Many a Mugful

FRANCOIS VILLON, A Documented Survey-- D. B. Wyndham Lewis--Coward-McCann, Edwin V. Mitchell ($5.00). Chosen by the Literary Guild for September, 1928.

Hard it is to look at a Gothic building without a romanticizing ophthalmia, harder still to consider a Gothic personage. Francois Villon is generally conceived to have been a frisking, lyrical scapegrace, much in the manner of John Barrymore's cinema portrayal of The Beloved Rogue, an essentially harmless, buoyant, inspired fellow.* The just biographer must be proof against the delusive magic of medieval names and picaresque histories.

The Man. Villon spoke the jargon of the Coquillards, a medieval freemasonry of blackguards who systematically plundered, lechered, toped throughout France. He wrote vigorous verses, high poetry. Behind these two varying expressions was a weathercock temperament. Born in 1431, he was raised from the age of seven in the home of a benign Parisian priest. Francois took both the bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Paris. One midnight, when the priest had gone to bed, the student crept out the door, made his way to the Pomme de Pin. There he swilled many a mugful. With him were 3 young picklock and a less specialized, more versatile scoundrel. After that day's dawn, Villon's spare hours were habitually ill-spent. At the age of 24 he killed a man in a mysterious brawl. He devised elaborate tricks for the theft of rich provender and wines (after his death the noun Villonerie was common parlance for clever ruses). The raucous trulls at Fat Margot's knew him well. The haughtier but hardly more discriminate Katherine de Vausselles flippantly ignored his lust for her when he could no longer buy pretty trinkets. To forget this voluptuous witch he decided to leave Paris. But beforehand, with three others, he burglarized the College of Navarre, a rich haul, which made departure necessary.

For four years he wandered through southern France, now poetizing for his connoisseur-host, Charles of Orleans, in the chateau at Blois, now sleeping in haystacks, once sentenced to death at Orleans. Always he pursued women, stole at a whim, strained at a bottomless tankard. And always he was freed from the dungeons (often by the services of the influential priest whom he called "my more than father"). Back in Paris, at the age of 31, he faced the gibbet of Montfaucon for a second time, was again liberated, sentenced to ten years' exile. With a farewell to his impoverished mother, whom he continually tried to comfort, he vanished from the city and from history.

The Significance. Author Lewis's Villon is not wax, nor is his fifteenth century Paris papier mache. Himself a man of energy, contemptuous of hot-house estheticism (which he flays in his Dedication and Preface, not the least stimulating portions of the book), he presents a three-dimensional, unsentimental Villon, a sensual idler and criminal, weak, mercurial, but possessed of four stable virtues-faith, patriotism, filial love, gratitude. Somewhere this man's tortured, gusty spirit was luminous with great poetry.

The Author. Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis arrived in the U. S. last week, was greeted and dined by Manhattan writer-folk. He is of Welsh-Irish ancestry, lives in St. Germain outside Paris, sends a regular column of comment to the London Daily Mail. He is an authoritative medievalist, a tireless scholar who disclaims his labors in his disdain for watery-veined pedants. He hates the "arty." His distant cousin is the more-famed Wyndham Lewis, vorticist, painter, novelist (Tarr), philosopher (Time and Western Man), a versatile, experimental da Vinci of the modern art world. Both are World War veterans, who combine literary enthusiasm with active lives.

*Francois Villon was also made popular in a recent operetta The Vagabond King; with Dennis King as Hero. The musical play was based on a famed portrayal of Villon's life, If I Were King, by Justin Huntly McCarthy in which Edward H. Sothern thrilled Manhattan during 1901, 1908, and 1916. In this opus the poet is represented making a bargain with Louis XI, King of France, whereby they exchange places for a short period. There is no historical basis for this romantic situation, which stimulated Playwright McCarthy's famed poem:

If I were king--ah love, if I were king--What tributary nations would I bring To stoop before your sceptre and to swear Allegiance to your lips and eyes and hair, Beneath your feet what treasures I would fling--The stars should be your pearls upon a string, The world a ruby for your finger ring And you should have the sun and moon to wear If I were king.