Books: Mystical Mysteries

THE GREAT FOG—H. F. Heard—Vanguard ($2.50).

An antarctic explorer one day found himself in a lush, green valley near the South Pole (volcanic heat kept it warm). The valley was inhabited by civilized, seven-foot-tall penguins who lived in a “Penguinry” of neat stone houses. The grave “chairbird” of the penguin parliament waved his flipper at the explorer. A choir of tuneful penguins rippled off “fluting sounds” of welcome that reminded the explorer of the clarinet works of Johannes Brahms. One smart penguin soon learned to speak a sort of penguin-English. “Being a bird,” he clacked, “of course I think we are the form in which Life is best expressed.” The explorer soon came to realize that this was no mere “bird-fancy.” For the penguins devoted their lives to developing (with the help of cosmic rays) mystically minded super-penguins and super-seals who were in tune with the infinite.

Most of the eight short stories in The Great Fog are as weird as this one. Bearded, erudite Author Henry Fitzgerald Heard is a masterly exponent of the Doylian detective story and the Wellsian, pseudoscientific fantasy. Writing under the name of Gerald Heard, he is also a distinguished British mystic (Pain, Sex and Time; The Ascent of Humanity}.

Like his penguins, anti-Darwinist Gerald Heard believes that the meek do indeed inherit the earth, and that the strong end up as fossils. He also believes that men might live as harmoniously as his penguins if they would learn to contemplate like Quakers and to aspire to extrasensory experience like Brahmin Yogis. Since 1937, Expatriate Heard has been expounding these doctrines from a home in Laguna Beach. Calif.

The Great Fog displays Author Heard in both guises. As H.F. he makes the flesh creep; as Gerald in disguise he makes the conscience crawl. A few of the stories are straight mysteries and scientific thrillers, in which the principal elements are a woman’s ear, a Siamese cat, a crayfish, a fog which covers the whole world. The other stories are trial balloons inflated by Gerald. They involve an eerie Gothic cathedral, with a mystic message for those who know how to find it ; an English spinster who is saved from suicide by tooth ache and theosophy; a couple of professors who wonder if they can exchange bodies simply by willing it. (They can.) But the nicest concurrence of the two Heards comes in the subtle, uncanny Rousing of Mr. Bradegar, the story of a simple dream. The dreamer may be 1 ) a man lying in bed and recalling his boyhood, 2) a boy lying in his crib and envisioning his manhood, 3) a corpse in its shroud looking back on its earthly days as man and boy, or 4) some “timeless” mixture of all three at once. Mystical Gerald Heard would probably plump for No. 4.

Mystery-Man H. F. Heard leaves it to the reader.