewn to skull and tusks. Mead has been spilled on the oak and the king's strong-thewed companions, none over 30, sprawl, snore or listen intently to the end of a long-drawn saga sung by Maccus, the harper. They thump the board with their cups at the finish. The ladies, gathered apart, lament the saga's true-loving hero.

It is the dawn of Saxon history, with heroic ideals looming in twilit feudal minds. Aethelwold, the king's foster-brother, prepares to ride into the dawn for the king's bride--a flax-haired Lancelot for a bucolic Arthur. They pledge their fraternity over staked swords. . . . Later, in a druidic Devon wood, Aelfrida's beauty twists this pledge. It is too early in history for a Lancelot to live with his own deceit. He buries his dagger in his own chest for brother-love, which is yet held above love for woman. Hasty critics have objected that such a tragedy belies human nature and should hinge more heavily on the sex motif. Which objection misses the gist of a drama laid at the roots of what Saxons have immemorially called their Idealism.

Thomas Hardy has said that the U. S. is notable only for skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Poetess Elinor Wylie has likened her friend to the peculiarly American sea off the coast of Maine, where much of The Henchman was written. Both these admirers were trying to express their feeling that Miss Millay is racially important; that, burning her candle early and late, for light of love and long hours of devoted folk-scholarship, she embodies both the high, bright folly and the brave integrity of a race given equally to deeds and dreaming.

Cradle Crusoes

CHILDREN OF THE MORNING-- W. L. George--Putnam ($2). Originally romantic, the Crusoe theme has passed through many literary phases and now emerges as a peg for behaviorist psychology. Summoning an earthquake and hurricane, Author George casts 59 children upon a scientifically desert island near Nicaragua, without a single adult to hamper their reversion to the primitive. They are of both sexes and many nations. All are between five and eight, an age which, for the sake of argument, is thought of as sufficiently old to fend for itself amidst tropical abundance yet too young for sex-consciousness or lasting memories of home and parents. In their "flower-splashed paradise" the children run nude, wild and healthy. Clans form. Blood tells. A language, God, property, marriage, fire, alcohol, boats, song, dancing, war and many another accessory of civilization are evolved with much probability. There are fine openings for sardonic pros and cons on the late* Mr. George's favorite subject, Woman. Evolution is consistently treated as a blind thing which "provides sport for forces which are sport for themselves."

Deep Clowning

The Story./- Serafino Gubbio serves a black, knock-kneed spider. Daily he whets its appetite with coils of transparent membrane. Not knowing why, creatures come near and sacrifice their real selves to the spider. Serafino Gubbio helps the spider devour them. Not long afterwards, myriad people issue from dark places where, seeking pleasure, they have seen the ghosts made by the spider. Relieved to be out again, they say, "What terrible rot!" Serafino Gubbio is a cinematograph operator for a big company near Rome.

He is extremely sensitive but equally philosophical, this Gubbio. Because he often echoes his chief's command, he has been nicknamed "Shoot." It is an Americanism that sounds ludicrous and a little contemptible to Italians. Another man might be annoyed but not "Shoot" Gubbio. He can contemplate worse than that with equanimity. The futility of mechanical "art," for example. Even the suicide of Giorgio Mirelli, a boy-genius whom he has tutored, does not greatly perturb him. Nor even the strange daemon of the beautiful woman who caused the boy's suicide. Emotionless? Oh, no. But he has taught himself to control his emotions so that he can serve the spider and yet preserve something more important than emotions: his soul, if you like.

The Nestoroff, the woman is called. Before and after Giorgio Mirelli she has had many men. Her proclivity for throwing her very beautiful body away on gutter types right after it has been worshiped by refined slaves, suggests degeneracy to most of her critics. The impassive Gubbio thinks not. He can understand it is her subtle revenge upon men who desire only that part of her which she scorns. Her revenge upon Giorgio, a pure youth, an artist, had to be yet more subtle because the injury he did her was worse than the others. He enjoyed only her body and that only esthetically, for his art, on his canvas. So she seduced him, promised him, denied, then betrayed him.

The Nestoroff is a woman who can keep herself, almost, beyond pity or fear. Giorgio's suicide was truly satisfying to her. Now she is quite happy with Carlo Ferro, the hirsute Sicilian actor. His domination keeps her strong against remorse for Giorgio. She is sufficiently in love to be anxious for Carlo's safety in a scene where he is to kill a charging tiger, a very real beast the company has obtained because it was too dangerous for the park at Rome. She insists on precautions.

The man with whom the Nestoroff betrayed Giorgio was the latter's sister's fiance, one Aldo Nuti. Aldo now reappears, just before the taking of the tiger scene. He has come for her or for revenge. She scorns him. She turns his revenge upon himself. She traps him into offering himself as a substitute for her Sicilian in the tiger scene, then covers him with public derision for his heroics. He has not heard about the precautions.

But Aldo Nuti countermands the precautions. He begs to be allowed to demonstrate his flawless marksmanship, if not his courage. The Nestoroff watches with the rest as they release the tiger and the director cries, "Ready, shoot!" Serafino Gubbio cranks his camera, inside the cage with Nuti. Aldo Nuti aims carefully and shoots, not the tiger, but the Nestoroff. The tiger tears him apart. Gubbio cranks on until someone fires pointblank through the bars into the tiger's ear. He thereby achieves perfection as a cinematograph operator. Emotionless? Oh, no. His suppressed terror strikes him dumb forever after. But except when he thinks of the fierce, innocent tiger's death, he has peace.

The Significance. Foe of machinery, Professor Pirandello never tires of manipulating the intricate machinery of the human mind. Attacking cinema with the full venom of a legitimate playwright, he manipulates his customary close-ups and fadeouts of existence, real and unreal, seeming and serious. A mystic, a believer in man's supernatural endowment, he finds nothing too lowly, dull or grotesque to serve his purpose--a beggars' shelter, a dusty country road, a flyblown tavern. One who speculates on the borders of insanity, he never long departs from concrete dramatization. Shoot is as full of action as a wild west show, as full of metaphysics as a German university, and more exciting than any combination of the two.

The Author, long a professor of philosophy in a Roman high school, turned to drama late in life after writing many novels and short stories. "Pirandellian" is now Italy's equivalent for "Shavian." He came to wide fame only in 1921, with his play Six Characters in Search of an Author. Critics who deny that Professor Pirandello is a philosopher at least agree that his genius for sardonic humor is considerable. If he only toys with mankind's moral and spiritual absurdities, and makes the stage a debating platform for fruitless metaphysics, he at least does it with terse wit and few didactics. Not a few clowns have been "deep" before him, but few "deep" thinkers have managed also to be amusing, and friendly. The amiable title of one of his plays (which opened last week in Manhattan), is Right You Are (If You Think You Are).

Jekyll-Hyde

DR. MOREL--Karen Bramson-- Greenburg ($2). A better book to pop into a steamer basket would be hard to find. Though the material is of the general warp and woof of which detective yarns are tailored there is positively no detecting but a great deal of sure suspense. Dr. Morel, "fashionable specialist" to feminine Paris, is no Dr. Jekyll who turns crudely into a Mr. Hyde by taking mysterious drugs. Rather he is a Jekyll-Hyde, a suave seducer and experimenter with the mortal coil. His undoing is his better self. The theme of a bad man unable to achieve the aloof, unswerving wickedness of a fiend, is deftly handled with occasional bits in quite the Stevensonian vein. Naturally it is the very modern heroine who undoes the doctor by giving herself to him when he had expected to seduce her formally. She, so to speak, ravishes from him the long nurtured orchid of his wickedness. The grim denouement, though revealed at the inception of the plot, is so skillfully contrived as to come off amid real suspense. Altogether a fine technical performance by an author who pretends only to melodrama but achieves something more.

NON-FICTION

Glamorous Gate

FINDING THE WORTH WHILE IN THE ORIENT--Lucian Swift Kirtland--McBride ($3.50). World travel, which means "The Orient" to most people, is becoming so common that a book of this sort at one's elbow is apt to be disastrously intriguing to all who should stay at home. It costs, says Author Kirtland, just about $15 in gold for every day you are on shore in the Orient. For a decent world-circling tour on your own, you need $3,000--just about what it costs, with "extras," on the round-the-world travel agency tours. With this fair warning, Author Kirtland, justly famed for his musk-and-sandalwood Samurai Trails, enters once more that Glamorous Gate, the East.

As a crisp, discerning picture of what the East is now--not was 30 years ago when Aunt Florence was there--the book deserves a place on the bookshelf of even a confirmed domiciler. How many stay-at-homes, or travelers either, know that French Indo-China boasts a chief port (Saigon) which thoroughly deserves its nickname, "Paris of the East"? There you can sit at an iron cafe table, surrounded by boulevardiers who speak only French, for all the world as though the Place de l'Opera were around the corner, and Montmartre just up the hill. Nearby is the stupendous Angkor Vat, a temple which few globe circlers see, but which ranks easily with the Taj. Down such must-be-seen or at least must-be-known-about byways Author Kirtland leads, with many a picture quite different from the stereotyped "shots" that disgrace the usual travel book.

Virtuous Vice

MR. CHARLES, KING OF ENGLAND--John Drinkwater--Doran ($5). Mr. Drinkwater, entirely suave in pen and person, has chosen very happily to write about Charles II. Posterity, with invincible gaucherie, remembers Charles as "The Merry Monarch," as the popularizer of a certain breed of spaniel, and as the only man or monarch to whom Miss Eleanor Gwyn* was ever faithful. Mr. Drinkwater does not forget the spaniels nor Nell Gwyn, but he remembers Mr. Charles.

Charles II, in short, was the first de facto constitutional monarch to reign in England, indisputably circumscribed by the divine rights of Mr. Tom, Mr. Dick, and Mr. Harry when they sit together as Parliament. Charles II could not forget that Toms, Dicks and Harrys chopped off the head of his father Charles I. Ostensibly the Restoration meant "back to normalcy" for the king; but actually Charles II was the first king of England who could be called, by any stretch of the imagination, "Mr. Charles." The deep undercurrents of the times--political, social, religious-- move steadily through the book beneath the rainbows and whirlpools of the Restoration court.

Mr. Drinkwater more than hints that the present age is as degenerate as the Restoration, with hypocrisy substituted for the chief virtue of Mr. Charles, forthrightness in vice. The king did with an easy grace what no mortal would dare now. He developed by his patronage a group of writers whose sheer wit has never been surpassed to produce the incidentally licentious Restoration literature: a literature now totally suppressed (except to scholars) by the moralists of an age which wallows in the stupid carnalism of "Daddy" and "Peaches."

In contrast, Charles II went decently to hear a sermon preached by the Bishop of Rochester, on March 30, 1684, accompanied by the Dukes of Northumberland, Richmond and St. Albans who, he did not conceal, were his sons, respectively by Barbara Villiers (Countess of Castlemane and Duchess of Cleveland), Louise Rene de Keroualle (sent by Louis XIV as a spy to Charles, who encouraged her to spy as much as she pleased and made her Duchess of Portsmouth), and Nell Gwyn. To gild the lily Mr. Drinkwater recalls how the Duke of St. Albans achieved his title.

"Come here, you little bastard!" cried Nell Gwyn to her son one day. Charles reproved her for the wanton coarseness of the epithet.

"Sire," she answered, "he has no other name that I can call him by."

Amused, perhaps touched, Charles thereat created a new dukedom.

*He died Jan. 30, 1926, aged 43.

/-SHOOT--Luigi Pirandello--Dutton ($2.50).

*Not to be confused with Novelist Elinor Glyn, still alive