Play-boy

Playboy

The new book* by romantic, poetic, enthusiastic, sparkling, dauntless, bubbling, impetuous, adventurous, dramatic, enthralling, etc. Playboy Richard Halliburton begins with a "Crash! The lightning in a rage split the writhing firmament from Thessaly to the Cyclades in one blazing, blinding glare. Streaks of fire burst into the inky darkness, inflaming the abyss about me and lashing at the clouds that hurtled past."

It is Jove, Author Halliburton explains, angrily tossing thunderbolts because a whimsical, gay, incorrigible, dramatic, inspired, etc. young Amercian is at the beetling, rugged, sacrosanct, fierce, rugged, granite pinnacle of Mt. Olympus and proposes to spend the night.

There follow in rapid succession the Vale of Tempe, the summit of Parnassus, scaling the Acropolis at midnight, wooing the Maidens of the Porch by Attic moonlight, swimming the Hellespont, climbing Stromboli and Vesuvius, trying to swim from whirling Charybdis to rocky Scylla, singing "Funiculi, Funicula" in the Blue Grotto to an English girl with an Alice-blue Rolls-Royce, climbing Aetna, playing Ulysses ("handsome, heaven-sent Greek") to a 65-year-old bobbed grandmother's Calypso, and reading "The Return of Ulysses" at Ithaca, having completed what was begun, a trip in the wandering wake of Ulysses doing all he did and several things besides.

The chapter containing the least Halliburton relates a visit to Rupert Brooke's grave at Skyros. Of all the Playboy's heroes, Poet Brooke seems to be the most genuine. But Poet Byron comes a close second: "Lord Byron once wrote that he would rather have swum the Hellespont than written all his poetry. So would I!"

As hundreds of thousands of U. S. clubwomen already know, Playboy Halliburton did swim the Hellespont, to catch up with Byron and Leander. And the dourest male skepticism will be disarmed by our hero's frank confessions that he took a taxi over the last seven miles of his race from Marathon to Athens in the very tracks of Pheidippides; that diving for sponges in the Gulf of Gabes gave him an earache.

Byron would have envied Playboy Halliburton as indeed he did envy prodigious Edward John Trelawny, of whom Mr. Halliburton is a slim, blonde, unbearded re-edition. For the Trelawny love of violence--he slaughtered Malays, bashed Turks--is substituted, or at least talked a great deal about, a love of Romance--and of "good copy." Both have written with an (extravagance surpassing mere boastfulness and Playboy Halliburton, though constantly referring to himself as "such a nut" and "incorrigible" and "foolish," has the editorial wit to push a lot of his playfulness off on various traveling companions. Also, knowing his public, Author Halliburton carefully explains that whenever the companion happened to be a female they stayed at separate hotels.

The result, as in the case of Author Halliburton's The Royal Road to Romance (around the world on $40), is the biggest kind of super-romantic money's worth that "self-satisfied people, caught in the ruts of convention and responsibility," can buy anywhere currently.

The Author. Born in Tennessee, with the current century, "Dick" Halliburton romped through Princeton University more bareheaded than most, running cross-country, editing a pictorial magazine, taking astonishing vacations, by the age of 21. Then he romped around the world in tramp ship forecastles, called it The Royal Road to Romance, said he was "living poetry instead of writing it." He talks volubly, cracks many jokes, threatens to write a novel called Hell. ^

*THE GLORIOUS ADVENTURE--Richard Halliburton-- Bobbs-Merrill ($5).