The Peripatetic Reviewer

When I first visited MARY LAVIN at Bective in County Meath, she and her attractive auburn-haired husband were living in the back quarters of the big country estate for which William acted as lawyer and overseer. They met me at the Dublin airport, and as we drove down the country lanes through the silver July dusk, Mary told me the story of the Mount of Tara, the ancient stronghold of the Irish kings, now a bare, sloping hilltop we could see under the crescent moon. Next day as we talked about her writing, she showed me the site on the curving bank of the River Boyne where their white Irish cottage would soon be building.

On our return the following year, my wife accompanied me, and now the cottage was threequarters complete, enough of it warm and secure beneath the blue tile root to house William and the little girls, with a cozy living room where we all had tea. Eudora Welty held come over from England with us; she and Mary had been drawn together by their stories, and their sympathetic interchange in Mary’s new house, so filled with hope, was tonic for them both. To me, Mary spoke confidently of having the morning hours to herself in the autumn when the baby would be in her crib and the older girls at school. But her manuscripts were scarce in the months that followed, and I gathered that she was making no headway with the new novel.

On my third visit to Bective, I came up to the cottage in waders after some early futile casts at the brown-tin led Boyne, where salmon were showing but not taking. Mary greeted me: William, she said, had been nominated for the Dail, and if his health would permit, he would soon begin campaigning; now he was upstairs abed with a troublesome cough. She spoke reassuringly of what the doctors had said, but I was never to see that gay spirit again, and his sudden death a fortnight later left Mary with the farm to run, the children to educate, the cooking and housekeeping — and what time left to write? Two years ago her writing was resumed, and m the preface to her new volume, SELECTED STOUIES (Macmillan. S3.95). she has some purposeful things to say to other women whose art has been deferred: “All my writing life, over twenty years now, the actual writing down of stories has been done in snatches of time filched from other duties, and particularly of late years when I have had to run the farm from which we get our livelihood. . . .

“I believe that the things that took up my time, and even used up creative energy that might have gone into writing, have served me well. They imposed a. selectivity that 1 might not otherwise have been strong enough to impose upon my often feverish, overfertile imagination. So il my life has set limits to my writing I am glad of it. I do not get a chance to write more stories than I ought; or put more into them than ought to be there.

there. “But how much is that? I think I begin to know. I even wish that I could break up the two long novels I have published into the few short stories they ought to have been in the first place, for in spite of the fact that I may write other novels, I feel that it is in the short story that a writer distills the essence of his thought, I believe this because the short story, shape as well as matter, is determined by the writer ‘s own character. Both are one. Short-story writing — lor me is only looking closer than normal into the human heart. self-analysis. Like Lord

That is an accurate self-analysis. Like Lord Dunsany, who first encouraged her, like her friend Eudora Welty, like Katherine Mansfield. Mary Lavin does her best work in the short form. Her stories arc skillfully inclusive; she keeps them clearly focused in the bright light of the present the reading of a will, the reminiscence of an old fiddler — and then by weaving the shuttle of time back and forth she involves us in a hungry love or a heart’s despair of a lifetime. In “At Sallygap,” the most poignant story she has yet written, which ought to have been included in the new volume and which I am sorry to say was not, Mary controls the shuttle with consummate skill. In “The Little Prince,”the longest of the new pieces, she tries to compass too much time: this forty-year curiosity about a younger brother who has disappeared in America moves unhappily from one implausibility to another.

The author is at her best when she writes about the rebel, the one against the group and that one the tenderhearted, the lone voice of feeling oppressed by the hardheaded, the practical, and the mercenary. “The Will.”the lead in her Selected Stories. is a thing of beauty, and Lallv’s rebellion against her family is touched with poetry and is so valiant that one can only read with pity. In “Assigh,”the captivity of a daughter by her father and his denial of a love that cannot be subdued are surely and beautifully disclosed. And in “Posy.”as in “Sallygap.”there is the might-havebeen to add its magic to the dreariest of lives. Death is ever present in Mrs. bavin’s books, and it overcasts some of them with almost monotonous melancholy. But when she sees most clearly and feels most deeply, these stories of the long feud, of the starved affection, of the Cinderella daughter, of the Irish son who never quite dared these tragedies so symbolic of Ireland’s plight — are authentic and haunting and masterful.

The legend of a child who was rescued and nurtured by wild animals and who lived with his foster parents, generally wolves, with understanding, is as old as the hills. Kipling dramatized it with his superb portrait of Mowgli in the jungle books, and Arnold Gesell again demonstrated the possibility in his study of the Wolf Child. Now comes a new variation of this theme in the novel, THE LION, by JosEPH KESSEL (Knopf, $3.75), a book translated from the French by Peter Green and selected for the Book-of-the-Month Glub. This is a theatrical story placed against the theatrical background of Kilimanjaro. John Bullit, the game warden of the National Park in Kenya, and his daughter. Patricia, rescue a two-day-old lion cub, no bigger than two fists, which had been abandoned. With bottle feeding and tender care, they raise him as a family pel: they call him King; they teach him games as they would any intelligent dog; and by the time he is fully grown and ready for release, he and Patricia have attained a brother-sister relationship; well, almost. They have daily meetings at King’s lair; they wrestle without Patricia’s ever feeling a scratch; and their understanding is such that at her command King will subdue his natural suspicion of white man and native.

Patricia’s mother is naturally somewhat apprehensive about these daily rendezvous, which usually occur at dusk after King has eaten (I thought lions had a rather formidable smell after they had made their kill?), and Mrs. Bullit would like to break up the affair by sending her daughter to a finishing school, but Patricia “dissolved worry and perplexity by a kind of soothing hypnotic magic.”Things run along without too much friction until a wandering tribe of Masai cross the reserve. Among the warriors there is one very striking morane. a glamour boy with an elaborate hairdo and an accurate spear; and long, long before it happens, the reader has the telegram that he and King are going to tangle and that when they do Patricia will be upset. Well, there it is. You can take it with or without salt, and personally I don’t believe a word of it.

Among the several discrepancies there is the question of Patricia’s age. The story is narrated by a rather goofy tourist who has conic to Kenya to see if he too can live unarmed and on speaking terms among the great herds, and when he first sees Patricia, a slender figure in gray overalls, “smile, stance, even the poise of her neck now quickened into seductively feminine warmth,” he realizes that he is dealing with a “child of about twelve.”But when he has his first cup of tea with Mrs. Bullii, she shows him the picture of the chapel in which she and her husband were married just ten years earlier. By inference — since nothing is said about her being born out of wedlock — this cuts Patricia to nine. With no knowledge whatever of Kenya but something of little girls. I venture to doubt that any nine-year-old ever exerted the authority and hypnotism with which Patricia is credited in this dubious story.

An American Marine who rose to be a company commander and who was wounded at the assault on Iwo jima. ROBERT ASPREY at the war’s end returned to the University of Iowa. A Fulbright took him to New College, Oxford, and thereafter he moved into the American Army Intelligence in Salzburg. Austria, where with his mastery of German and his interest in espionage he found himsell absorbed in the extraordinary case of Alfred Redl. In 1913 Colonel Redl was deputy chief of the Intelligence Bureau in Vienna, an officer of thirty-two years’ standing, honored by Emperor Francis Joseph and regarded by his superiors as the best counterintelligence officer in the dual monarchy. On May 25 of that year he committed suicide when it was discovered by the German headquarters that he was in the pay of the Russians, to whom he had systematically betrayed the war plans and innermost secrets of the high command.

In THE PANTHER’S FEAST (Putnam, $5.00) Robert Asprey tells the unvarnished, engrossing story of Colonel Redl’s rise and fall; it is a biography based upon the documents and research which the author secured while attending the University of Vienna in 1955-1956. Some of the documents in the scandal had been burned at the end of World War I, but the author found retired intelligence officers who remembered their contents, and by some lucky poking into other archives he produced the official records of five espionage cases in which Redl was deeply involved. He also ran to earth the Colonel’s male paramour, Stefan, for it was Redl’s homosexuality, indulged in when he was a junior officer in the dreary outposts, that forced him into debt and thence into treachery. This book reads like a novel, but a novel of whose authenticity there can be little question. I like it for its picture of Vienna in its heyday, for its account of advancement in the imperial staff, and most of all for its devious and explicit explanation of how a mastermind betrayed himself.

I once asked my cousin, Dr. Alice Hamilton, who of all our immigrants were the swiftest to adapt themselves to American life, and she replied unhesitatingly the Island Greeks, LION AT MY HEART by HARRY MARK PKTKXMS (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $3.95) is a strong-willed and passionate story of a Greek-American family and of the storms they go through in the process of taking root in Chicago. Angelo Varinakis is the Lion: a gusty, impulsive steelworker imbued with his love ol Greece, exultant in the leadership he has forged for himself in the new land, and set in his ways. The Lion is proud of his two sons Mike, who has inherited his strength and who works beside him in the steel mill, and Tony, the tenderhearted, who is studying to be a teacher. But when Mike falls in love with Sheila, who is as Irish as she is redheaded, and determines to marry her, the bond is broken and the story begins in earnest.

Mr. Petrakis writes feelingly of the Greek colony, their wild dances, their feasts of wine and roast lamb, their outspoken priests, their loyalties, and their feuds. As his name suggests, the author has sprung from just such a clan. His father was a Greek Orthodox minister who had his first parish in Utah, in a coal-mining community where young Greek immigrants worked the mines. This is the wellspring of a book which is warmhearted and clear and appealing in its characterization.