Softer Answers

ALL MEN ARE ENEMIES--Richard Aldington--Donbleday, Doran ($2.50).

What people liked about Death of a Hero, Author Aldington's first job of fiction, was that the writer attacked his story with the malicious gusto of a man who was hopping mad. In Roads to Glory, The Colonel's Daughter, Soft Answers, the War-torn writer's spleen, his disgust with the England he loves too well, abated not a whit. If there is less bile in All Men Are Enemies, if it seems a bit less malicious than the previous Aldington novels, it is because it is longer (574 pp.), less direct, padded. Author Aldington is finding it increasingly difficult to pick off the remaining bowling pins of pre-War cant and hypocrisy, having already sent the bulk of them crashing oft the alley.

Like the charming Olympian passage in Ztileika Dobs on, a scene among the gods opens All Men Are Enemies, in which Aphrodite promises Antony Clarendon, just conceived, strong erotic powers. Ares gives him strength in battle. What the gods give they possibly conceal, for the average reader will not notice a superfluity of either amorousness or strength in Tony's character. Unlike most lengthy British character studies, the novel does not report the rigors of Tony's adolescent schooldays. He appears to have sprung full-born into a family in which the father deified Darwinian Science while the mother deified Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the midst of all the Edwardian amenities of an upperclass household, Tony came to the conclusion that neither his father nor mother was totally right or wrong, "but if you went to life with all your senses open, with your body as well as your mind, with your own fresh feelings instead of abstract laid-down ones, then indeed all men were your enemies."

Sensuous Tony's first experiment in love-making was with his more mature cousin Evelyn. In Paris, at 18, he thought he was in love with Margaret, a proper young hypocrite whom he kissed in the woods beyond St. Cloud. His mother's sudden death in a carriage accident put an end to that affair for a while. Then he went to Italy, where his tourist impressions were noted with great care, and finally to the Mediterranean island of Aeaea, "twelve hours from Naples," which is mythical. Mythical or not, there he met Katharina, "Katha" for short, and not much later they were swimming naked in the blue Mediterranean. They planned to live together in London. She was to come to him there August 10--1914.

Katha never got to London, and there was a five-year nightmare before Tony could get to Vienna. Letters between them had gone astray. The lovers were lost. So Tony came back and married Margaret because she desperately wanted to and he was suffering from "delayed shock." Not for 13 years did Tony see Katha. By 1927 he had given up his business, had begun wandering round the Continent. At Aeaea they met. Katha was thinner. She had been scrubbing floors in a Vienna department store. Poverty had even pawned her body a few times. She could no longer have a baby. But Tony and Katha were together again.

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