Lutetian Lupercalia

THE BEAUTIES AND FURIES--Christina Stead--Appleton-Century ($2.50).

"Men of genius ruin themselves for some fantasy, or for their families, that's why there are so few that succeed. There are really hundreds of thousands of men of genius in the world." This minority opinion is delivered not by Author Christina Stead herself but by one of her characters; but she writes as if it were true. The Beauties and Furies, like her earlier books (The Salzburg Tales, Seven Poor Men of Sydney) is something rich and strange, bears the same relation to workaday life as Ariel's song to a drowned man.

Against the realistic but poetically envisaged background of yesterday's Paris, in a political climate heavy with the Stavisky scandals and the riots of Feb. 6, 1934, swarms a crowd of fantastic figures in a kind of Lutetian Lupercalia. Outlines of the story are mundane enough. Elvira, pretty and discontented, has left her stodgy British husband to join her lover, Oliver, in Paris. On the train from Calais she meets Marpurgo, a cultured lace-buyer, an opaque fellow who grows more sinister with acquaintance. He describes himself as "a virtuoso in decadence, disintegration, mental necrosis. . . ." His hearers are usually mystified, end by mistrusting him admiringly or asking him for a match. In Paris, Marpurgo attaches himself to the lovers and encourages their troubles. For a while the course of their illicit affair meanders with delightful smoothness. Then Elvira begins to miss her settled respectability. Oliver shamelessly discovers that he is attractive to other women. While Elvira maunders at home over her fate, Oliver with regrettable lightheartedness deceives her with the fey Coromandel, the veteran Blanche, with a chance prostitute who knows her Baudelaire.

Elvira's husband goes to Paris, to do the decent British thing, muddles the situation more. Conferences coagulate. Marpurgo flits from group to group, breathing out night thoughts and miasmal metaphysics. When his boss fires him because of his artistic expense accounts, thinks of hiring Oliver in his stead, Marpurgo's scheming grows more satanic. With a gloomy consciousness that he has done all he can, Elvira's husband tires of her vacillations, takes himself back to England. Elvira settles herself to lie on the bed she has made, then suddenly realizes that Oliver is an inconstant bedfellow, goes home to her husband after all. When Oliver decides he is through with Paris too, Marpurgo encourages his departure, for more reasons than one. On the boat train Oliver, by now an incorrigible ladies' man, meets another girl. . . .

Not so much in the story nor its background but in her characters' coruscating conversations, the implications of their grotesque actions and their wilder words, does Christina Stead's originality shine. Readers who know where they are with the Saturday Evening Post will get little or nothing out of The Beauties and Furies. Its trolls and hobgoblins may show less timid readers a thing or two not visible except by moonlight.

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