Africrescendo*

Mr. Powys as a Mumbo-Jumbo-Brummel

This book takes no text; it employs no plot to give it body, no characters to give it blood and spirit. Its subject is the continent of Africa; and its strangeness proves once more the truth of an ancient apothegm concerning truth and fiction. Written in the manner of a novel and cast in the pattern of a travelogue, it belongs to that obscure hinterland of literature that W. H. Hudson visited in Green Mansions and Defoe, to a certain extent, in Robinson Crusoe.

Africa is a harsh nursery for receptive natures. The author had to reconcile his to the task of keeping in order some sheep and some natives-- a task which included counting, shearing, earmarking, castrating the former ; humoring, doctoring, whipping, burying the latter. This was itself taxing for a young and literary Englishman-- a Beau Brummel in khaki pants and red shirt, exiled from home because of ill-health. There were compensating novelties. For instance, on the night of his arrival he lay shivering through the white hours in a disused woodshed while a lion drank from a reservoir outside his door; later, he put down a native riot, shot a hippopotamus, trapped a lion, was hoodooed by a witch-doctor, barely escaped being trampled by a herd of wild elephants.

At another time Mr. Powys had accused an African "Man of God" of stealing goats and had been heartily cursed in return. That night, as he lay in the dark, he heard a ghastly laugh, he writes, "long and loud, whining and wailing up from the forest, up from the gully, so I judged. I tried to reassure myself. Surely it was the howl of a hyena feasting on the remains of the dead buck? But even as my mind was suggesting this, my subconscious self knew that it lied. That criminal human outcry, it could issue from no animal throat. . . . Somewhere out where the hispid branches swayed, I know there was a man with white canine teeth giving vent to BLACK LAUGHTER! ... A long time passed . . . then gradually I began to realize that the room had become filled with an extraordinary odor, an odor of putrifying blood and rotting flesh, the odor and breath of a hyena." When day comes he looks out and sees "stamped in the dust of the threshold, two indents-- one the footprint of a man; and the other the padded dog's spoor of an erect hyena. I knelt and examined them both closely. There was no mistake about it. One foot was a foot with toes; the other a foot with claws!"

Such experiences as this have a novel ring, but they are not totally unfamiliar ; others have undergone them, written about them, cinematized them.

The difference between these people and Mr. Powys lies in the fact that the latter is an artist. His book is in formed with the spirit of Africa as with a sensible presence, is haunted with the shadow of that jungle in whose twilight incredible beasts wage their truceless wars and come down by night to drink from the river-pools under the swinging constellations of the Cross-- constellations that see, here and there, man's fugitive campfires, how dwarfed in that illimitable waste! Reading, one can almost detect an odor, acrid, animal, exciting --the smell of Africa.

The Significance. It is in this quality of primitive reality that the book is original and profound. Questions are always being subtly provoked that are easy enough to answer at a dinner table within hearing of a hotel orchestra--not so easy when one can catch far off, as it were, the challenge of the ageless cataracts of life and death thundering forever in the dark places of the world. In one passage, Mr, Powys recounts talking with a Kikuyu who asked him solemnly if he were aware that elephants had once been men: "He looked so serious when he asked the question that, on my soul, I was half inclined to believe him. I tell you in that darkening forest with the rustling of the tropical leaves about me and the indefinable stir of the oncoming night audible everywhere, it seemed more than possible that I was about to hear the authentic story of the origin of man." This may serve to illustrate, in a small measure, the eerie quality of a book that bids fair to do what W. H. Hudson's work has done for South America--include another Continent in the Empire of English Letters.

The Author. In 1914, Llewelyn Powys went to Africa, where his brother had a farm, to avoid dying of consumption in England. He returned in 1920, published Ebony and Ivory, which won him instant recognition. Now he lives in New York.

* BLACK LAUGHTER-Llewelyn Powys--Hareourt, Brace ($2.50).