Books: Novelist in Rome

ROMAN FOUNTAIN—Hugh H/o/po/e—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

A novelist who can swim skillfully in imaginary worlds, Hugh Walpole was hired by the Hearst press to eyewitness the funeral of Pope Pius XI and the election of Pope Pius XII. Roman Fountain is a reflective record of this experience.

Thirty years before, the novelist had visited Rome as a poor but haughty young man, had met a moist old character who took him to see an obscure but radiantly beautiful fountain. Ostensible theme of his book is his skeptical wish to see that fountain again. Actually it is a profounder search for a profounder fountain.

Effortlessly the ghosts of reminiscence live again; the plane drops down with misted windows through the clouds; the tired novelist settles in his hotel room; the telephone rings.

“My heart beat. My hand shook a little. Suppose that he were one of those sharp, kindly-savage Americans who bark like dogs, sit in their shirt sleeves, curse and swear, chew the damp stubs of cigars.” It is, however, only Alfred Noyes. But the novelist’s journalistic boss turns up soon enough, steers him around to see the Pope lying in state, coaches him on how to open his articles with a bang.

Walpole’s descriptions of the great, gradually darkened funeral in St. Peter’s and the scenes of mass Medievalism at the proclamation and crowning of the new Pope seem partly a revulsion from those articles he opened with a bang. At any rate they show what he, whom Henry James befriended long ago, can do when he tries. In between ceremonies he visits the Papal Observatory, Castel Gandolfo and the grave of Keats, muses about Michelangelo. The scarcely-hoped-for election of Cardinal Pacelli, that saintly cleric, assures him that a spiritual fountain is still there.

Just when a reader becomes convinced that Hugh Walpole is a feathery, confiding, complacent man of letters, he begins to write like a great writer. Just when a reader begins to think Walpole really is a great writer, he becomes feathery, confiding. So Roman Fountain is pleasantly interesting and possibly wise.