Man Without a Country

DEAD MAN IN THE SILVER MARKET (203 pp.)--Aubrey Menen--Scribner ($3).

"Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble," lamented Job. But trouble fairly brims over when a man is born, as was Aubrey Menen, of an Irishwoman and a Hindu, is registered as a native Briton and educated like a true-born Englishman. Beset by so many distorting mirrors, such a man is bound to see the baffling jigsaw puzzle of his identity with either tears or laughter. Novelist Menen (The Prevalence of Witches, The Duke of Gallodoro) chooses laughter.

It is not the sort of hearty comedy that rolls 'em in the aisles, but a Deep Freeze mixture of the sardonic and the downright mean. Dead Man in the Silver Market* is ostensibly an autobiographical treatise on what happens to patriotic ardor when it becomes decadent and jingo. But it reads more like a sharp essay by a man who has no country to be patriotic about.

The English, says Menen, did not shun or scorn the dark-skinned little boy who grew up among them. On the contrary, they tried their best to make him feel at home--and tried so hard that he felt just the opposite. Menen's schoolteachers assured him that, despite his Indian complexion, he was heir, "by virtue of my birth certificate," to all the wonderful inner characteristics that made Englishmen the most cultured, most advanced, most notable people in the world. They even argued that, despite his Indo-Irish parentage, he had, if he tried hard, an excellent chance of growing into an honest man.

In 1924, when Menen was twelve, he was summoned to India by his grandmother, a formidable, high-caste Hindu of Malabar, whose views were quite unlike his English teachers' but equally definite. She received him "formally," i.e., seated on the floor (she considered chairs unspeakably vulgar), with "her breasts completely bare." "A wife who dressed herself above the waist," she explained, "could only be aiming at adultery."

Grandma carried Menen's confusion a step further by explaining why no decent Hindu could want to become a Briton. The British were so foul and insensitive a race that they never bathed more than once a day, and thought nothing of actually sitting in their dirty bathwater. Lewdness and promiscuity they accounted virtues, for which reason they permitted their children to marry only when they were long past the age of chastity. They were so shameless that instead of retiring to a dark corner to eat, they engorged grossly at a public table, where all & sundry might witness the repellent act of mastication. Nothing, concluded Grandma, could redeem Menen's Irish mother (to whom she always referred flatly as "the Englishwoman," much irking Mrs. Menen). but if Aubrey wanted to become a true son of Malabar and inherit the family wealth, it was not too late. He had only to quaff a goblet of sacred cow's urine and "the sad accident of being born in London" would be forgotten.

But poor young Menen could not down the "magic potion." Too Indian ever to be English, too much a John Bull to fancy sacred cows, Menen stumbled on into displaced maturity. Out of fairness, he made one effort to see if De Valera's Eire were perhaps his true homeland; but a tour of the country on which he was asked to admire 200 "crosses of white marble," each inscribed: A MARTYR TO BRITISH IMPERIALISM, turned him positively black & tan with irritation.

Menen now lives in a sunny villa near Naples, where no one, presumably, bothers to assure him that he is Indian, English, Irish or, indeed, anything but himself.' The remainder of his book is composed of scathing studies of British and Indian follies and foibles, and gibes at the intolerant, absurd dogma which racial smugness arouses in people of every race. Dead Man is coldly planned and excellently written, but it has one (characteristically English) weakness which takes much of the punch out of it. This is Author Me-nen's insistence that his hybrid self is a purely satirical and intellectual matter. Betraying suffering or pain, he evidently feels, would be as improper as being caught sitting in one's dirty bathwater.

* The title is drawn from an episode in which an Indian is killed by a British soldier in Old Delhi's silver market.

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