Not Really

HERE'S ENGLAND (378 pp.)--Ruth McKenney and Richard Bransten--Harper ($3.75).

The England of Ruth McKenney and her husband Richard Bransten is not unlike the Greenwich Village she described in My Sister Eileen--a place considerably more productive of mad fun and giggling fits than the real thing. The book is designed for the intending tourist, a figure Author McKenney seems to picture as a rather backward 14-year-old for whom things have to be put very, very simply, especially dull and difficult things like history.

Sometimes things get so simple that they stop being history. Brooding over the tomb of Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, in Gloucester's handsome cathedral, McKenney drops into a palsy-walsy reverie: "Poor old Robert. I have always wondered why they called him Curthose. Maybe his stockings kept slipping down, the way mine did in the sixth grade?" When dealing, with the world of here & now, Author McKenney drops into a dear-diary style more suggestive of Anita Loos's Lorelei Lee than of an ex-staff writer of the New Masses. "In fact, I think leaving debris around even in a place totally remote, is antisocial and swinish; people who throw sardine cans into babbling brooks . . . probably ought to be shot."

When all the twitterment is over, the patient reader will find that he has been sold the hoary old tourist round of cathedrals and castles, the Tower of London, and all. The only new thing McKenney has to offer is a minority opinion on cricket--a wonderful game, it seems, after all.

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