Books: Arthurian Cocktail

THE WITCH IN THE WOOD—T. H. White—Putnam ($2.50).

This book is a sequel to The Sword in the Stone, shows faintbrained, sweet-natured King Arthur confronted with the first problems of his position: how, with horn-rimmed Merlyn’s help, to defeat rebellious kings; how to enlist Might in the cause of Right. Half-fantasy, half-burlesque, like its predecessor it mixes wisecracks and Morte d’Arthur, scrambles legend and topical satire. While her husband King Lot is away fighting Arthur, Queen Morgause, comic symbol of the egocentric wife, attempts the seduction of lovesick King Pellinore (3.2 Don Quixote) and Sir Grummore Grummursum (Sancho Panza on rye). Meanwhile her neglected sons Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris and Gareth confound their Saracen tutor Palomides, who talks rather like Charlie Chan, and beg stories from heretic St. Torealvac (parody brogue), who inhabits a beehive and drinks mountain dew.

T. H. White’s well-timed, wild dialogues are suggestive of the better (not the best) comic strips. His Freudian overtones and contemporary analogies make the book “profound,” in the publisher’s opinion, as well as “funny.” There is an ice carnival, a burlesque of chivalry complete with pratt falls; there is an affecting and terrible sequence, in somewhat doubtful taste, about a unicorn. The book as a whole might be described as a shake-up of British rectory humor, Evelyn Waugh, Laurel & Hardy, John Erskine, and the Marquis de Sade, quite well enough blended to please the palate of Sword-in-the-Stone partisans, to assure its author definite standing among such cult men as A. P. Herbert, P. G. Wodehouse, Lewis Carroll.