Books: Fading Embers

THE SILVER BACCHANAL (305 pp )Rene F৙ü;p-Miller—Atheneum ($4.50). Somewhere, some time, in southeastern Europe, the remnants of a beaten army shuffle into the city of Drohitz there to regroup before facing an unidentified enemy once more. These are the same weary, mud-stained troops who fought a hopeless battle for a useless hill in Allegorist F৙ü;p-Miller’s The Night of Time, May 9, 1955); and to them Drohitz is something more than a well-fed peasant town. It is the focus of their tront-lme dreams, a city of dazzling peacetime riches, of sunny, soft-bodied girls strolling along the Corso. In entering Drohitz. exults Gravedigger Adam Ember of the army’s medical corps “we belonged to life once more.” Dead Wrong. Ember, the passive tattered Everyman of both novels is dead wrong At first. Drohitz girls and Drohitz gilt shops make the troops royally wel come. City fathers entertain the officers at an orgiastic banquet that precedes a midnight trip to the Mashinka Drohitz’ spectacular red-light district. There less than 24 hours after the army’s arrival Embers commander and a prostitute called Black Narcissus die in agony from some unnamed disease.

The crisis changes the army from guest to Gestapo. The Mashinka is quarantined; a grimly comic campaign is organized to fight the disease. Drohitzers who might have been exposed are rounded up and lodged in the Silver Hall, the mirror-lined banquet room of the Mashinka’s most fashionable bordello. Confinement quickly erases the difference between whore and housewife, who come to share each other’s concerns: a prim matron tries a striptease, the prostitutes study cake recipes. Eventually quarantine proves ineffective. The infection rages through Drohitz and the surrounding countryside and Ember, promoted from subaltern to Commissioner of Deceased Persons, runs out both coffins and burial parties. At novel’s end the army marches off to another regrouping point, still expecting ‘ever new and more glorious victories.” The surviving Drohitzers are left in a defenseless city, a death trap for the advancing enemy.

Hollow Laughter. In The Night of Time, Author F৙ü;p-Miller, an encyclopedic, Hungarian-born historian who teaches sociology at Manhattan’s Hunter College, produced a soberly symbolic essay on the fatuity of war. Wider in scope, The Silver Bacchanal reveals man as an Absurd Animal, torn between hope and despair, ideal love and an insatiable lust. F৙ü;p-Miller’s instrument of dissection is irony, e.g., the army’s bureaucratic campaign against disease-carrying houseflies, in which the city is divided into sectors manned by bumbling brigades of swatters. But the laughter evoked is hollow; the comedy is as cheerless as the triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch.

Written originally in German, Bacchanal is afflicted with a left-footed translation.

It also suffers from F৙ü;p-Miller’s one-dimensional characterization: across a symbolic landscape, only sardonic Adam Ember (Hungarian for “man”‘) plods with recognizably human gait. But despite such weaknesses, The Silver Bacchanal is genuinely disturbing as a brutish vision of the dark cravings that often lurk beneath the thin texture of civilization.