FICTION: Mystic in Mexico

THE PLUMED SERPENT—D. H. Lawrence—Knopf ($3). Here lies Mexico, a sullen nation of black obsidian, brooding beneath a cruel sun. Christ hangs dead upon his cross and the name of Mary is a sterile myth in dusty shrines. By night, among the peons, the old gods stir, the Aztec gods. Quetzalcoatl, the bird-snake, is come again from “the cave which is called the Dark Eye, behind the sun,” where the waters rise and the winds are borne on the waters of the afterlife. Through hia priests he brings a new manhood and womanhood, to be entered by night at hushed circles where a drum is beaten and the men sit naked to the waist chanting inward liturgies.

It is a strange, compelling state of affairs rather than a story, based largely on actual spiritual phenomena in Mexico today, where Mr. Lawrence spent long months before climbing to a remote New Mexico mountain to write in bearded solitude. The pages are full of that Laurentian physico-mysticism, that preoccupation with endodermal emanations, the abdominal brain and sex pyschology, that moves many profoundly, puzzles others, and revolts the squeamish. The main characters are three: Kate Leslie, a sensitive Irish widow who has fulfilled her young womanhood and egotistically put it behind her; Don Ramon, Quetzalcoatl’s triumphantly masculine semi-Indian high priest; and Don Cipriano, “a little fighting male” of European extraction, to whom Kate submits the new womanhood derived from Ramon’s revelation.