Consequences

IMPASSIONED PYGMIES--Keith Winter --Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

In the parlor game of '"Consequences," unlikely characters are confronted with each other; their cross-purposed dialog and action are sometimes funny. As a serious literary trick, Plato used the same device; so did Walter Savage Landor, British Novelist Keith Winter's latest book is based on this "consequential"' scheme. Suppose that D. H. Lawrence, surrounded by sycophants, went to Mallorca to die. Suppose Noel Coward, vacationing, became his neighbor. What would happen? On this lively supposition Author Winter has written a tale that is blurbed as another South Wind but is more like Somerset Maugham's spiteful Cakes and Ale.

Mallorca is called Miramar, Lawrence is Marius, Coward is Andrew Jordan. Marius has two sons, one of whom despises his father and can think of nothing but his future career as a great trapeze artist; the other, Saul, has left home several years ago but is coming back to do his last filial duties. On the boat from Marseilles Saul meets Andrew Jordan, a "brilliantly second-rate," phenomenally successful playwright. In their very first conversation Andrew's shiny sophistication crumples before the hypnotic sincerity of Saul; by the time they reach Miramar Andrew is in a dither to do something first-rate and make Saul admire him.

Meantime Marius' household pursues its usual temperamental tenor. The five disciples hate each other, scribble notes for their forthcoming biographies (they all know Marius is dying), try to maneuver the sick man into tete-`a-tete walks. Lewis, "deeply insincere," has more than one earmark of J. Middleton Murry, one of Lawrence's biographers. Others are Robert, a timid soul; his wife Hilda, who married him because Marius suggested it but who nurses a platonic passion for the Master; Mark, a bully; Johnny, a poet who is not a gentleman and is very self-conscious about it. Marius' bovine wife, Helga, feeds them all, pays little attention to their twitterings or shrieks. The colony is further complicated by the arrival of a young married couple, Lilly and Simon, who seem at first happily married. But Lilly, it rapidly turns out, is a schizophrenic : she splits up into three personalities, most potent of them being a nymphomaniac who frightens poor Simon to the edge of insanity.

Marius and Andrew meet but find each other uninteresting. Saul's catalytic presence throws everyone into frenzied activity. The disciples intrigue more furiously than ever; Simon looks paler every day; Andrew sits up till all hours writing "a really sincere" play. Saul falls in love with Lilly but casts her out when he finds what she is up to. The dying Marius, in a last effort to get away from his disciples and his own failure, gets Saul to promise he will take him to Africa. Andrew, unable to write a sincere play without being dull, drowns himself.

As a satirical portrait of Noel Coward, Impassioned Pygmies is first-rate. As a caricature of Lawrence's biographers it is catty but acute. As a novel about real human beings it is less than fair.

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