Books: Troy

A TROJAN ENDING—Laura Riding— Random House ($2.50).

Troy’s tale is one of the oldest stories in the world. It has been questioned, sifted, dug into by historians and archeologists, reconstructed by poets. Two epics (the Iliad and Odyssey) and a low hill in Turkey, within sight of the Dardanelles, are all that scholars and poets have had to go on. Laura Riding’s A Trojan Ending, not to be confused with such mere literary romances as John Erskine’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy, probes the dusty pile of Homeric legend with the findings of modern scholarship, discovers in it not a prehistoric frieze of barbarous “heroes” but a valuable prototype of the modern world.

“The story of Troy, now dispersed in mocking legend,” says Author Riding, “was the first tight knot that history made in time.” Whether or not her unraveling of that knot and its ensuing threads will please all masculine readers, it is an exploration of legend that turns up many a psychological find, pieces together many a broken sherd of human nature. Laura Riding does not tamper with the main outline of Troy’s well-known story. But she finds the clue to the Trojan War not in Paris’ seduction of Helen but in the opposing temperaments of the Greeks, whose civilization is on the make, and the Trojans, whose civilization is (in the best sense) finished. She makes her mouth piece-heroine a character unmentioned by Homer—Cressida, daughter of the Trojan’s Chief Priest of Apollo, ill-famed in literature (by Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare) as a heartless jilt. Chosen as a central character because her “legendary real” identity offers the widest freedom for creating a sensitive female observer, Laura Riding’s Cressida is not jilt but “almost in her time what woman may be in ours.” This Cressida does not leave her Trojan lover Troilus for a Greek lover, Diomedes; she chooses an unhappy life among the alien Greeks to carry on the vital idea of Troy.

Of the more than 100 characters who throng the story of Troy, Laura Riding does not so much deny the traditional estimate as sharpen it to a difference. Thus Helen, whose glamour is “like air and wind and leaves rather than flesh . . . is virtuous, but it is a virtue that will never be tested, and that is the reason it has become so legendary.” And Odysseus is classed with other “fortune-seekers, roving villains, shrewd impostors, remarkable nobodies of chance.” Heroes of A Trojan Ending are not the warriors but the women. They can do little to repair or avert the man-made damage, but their chorus of wisdom gives the action its meaning. Andromache, Cassandra, Helen, especially Cressida have things to say about men, women and life that will give many a man unsauced food for thought: “Women don’t exist for the purpose of making good men out of bad material or wise men out of foolish material. They exist, Cousin, for the purpose of making life real, making men real—for if there’s one thing a woman can’t endure it’s to be surrounded by phantoms . . . women know what men are, and. though men do not know it from themselves, they learn it from women. But women can learn nothing about themselves from men … it is not to grow bigger in places and people that the world goes on, but to refine in itself the few true places, the few true people—and the rest is dispersion, the becoming Nothing, the reaching Nowhere.”

The Author. Highly regarded by some critics, Manhattan-born (1901) Laura Riding has had few U. S. readers, who consider her poetry mostly unintelligible, only partially understand her prose. But in A Trojan Ending her first prose work of wide common popular appeal, readers will find an exciting flavor, much to make them sit up and ask for more. Driven from her home in Mallorca a year ago by the Spanish civil war, Laura Riding is now living temporarily in England, has just finished revising her collected poems, to be published in the U. S. shortly.