Unintentional Best-Seller

THE ITCHING PARROT--Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi--translation & introduction by Katherine Anne Porter --Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

One of the most colossally popular books ever written, this Mexican novel, now translated into English for the first time, after 126 years of neglect, has been bought in the past by some 100,000,000 readers of Spanish. Says Translator Porter: "[It] is without dispute The Novel of the past century, not only for Mexico but for all Spanish-speaking countries." One press in Barcelona printed a million-odd copies annually. For millions of common people The Itching Parrot has been editorial page, moral preceptor, soapbox speech, liberalistic handbook, underground leaflet, scandal sheet, pulp-thriller, comic strip, and dirty-joke book. It has also been--and still is--an engaging story in which is made wonderfully vivid, as Mrs. Porter says, "the sprawling, teeming, swarming people of Mexico, ragged, eternally cheated . . . insatiably and hopelessly hungry, but indestructible." Relieved of its pamphleteering and moralizing (and probably of a good deal of its vulgarity), it stands in English as a highly readable minor classic, written in a kind of steel-engraving prose.

The Itching Parrot--"Poll" for short--is the nickname of one Pedro Sarmiento, a well-born Mexican ne'er-do-well who plays out the classic routines of all picaresque heroes, with a strong dash of erotic chile con carne seasoned with moral saws and liberalistic satire. The Parrot disregards a wise father, is spoiled by a booby mother, wastes her fortune, sinks to the lowest flophouses and gambling dens of Mexico City, where "there are but two rules: luck and cheating. The former is more lawful, but the latter is surer." In jail the prisoners rob him and empty their slop pots over him (Poll cheerfully reports himself as clown, coward, butt and skunk).

The Itching Parrot's further pages include a cruelly realistic marriage, a gruesome, slapstick try at corpse robbing, harsh satire on civil and priestly extortion, some Swiftian dialogues with a Chinaman on law, religion, medicine, the rich. At length he meets repentance head-on in the dead person of an old pal: "I saw hanging to a tree the impaled corpse of an executed man in his white gown and tall cap adorned with a red cross, his hands bound." Towards the virtuous end of his life Poll finds a new pal--"One Lizardi . . . a sorry writer in your motherland, known to the public as 'the Mexican Thinker.' " Dying, he entrusts Thinker Lizardi with his story. The Thinker adds his own account of Poll's pathetic death.

The Mexican Thinker. Joaquin de Lizardi, the author of the Parrot's adventures, wrote only this novel, and did not even mean to do that. He was a political pamphleteer, and this fictional false-face for his ideas was his "last hope of outwitting the censorship, as well as of making a living by its sales. . . ." Serialized, it was suppressed at the eleventh chapter, published in full after his death.

Born in 1776, Lizardi picked up and lived by & for the ideas of his century in a country where those ideas brought prison and poverty, finally excommunication. He fought for "freedom of the press, first, last and forever, compulsory free education, religious liberty, liberty of speech and universal franchise, and naturally, almost as a result of these things, justice, sweet justice, for everybody, regardless of race, class, creed or color." He was sometimes taken in by leaders like Santa Ana, but never for long. His wits were "intransigent and not for sale," and though he was afraid to die, "he was not afraid to suffer a long, miserable existence for the sake of his beliefs." He wanted his epitaph to read, "Here lies the ashes of The Mexican Thinker, who did what he could for his country." But he never had a gravestone.

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