This Other Eden

THERE'LL ALWAYS BE A DRAYNEFLETE (70 pp.) -- Osbert Lancaster -- Houghton Mifflin ($2.25).

The town of Drayneflete is not to be found on the usual maps of Britain for the very good reason that Osbert Lancaster made it up. To British Cartoonist Lancaster, nonetheless, Drayneflete (on the "limpid Drayne") is like so many real English towns that it might as well stand for the average. In a series of witty drawings tracing its development from Roman times to the present, Lancaster shows just how it got to look the way it does, and how it may look when the town-planning bugs get through with it.

Lancaster, a gnomish dandy who looks at the world across one of the most magnificent pair of mustachios still in private hands, sees the history of Drayneflete as a steady upward climb until it reaches the 18th Century. From then on, esthetic disaster follows esthetic disaster until the stage is set for the final horror: the Drayneflete of Tomorrow.

Lovely Shelmerdine. One horrible example of Drayneflete's decline & fall is the little Gothic lodge built by the second Earl of Littlehampton on the outskirts of town, about 1800, to house the noble lord's friend, the poet Jeremy Tipple. At first a pretty little country house, the building becomes in turn a town house crowded by a garish gin palace and a draper's shop, a mason's workshop, and finally--in the Drayneflete Plan--a pickled historical monument ornamenting a main traffic artery.

Cartoonist Lancaster's sprightly, prattling text is as amusing as his drawings. As a whole it is a parody of the fly-blown local guide (revised edition, 1910), which is all that the tourist is sure to find in the average British town bookshop. It also unobtrusively manages to deliver a great deal of shrewd literary and social satire. The reader who follows the career of the Figet (or Fidget) family from the days of 15th Century Master Humfrey Figet down to the gayer days of the lovely Shelmerdine Parsley-Ffidgett (who was painted in the buff by Modigliani and drowned bathing at Cap d'Antibes one midnight) will know pretty well all there is to know about the average Whig county family.

Fiery Tipple. The history of the family of Lord Littlehampton's friend, Poet Jeremy Tipple, is also a compact history of British literary taste. It ends on a magnificently acid note with an account of the devoted leftist, Bill Tipple, a conscientious objector in the late war until the German invasion of Russia jolted him into joining the Drayneflete section of the National Fire Service. Bill Tipple is currently organizing secretary of the World Congress of International Poets in Defense of Peace.

The drawings that illustrate these anecdotes and parodies come just as close to the mark as the architectural drawings which form the backbone of the book. The illustration of one of the innumerable civic ceremonies graced by Edward VII as Prince of Wales says just about all there is to be said about such aspects of British municipal life, and the family group at Fidget Priory on Christmas 1907 is the last word on the English country house party in its heyday.

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