Nazi Idyll

DEATH OF A MAN--Kay Boyle--Harcourt,Brace ($2.50).

Among U. S. expatriate writers a tall, midwestern girl named Kay Boyle has emerged as the most prolific of the lot. In the last three years she has published six volumes. Master of a spectacular if not always lucid prose, she has told the story of the death of a tuberculous writer in Year Before Last, described life in homosexual circles in Gentlemen, I Address You Privately, and in general written of tempestuous artistic spirits who have a weakness for flowery language. Last week she offered U. S. readers a novel cut in the same pattern as her previous works but dealing with an Austrian doctor and an American girl whose love affair was entangled in the affairs of the Austrian Nazis.

These two meet while climbing mountains in the Tirol. Dr. Prochaska of Feldbruck is an impassioned adherent of Hitler to whom the mountains offer an almost mystic attraction: "It had been these mountains here and the others like them that all his life had wooed him from the streets and the houses as the thought of women wooed him. He knew their sloping icy shoulders. . . . He knew the chains of them well; the Ortler group with the tall lovely leaning body of the Ortler casting her shadow from exile on them, and the Venediger looking towards the lagoons of the Italian sea, and the two Glockners rising from their glaciers, upright from the brink of death." Pendennis Jones is a midwestern girl, married to an Englishman, who expresses herself in slightly dated wisecracks, bears a considerable family resemblance to the character of Brett in The Sun Also Rises. Sending her husband packing, by some measures not disclosed, Pendennis visits the doctor, talks politics with him, tells the story of her life, becomes his mistress. The story of her life reveals that her mother had been killed in a fall from a horse, for which Pendennis' twin brother was responsible, that her brother had hanged himself at the age of 17, that her father had raised her to be a man.

The love affair of Dr. Prochaska and Pendennis involves much political talk, a skiing trip on which they light fiery crosses and evade the authorities, a night in a mountain cabin where the doctor ministers to a sick child, the bombing of a news paper office. Their idyll ends somewhat inconclusively with the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss. Having left the doctor suddenly, become mixed up in homosexual circles in Vienna, Pendennis realizes that he will need her when she hears of the failure of the Nazi putsch, starts back for Feldbruck. They do not meet again.

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