Psalmist Psychologized

DAVID THE KING--Gladys Schmitt--Dial ($3).

David the King, a full-bodied (631-page) retelling of the great Biblical story by the author of The Gates of Aulis (TIME, June 15,1942), is the March choice of The Literary Guild and the Religious Book Club.

The story of David, the spoiled shepherd poet who climbed into royal favor, betrayed King Saul and his people, took over the throne, ruled Israel in her march from primitivism to the brink of decadence, and declined among the dissensions, rapes, assassinations, and revolutionary plots of his children, then sought and found his God at last--is one of mankind's archetypical legends. Miss Schmitt has chosen to tell it not as a historical or Biblical but a psychological novel. In this task she suffers from a serious handicap: as a novelist, she is not very adventurous; as a psychologist, not very interesting.

She is aware that David's middle-aged infatuation with Bathsheba must have been suffused with the sense of death. But she is incurious about the odd fact that, until he was King, David was capable of begetting only one child, and that by an adolescent girl who worshiped him as if he were King. She develops David's crookedly loyal captain Joab into a conscienceless foil for her almost equally sinful but conscience-torn hero; but she explains David's lifelong forbearance towards Joab only by the phrase, "a nameless fear." Her examinations of religious and mystical experience are sometimes emotionally convincing, but so loosely generalized that the reader nods at, without believing or suffering, David's intuitions of "other Jahvehs"--one of love, for example, or one who is blind and heartless.

A-Budget Casting-As a straight storyteller and creator of character, Novelist Schmitt is often very competent, but on a high-mediocre level which suggests that, in trying to write a universal story to be universally read, she has tempered her imagination and intelligence to the shorn middlebrow. Under Biblical sanction, there are a lot of women with alerted breasts and, for the ladies' trade, some ten scenes in which a man is displayed "naked except for his loincloth." The characterization, generally perceptive, but never "difficult," is smooth and simplified enough to suggest A-budget movie casting. But Author Schmitt has managed to give her hero's miscellaneous career overall unity by using it to illustrate her chief idea: that so long as conscience survives, man learns not only from the good he tries to do but perhaps even more so from the evil he does.

Miss Schmitt claims to have written every sentence in her book no less than three times. At its ardent best, her style is hopeful and reverent, rather than adequate. Amidst such prose, an occasional direct quotation from Samuel I or II comes like the blow of a hammer through a cotton work glove.

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