Books: Cozy Higgledy-Piggledy

Cozy Higgledy-Piggledy

FARAWAY—J. B. Priestley—Harper.

As soon as Author Priestley’s readers learn that William Dursley’s study is “a cozy higgledy-piggledy” and that he plays a high-spirited gambit at chess, they will doubtless be better prepared than Author Priestley’s hero for what follows: a treasure hunt, for pitchblende, to Faraway Island via Manhattan, San Francisco, Tahiti. A transoceanic treasure hunt is a new sort of theme for Author Priestley but it is well suited to his fondness for sketching minor characters. Faraway is as full of them as a suburban telephone directory. William Dursley has three traveling companions: a retired naval officer who is curt and frosty; a bouncing, beaming Lancashireman named Ramsbottom; a U. S. girl of the type who “lets one down.” He is bothered by a mysterious South American named Garsuvin, by a chorus of wiggling Tahitian girls, by a Hollywood cinema producer, by a London tycoon who takes William Dursley on a tour of speakeasies and to a bicycle race. William Dursley falls in love twice: first with the U. S. girl who presently runs off with a cinema troupe in Tahiti, then with anEnglish widow who nurses him out of a fever caught while carousing shyly with the native girls.

No admirer of the U. S., Author Priestley contrives to have his hero bored by a Cincinnati Babbitt who remarks of his library of tourist literature: “I guess I’ve got the most complete one in the States.” More profound and more profitable than Author Priestley’s knowledge of U. S. idiom is his knowledge of how to give unreal characters an air of reality by letting them sit down in out-of-the-way places to chat about everyday matters like sex, communism, the cinema, debauchery, patriotism, honesty. The ramblings of Author Priestley’s invention are limitless. They make Faraway what one of Author Priestley’s seafaring men might call a “scrumdoolious” chronicle, even more higgledy-piggledy than the study which is still waiting for William Dursley after 450 pages of cozy adventuring.

Cherry Bosoms

THE LADY OF THE BOAT—Lady Murasaki—H oughton, Mifflin.

Artfullytranslated by Arthur Waley the first four parts of Lady Murasaki’s 900-year-old Japanese masterpiece, Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji, The Sacred Tree, The Wreath of Cloud, Blue Trousers), have given many an Occidental reader an appetite for the dainty psychological morsels of antique Nippon. With all its predecessors’ inimitable flavor, The Lady of the Boat tells a simple story, though its characters are modernistically complex.

The tale is of Kaoru and Niou, two princes of noble blood, and their affairs with Agemaki and Kozeri, Prince Hachi’s lovely daughters. Kaoru is an exceptional youth with such a natural fragrance that even at a distance people can smell his “hundred-step scent.” Niou, who carries no such natural musk, tries to emulate his friend by becoming an expert mixer of perfumes. But Niou’s personal life, dedicated to endless amours, is not so savory. Kaoru. with heavenly leanings, leaves women and the court alone.

In the course of his monkish aspirations Kaoru meets venerable Prince Hachi, who lives in retreat on his country estate. There they study heavenly philosophy together until the tinkling of a lute and a 13-stringed zithern behind the paper doors apprises Kaoru that there are daughters in the house. From that moment his elaborate ceremonial courtship, in which every little movement has a meaning of its own, begins. But it is only long after the death of Prince Hachi. who consigns his daughters to Kaoru’s guardianship, that he even sees the girls.

Kaoru desires Agemaki, but she wants no man. When he tries to consummate his love, she substitutes her sister in the bed. Shocked. Kaoru leaves Kozeri untouched, begins to see that he has been unfaithful to Prince Hachi’s trust. He determines to befriend the girls by marrying Kozeri off to his noble friend Niou. The gallant Niou succeeds in winning her, takes her off to court. But soon, for court reasons, he has to reduce her to concubinage. With her tragic disappointment the book ends. Though Niou “vowed to cherish her in this life and all lives to come . . . she could not help reflecting that, short as this present life is, he had already found time in it to break her heart once, and it was asking a good deal to expect that she should look forward to their union in a succession of future existences with any great sense of comfort or security.”

The Author. A lady as irreproachable in her own behavior as her characters were worldly, Lady Murasaki (Murasaki, no Shikibu) belonged to a junior branch of the Fujiwara family, married a kinsman, joined the court of the Empress Akiko when he died. The Genji Monogatari, in 54 books, was finished in 1004 or a little earlier. Tourists who visit the Lake Biwa Temple of Ishiyama can see what legend calls Lady Murasaki’s room and a scrap of the handwriting in which she composed the first Nipponese novel, some 700 years ahead of England’s Fielding.

Books of the Week

THE LONDON OMNIBUS—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). 1,400 pages of novels, stories, essays, plays, poems by A. P. Herbert (The Water Gypsies), Somerset Maugham (Rain), Virginia Woolf (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown). Noel Coward (Private Lives), Aldous Huxley (The Cicadas & Other Poems}. 13 other famed Londoners, reprinted from original plates, August choice of the Literary Guild.

FARAWAY—J. B. Priestley—Harper ($2.75).

HEAD TIDE—Joseph C. Lincoln— Appleton ($2.50). Cape Cod in 1870.

THE INDIFFERENT ONES—Alberto Moravia — Dutton ($2.50). Witty tragedy by a young Italian who has studied Aldous Huxley.

BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD— J. W. N. Sullivan—Knopf ($2.50). Brief and intelligent autobiography by a London scientist and music critic.