Brownstone & Sulphur

HORSE IN THE MOON--Luigi Pirandello --Dutton ($2.50).

So accustomed is everybody to thinking of Pirandello as a dramatist that his publishers on the jacket of this book have inscribed: "This is a book of fiction." It is a twelve-story selection from a projected 24-volume skyscraper entitled Stories for the Year Round. Like the Thousand & One Nights, like mottoes on church calendars, there will be Pirandello tales for every day of the year, every mood, every occasion.

Most moods, most occasions must be rather grisly affairs to find these tales sympathetic. Of them Translator Samuel Putnam writes: "Here were no tragedies of the adamant will in self-ruinous conflict with an ineluctable Fate. Here, rather, was a disheartened and disheartening abandonment to the stream of an ignoble destiny." Maestro Pirandello considers Europe "senile, full of animated corpses." He writes of its brownstone-fronted society as if he smelled a rat, as if the rat had been dead a considerable length of time.

The Maestro gets his laughs out of diablerie and the grotesque. "Horse in the Moon" silhouets a bridegroom, apoplectic with lust, and the head of a dying horse against a copper moon. The bride, seeing these two dying animals, and hearing the cries of anticipant ravens in the empty heavens, runs for home and father. Theme of "The Cat, a Goldfinch and the Stars" is that every individualized consciousness is circumvallated by whatever body it may inhabit. The stars knew not that the cat killed the goldfinch; the cat knew nothing about that particular finch; the bird did not know that it was life's only joy to the old couple whose dead grandchild had trained it to perch on their shoulders, peck at their ears. But the old couple thought the bird sang only to ease their mourning, that the cat planned death to their particular bird, that the stars wept for their sorrow.

In "A Wee Sma' Drop" the author finds an old man sitting corpselike in a wineshop, an untasted bottle before him, passively allowing the flies to attack a pimple on his forehead. It develops that for the old man the bottom has dropped out of everything. Gone sour are the immaterial wines of love, hope, desire. Sole remaining comfort, a drop of real grape, his family has denied him because it made him rowdy. Consolation he finds "by coming here and reminding myself that, while my sorrow is real enough now, all I should have to do would be to take a thimbleful of wine and it would be gone." Touched to the heart the Maestro leans over to him, whispers: "Excuse me, but won't you at least permit me to brush that fly off your forehead?"

The Author, Luigi Pirandello, Ph.D., was born in Girgenti, Sicily in 1867. His father owned a sulphur mine, which may have given his writings their slightly diabolical odor. After studying at Rome and at the University of Bonn, he became teacher of Italian Literature at the Normal College for Women, remained there some 30 years. Five volumes of poetry, 20 of short stories, three novels got him little reward. His now celebrated novel The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) sold only 2,000 copies in 18 years. In 1912 Pirandello was persuaded to turn to the drama. Success shook him out of his professional shell. Now a fashionably-dressed gentleman he rushes about Europe writing comedies in hotels and wagon-lits, takes his own theatrical company on summer tours through Europe. Most celebrated play: Six Characters in Search of an Author. Other translated plays: Sicilian Limes, Henry IV, Right Yon Are, Each in His Own Way, The Pleasure of Honesty, Naked, As You Desire Me. Novels: cast, Shoot!, The Old and the Young.

Guggenheim Reward

THE NINTH WITCH--Edward Davison --Harper ($2).

A poet's Muse is often made up of his subconscious ideals. Among Poet Davison's favorite ideals are swans, sexual normality, the England of William Cobbett's heart's-desire. Stir these three together, pepper them with premonitions of death-to-come. If you find the brew savory you will like this book of unpretentious poems.

The title poem treats an old theme with young gusto. Peter the friar on Good Friday night comes on nine young witches dancing to the Devil's fiddling. Peter hides the naked ninth witch's broom; when the others fly off she is left behind. Peter drags her off to burn. On the way, to stop her blasphemous outcries, he throttles her. Not wishing to spoil a good witch-burning he tries to revive her, covers her cold body with his frock. Before dawn he is under the frock too. Subsequently the witch recovers her broom, flies away. Peter, despairing for his soul, hangs his body high.

Like most young lyricists Davison writes some poems under the influence of other poets, some under little apparent influence, not even the author's. The best ("I Saw the King," "Cobbett's Ride." "Home-Coming") are Davison's very own, are good indeed. Born in Glasgow, Poet Davison was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing while teaching English at Vassar. He wrote most of The Ninth Witch during his endowed holiday. Poetry addicts will enjoy his book, future anthologists find it useful.

Infra-Red

MEN IN DARKNESS--James Hanley-- Knopf ($2.50).

Discomfiting to beneficiaries of modern civilization is the thought that their blessings rest not only on God's mercy and uncomplaining machines, but also mercilessly on millions of men beyond complaint. Compared to these, machines live easy lives. James Hanley, an uncompromising young Irishman (born in Dublin, 1901), takes a Balzacian view of these poor to whom all things are poor, writes of them in a Balzacian style interlarded with curses. His first book Drift (1930) caused a literary sensation in England. The present volume will appeal to all who share Hanley's suspicion "that it is more important to unlearn than to learn."

One of his few upper-crust characters thus addresses an ancient fugitive from the workhouse: "When anybody like yourself enters a great civilized city, a something happens. Thought becomes paralyzed, collective thought I mean, for that, after all, is the meaning of civilization. . . . You are at once a sore, a pestilence. a kind of plague, disease, threat. You must hide, get away; anywhere; back into those fastnesses of dark and chaos and not return again. . . . Obliterate yourself. Fade out of sight and mind as quickly as possible." This particular veteran fades unseen into a junkyard shed full of oily rags. A passing locomotive throws a parcel of sparks over the fence. Even the junkyard proprietor is half glad to see such filthy rubbish burned away.

Author Hanley's stories have little plot; what little they have is mostly superfluous. More muck than marble.these lives cannot be arranged in sculptural groups. They are only part of a larger plot, that of society itself. Like other literati Hanley takes that plot for granted, is interested mostly in the significance of the human suffering within it. Some of his stories:

John Grundy, who cleaned the streets of Bootle, has come to love his mucky job, is known to everybody as John Muck. One day he looks into the eyes of Miss Pettigrew, the railway-station tobacco-girl. After that, muck loses its charm for him. He writes mucky notes to the girl, who despises him, trails her through streets that he leaves mucky now. Just as he begins to realize that he is John Grundy, not Muck, the girl falls in love with him. But by leaving his muck in the streets he loses his job. At his first tryst with the tobacco-girl he realizes that her love has killed John Muck, who had a paying job. John Grundy, unemployed, throws his truelove into the canal.

The longer "Narrative" starts with a riot of the unemployed on Liverpool docks to get jobs on an outgoing mystery ship, AO.2. There are 300 applicants, seven jobs. After dismal last-nights on shore the lucky seven sail away to be torpedoed in the Irish Sea. Going mad in the lifeboats all are lost, except the 293 unemployed left on shore.

In Darkiest Africa

CONGORILLA--Martin Johnson--Brew-er, Warren & Putnam ($3.50)

Twin objectives of Martin & Osa Johnson's latest safari were pygmies and gorillas, least of men, largest of apes. The former live in the Itura Forest, Belgian Congo; the latter haunt the Alumbongo Mts. and the slopes of Mt. Mikeno, Uganda. Martin & Osa Johnson belong to the modern school of game-hunters. They travel mostly with fun and camera, ton trucks (Willys Knight) and flashlights (Eveready). Three hundred black porters were needed to bring their equipage down a steep 11-mi. descent. Their kill was largely bananas and bottled beer. However, plenty of well-trained elephant-guns made it lucky when angry lions and gorillas did not charge. Some of their camera-shots are superb.

Starting from Nairobi, Kenya Colony, the explorers crossed Lake Albert, plunged into the tropical vegetable soup of the Itura Forest. Here they organized a studio-village of over 500 pygmies, sound-pictured them at home. A daily bunch of bananas each, a tablespoonful of salt, held them for three months. These pygmies are the slaves of larger blacks; but to the Johnsons they seemed "the happiest persons on earth . . . unspoiled children of nature with the mentality of ten-year-olds. . . .They are just simple primitive animals, caring nothing about the hereafter and little about the here."

When the Johnsons went on to gorillas, they found plenty, but the great apes hardly lived up to Tarzanic tales about their ferocity. Hairy vegetarians, they peel bamboo shoots for a living, beat their chests when approached, never attack. Two young ones were captured alive by treeing them, chopping down their perch, smothering their struggles under a tarpaulin. Tales of their "snatching screaming women from the beds of terrified husbands" expectant readers will be disappointed to learn are "all bosh." "In fact, gorillas are nearly desexed. When we captured our pair, the black boys informed us that we had a male and a female. It was not until four months later, however, that we knew which one was male and which one female." This exemplary couple were temporarily housed in Manhattan's Central Park Zoo, then sent to the San Diego, Calif. Zoo. Their captor has since sworn never to send another animal into captivity.

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