Old and Dirty

THE IMPREGNABLE WOMEN--Eric Link-later--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Extravagant admirers of Britain's skittish Eric Linklater have not hesitated to compare him to Aristophanes. Author Linklater's picaresque, satirical novels (Juan in America, Magnus Merriman et al.) were full of bawdy humor and a blithe unconcern for English notions of propriety. But last week, when he published a new-fashioned novelist's version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, critics concluded that the Scot was no match for the Greek on his own ground.

Aristophanes was sick of the Peloponnesian War when it started. Twenty years later, in 411 B.C., he was even sicker. Athens' allies were slipping away; the Syracuse expedition had ended in crushing disaster. But whenever one side suggested peace, the other side was doing too well with the war to call it off. Then Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata. What if all the women of Athens united, seized the Acropolis, told the men they would live resolutely continent till the war ended? Aristophanes suggested that the war would end at once.

Lysistrata has been repeatedly revived (most recently on Broadway in Gilbert Seldes' version, 1930) because: 1). it is a classic; 2) it is smutty; 3) it is antiwar; 4) it is funny. In The Impregnable Women, Author Linklater follows his model with near-sighted intensity. Lady Scrymgeour puts a stop to the war between Great Britain and France with as much zeal and dispatch as Lysistrata put a stop to the war between Athens and Sparta. The Impregnable Women is less light-headed than either Lysistrata or Author Linklater's earlier books. It exhibits his glib facility for treating outrageous events, but his admirers may be disconcerted to find that he possesses a moral sense. And they will agree that Aristophanes did the same thing better, with music, a long time ago.

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