Scholar Gypsy

DON GYPSY--Walter Starkie--Button ($3-50).

If you are fat and fortyish, but a fiddler you might possibly be able to spend your vacations the way Professor Starkie does.

But unless you were also at home in three or four languages, one of them Calo (Gypsy), you could not follow his footsteps very nearly. Few men have so succeeded in combining the respectable with the vagabond life. In term-time Walter Starkie is professor of Spanish literature in Dublin University, a director of the Abbey Theatre, the most indefatigable diner-out in Dublin, with a finger in every literary, academic and musical pie. With the beginning of the summer vacation he says good-by to all that (and his wife and two children), tucks his fiddle under his arm. stuffs -L-3 in his pocket for emergencies, and hies him off to Hungary, Rumania. Spain, to play tunes for his supper. Last week he published the account of his latest wanderings: this time they took him through Spanish Africa and southern Spain. More concerned with gypsy songs and customs than with gorgio (non-gypsy) politics. Fiddler Starkie had little seismic to report of a land that was soon to become a volcano of civil war. Only headlined name he mentioned was that of Largo Caballero. whom he heard characterized as a big-talking bourgeois.

Following no set itinerary, Fiddler Starkie started playing in the Tangier streets for coppers, was soon invited to make one of a brothel orchestra. In Andalusia he joined a circus, left it after a single performance in which his fiddle-playing act degenerated into a clownish tussle. In the gypsy caves of Granada he spent a riotous night. Knowing the gypsies of old. he rarely had trouble scraping acquaintance with members of the tribe.

Once he spent three uncomfortable days and nights in a gypsy camp, during which time he was the anxious witness of four fights, blood-letting but invariably ending in kisses. Occasionally he was led into temptation, but never forgot that he was a married man.

As a kind of sentimental homage, Fiddler Starkie ended his summer's rambles with a pilgrimage to La Mancha, in Don Quixote's footsteps. Unfortunately, although he often felt like Don Quixote, he looked much more like Sancho Panza. was once so hounded by a pack of small boys that he sought sanctuary in a church.

When he emerged, one of his tormentors came up and apologized, explained that they had picked on him because he was a stranger--"besides, you were so fat and all." Readers who are in a hurry may grow impatient with the meanderings of this musical picaroon; but for those who enjoy armchair travel and are not averse to scholarly or musical digressions by the way, Don Gypsy is a better than "tiny dose of Pantagruelian jollity of mind pickled in the scorn of fortune."

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