Don Quixote's Author

A MAN CALLED CERVANTES--Bruno Frank--Viking ($2.50).

In 50 words Thomas Carlyle said most of what is actually known about the man who wrote Don Quixote: "A certain strong man fought stoutly at Lepanto, worked stoutly as an Algerine slave; with stout cheerfulness endured famine and nakedness and the world's ingratitude; and sitting in gaol, with one hand left him, wrote our joyfullest, and all but our deepest, modern book, and named it Don Quixote." Not a letter or a manuscript of Cervantes has survived, nothing but a few legal documents, "residuum of his continual poverty."

Author Frank, admitting that not enough is known of Cervantes "to build up a biography without gaps," has chosen to write his life in novel-form. U. S. readers will prefer Author Frank's version to Spanish Author Tomas' (TIME, July 23), but may find themselves wishing they knew more about Cervantes than either biographer can tell them. To such a wish Bruno Frank would reply: "Then read Don Quixote."

Unlike his contemporary Shakespeare (they died in the same month of the same year: April, 1616), Cervantes lived an adventurous life, never attained comfort or respectability. Though the Spain of his day was mistress of the world, it was the most impoverished country of Europe. The stream of gold from Spain's empire poured uselessly into the desert of Philip II's fanatical schemes and such poor devils as Cervantes got never a drop. As a young man with no future, he jumped at the chance of getting out of Spain, going to Rome as Spanish teacher to a Papal legate. There, for something else to do, he became a soldier and went off to fight the Turks. In the bloody sea-battle of Lepanto a bullet shattered his left hand, made him a hero.

But heroes were six a penny after Lepanto. Cervantes was glad to be sailing home again, even with no greater reward than letters of recommendation from his general. It took him more than five years to get there. On the voyage they were captured by Algerian pirates, and Cervantes' prized letters got him the uncomfortable honor of being held for an impossibly high ransom. Back in Spain he found various ways of nearly starving, loved a slut who left him, married a slattern whom he gladly left. As a middle-aged tax collector for Philip's insatiable treasury Cervantes might have ended his weary days. But he fell foul of his superiors, was arrested for embezzlement and clapped into the big jail at Seville. There, with the scum of Spain as his audience and his inspiration, Author Frank leaves him, happily hard at work on his masterpiece.

The Author. It would be news if a first-flight German author still lived in Germany. Bruno Frank, like most of his colleague-compatriots, does not, is settled in comfortable exile at Sanary, on the Riviera, near his fellow-exile, Lion Feuchtwanger. Big, baldish, blond, Bruno Frank looks like a professional wrestler, lives with the precise routine of a German Ph.D. (which he is). For years a best-seller in Germany, he was until recently one of the most popular German playwrights. He enjoys eating, drinking, smoking; dislikes noises, hypocrites, badly-bound books. He is at present in London, writing for the British cinema.

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