Short Notices

A SEVERED HEAD, by Iris Murdoch (248 pp.; Viking; $3.95), leaves little doubt that adultery would be even more popular than it is but for the fact that it involves a more exacting set of rules than marriage itself. Oxford Philosophy Don Iris Murdoch has written a novel about adultery so complex and involuted as to suggest an anthropologist's chart of the mating patterns of a tribe at once polygamous and polyandrous. Among the wholly amoral cast of characters: Martin Lynch-Gibbon, an elegant but asthmatic London wine merchant, who is also the novel's narrator; his blonde wife Antonia; his black-haired mistress, Georgie; their joint analyst, Anderson Palmer, a smooth, prosperous Freudian who, despite a "big white American smile," is also something of a warlock and misleads both women from couch to bed; Palmer's sister, Dr. Honor Klein, a notable witch and anthropologist given to fingering a samurai sword while talking of herself as a severed head (see Freud on Medusa, a character hopefully prompts the reader). Lynch-Gibbon, a glutton for grief, is, of course, transfixed by this menacing Gorgon. By what black psychological thimbleriggery their union is achieved--despite innumerable obstacles of which incest appears to be the least--is too intricate to be described. A mythological key is provided on the novel's last page.

Author Murdoch's intelligence, both as critic and novelist (The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle), is above question. But this sophisticated shocker seems to have little point beyond the homely moral that those who think life would be simpler without moral rules are very simple indeed. Also, the great uncouched majority may well find food for the suspicion that--in some hands--psychiatry may involve demonological matters leading not to a liberation of the mind but to some thing closer to a witches' Sabbath.

A JOURNEY TO MATECUMBE, by Robert Lewis Taylor (424 pp.; Doubleday; $5.95), like the author's Pulitzer prize-winning Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, is a parody that echoes Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Basically, it is a stunt that may appeal to fanciers of literary ventriloquism. Like Tom Sawyer, Davey Burnie is an orphan with a pesky aunt who keeps scrubbing out his ears. Like Huck, Davey has a Negro pal, name of Commercial Appeal. Unfortunately. Commercial Appeal is killed in an early burst of Ku Klux Klan violence in Kentucky in the 1880s and cannot sail down the Mississippi with Davey. But down the Mississippi Davey does go, with his Uncle Jim, a cigar-smoking Civil War veteran and college man learned in the classic lore of "a number of deceased nuisances like Horace and Socrates and Pluto." Other passengers: Zeb, an old family detainer fond of saying "howsom-ever''; Dr. Ewing T. Snodgrass, an engaging purveyor of something called Distilled Essence of Spooju (43% alcohol, 57% swamp water), who strikingly resembles W. C. Fields; and the doctor's nubile daughter Millie.

The kind of minstrel humor this crew indulges in makes A Journey to Matecumbe seem like a floating company of Show Boat. For the rest, there is a whole passel of adventures--riverboat gamblers, Creole bar girls, a caddish impostor who has filched an entire plantation. Davey is beaten with a bull whip, stalked by Seminole Indians, and gets seasick from Natchez to Mobile. With all that. Author Taylor is not too tired to include plenty of "descripty passages.'' In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote a boy's book that fascinated adults; in Matecumbe, Author Taylor has written a book for adults that may possibly appeal to boys --except that they don't hardly make that kind of boy any more.

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