Man's Fealty

THOMAS by Shelley Mydans. 439 pdyes. Doubleday. $5.95.

Probably no man of the 12th century has had more meaning for intellectuals of the 20th than Thomas Becket. Hum bly born in London's Cheapside, Becket rose high in the world to become Chancellor of England under his fast friend and boon companion, King Henry II. Becket served his king by curbing the power of the lawless barons, and Henry then had him appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in order to curb the power of the clergy. Instead, Becket switched allegiance from King to God. His relevance for moderns is in his martyrdom and its unanswered questions: Where does a man's loyalty lie and, once pledged, does it require even the surrender of life?

Saxon Rebel. Poets from Tennyson to T. S. Eliot have struggled with the problem of Becket. In Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot maintained that "Christian martyrdom is no accident" but an act prearranged either by God or the doomed man. France's Jean Anouilh built his play Becket more on the love-hate relationship of the king and archbishop, but also claimed that Becket was a Saxon rebel against England's Norman overlords. To Poet Christopher Fry, in Curtmantle, King Henry was the tragic hero and focus of the play; Becket vanishes from sight after his murder in the second act.

Undaunted by the list of her great predecessors, Author Shelley Mydans, wife of Photographer Carl Mydans, again tells the story in this new book, subtitled "a novel of the life, passion and miracles of Becket." It is still a rousing tale, filled with pomp and circumstance, tumultuous with the hacking blades of knights in battle, and silken with conspiracies that range from London to Rome.

Ritual Murder. All of Becket's biographers have been borrowers, and Shelley Mydans is no exception. Through judicious, and admitted, dippings into Dr. Margaret Murray's books on medieval witchcraft, she throws a shadowy net of the supernatural around her story, suggesting that Henry II's great-uncle, King William Rufus, died in a ritual cabalistic murder in a sacred wood, and strongly hinting that Henry himself was doing the Devil's work as much as Becket was doing God's. Since Thomas is fiction, not history, Author Mydans need not apologize for her liberties. Nor for her writing, which is smooth when Becket walks in piety and muscular when he is routing the chivalry of France for his king.

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