Freedom from Thought

THE BACKWARD BRIDE (180 pp.)--Aubrey Menen--Scribner ($2.75).

Uncle Giorgio was the sagest bandit chieftain in Sicily and, as a man of rugged common sense, considerably disturbed about his favorite nephew, Aquila. Palermo University had turned the poor boy into an intellectual. In particular, Aquila had gone overboard for the doctrines in the books of Oxford's Professor Lissom, the great advocate of free love and flexible philosophy. Clearly, the boy's only hope was his beautiful, semiliterate fiancee, Anisetta, who had a down-to-earth determination to marry Aquila and start having twelve children right away.

Uncle Giorgio thought that Anisetta was going to do a lot for the boy, but he didn't rely altogether on her simplicity and good looks to bring Aquila to his senses. When they got married, Giorgio presented them with all the forged money and papers needed for a trip to England and escorted them off to let Aquila meet the great Professor Lissom in person.

"Back Tuesday." When they got to Oxford, the professor was delighted. For Aquila, he arranged a series of instructive meetings with progressive people that kept the young man fully occupied. For Anisetta and himself, the professor set up a cozy week in the country. Before she went off, Anisetta wrote a note that she thought would surely bring Aquila in pursuit, cure him of being progressive once & for all: "Have gone to live in sin for a week with Professor Lissom, back Tuesday lunch--your loving wife A." Uncle Giorgio thought the note would be enough, too, but it wasn't. After all, jealousy was bourgeois and old hat, and no true progressive would deny his wife her emotional and physical freedom. When he thought it over, Aquila was delighted to find that Anisetta was picking up modern behavior so fast.

Uncle Giorgio, Anisetta and Author Menen's fans have to go through a lot more before Aquila sees the light. After the professor comes a French existentialist count, after him a comic American from Ohio, and then a comic psychiatrist. Finally, to Uncle Giorgio's great relief, Aquila is stung into fighting a duel with another comic American--a Southerner, suh, that only a British writer could dream up--and the pair leap into each other's arms. The book ends two years later with Aquila hugging his wife and benignly watching baby shred up his books. The couple are settling down to true happiness securely based on freedom from thought.

South-Southeast. Half-Indian, half-Irish Author Menen's little parable is fair sport as far as it goes, but it is a comedown from his witty and pointed satirical novel about the British in India, The Prevalence of Witches (1948). The Backward Bride seems meant to be profound in a Shavian way when it is not trying to be like Norman Douglas' South Wind. It is as far from either model as it is from the double target roughly caricatured in the description of Professor Lissom. The professor is somewhere south-southeast of Philosopher Bertrand Russell and the plump Bloomsbury hedonist, C.E.M. Joad. All that fidgety Satirist Menen succeeds in doing in his jape is to remind the reader what neat debaters those two are.

The book does stir a mild interest with the problem of Anisetta's technique. She gets home to Aquila spotless. How does she get so much accommodation, food and mileage (a trip to Paris) out of her lovers without giving anything but motherwit dialectics in return? Chatty about everything else, Author Menen glides silently past this point.

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