City That Never Was

THE YEARS OF THE CITY (567 pp.)--George R. Stewart--Houghton Mifflin ($4.50).

At the founding of Phrax, the soothsayer predicted that the city would live through more than nine human generations. As soothsayers go, he was pretty accurate: it lived some 200 years before enemies stormed it and set it afire. By then, decayed old Phrax, the vigor of its youth and the wealth of its maturity gone, was ripe for death.

The chronicler of Phrax's growth, greatness, decline and fall is both a professor (English, University of California) and a novelist (Storm, Fire), and his chronicle is a work of scholarship as well as a novel. The sets, costumes and psychologies are as authentic as Professor George R. Stewart could make them. But Phrax is imaginary, a city that might have been, but never was. "It is Greek--yes," says Author Stewart in his foreword. "But do not turn to the atlas . . . Do not consider too deeply what century."

Imaginary, too, are the Phragians whom Stewart uses to illustrate the city's neatly Spenglerian life cycle. Archias arrives with the first settlers as a boy stowaway. Ragged and kinless, he carries on his forehead the scar of a cut made as an identification mark during the sack of his unknown native city. Grown prosperous and middle-aged in the hilltop village of Phrax, he fathers Bion, who appears later in the chronicle as a sturdy citizen of a city that is still raw but has years of greatness ahead. Bion's son Callias, heir to wealth, enters as an aging and slightly effete scholar. Callias' son Diothemis totters onstage as a feeble and impoverished ancient, the oldest man in Phrax. He dies on the city's last day, but his little grandson survives, an identification mark cut on his forehead.

The excessive neatness of the full circle from cut forehead to cut forehead is characteristic of The Years of the City. Right down to the pat A, B, C, D of the main characters' names, Author Stewart built his massive book with a professorial care that helps make up for his defects as a novelist. His descriptions are sometimes gravelly with detail, and his style is sometimes thorny, but his tale of a city that never was can teach readers a lot about the cities that really were--and the cities that are. "When we read the story of the development of one city," asks Bion's son Callias, "do we not read the story of all?"

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