Planet Seer

THE STAR-GAZER--Zsolt de Harsanyi --Putnam ($2.75).

The biographer of a man three centuries dead has his choice of producing a work of scholarship or of telling a story. If he tells a story he might as well call it fiction because that it will largely be. As such it may nevertheless be an illuminating piece of historical literature, as are Robert Graves's two stories of a Roman emperor (I, Claudius and Claudius, the God). Or it may reach the second-rate level of a plausible, readable and honest tale like The Star-Gazer, which is a freely fictional novel of the life of Galileo.

Hungarian Zsolt de Harsanyi begins his story in 1587, when Galileo Galilei was 23 and threadbare, harassed by a termagant mother, a frayed father, spiteful fellow students at the University of Pisa. The well-known Leaning Tower experiment is handled by Harsanyi with considerable irony. When Galileo, then a young professor at Pisa, proved before a great crowd that objects of different weights (even though of identical shape and size) had exactly the same rate of fall, almost everyone was disappointed. "Is this all?" said the boys. But Galileo became a famous nuisance.

From a Belgian experimenter Galileo got the idea that led him to construct his first telescope. With the new instrument, which he called cannocchiale ("tubespec-tacles"), he was the first human being to see the satellites of Jupiter, the spots on the sun, the mountains of the moon. In Venice the splendid Doge (Venetian dialect for Duce) puffed up the steps of the Campanile of St. Mark's to take a telescopic gander, immediately doubled Galileo's annual stipend of 500 florins ($30,800 at the 1940 gold price).

The Copernican theory that the earth is a planet and moves round the sun did not attract the serious concern of the Inquisition until it began to look as if Galileo was proving it. His first brush with the Holy Office resulted in nothing more than an eloquent, friendly warning from the great theologist, Cardinal Bellarmin. It is on this occasion that Harsanyi has him make (gaily) his famous--probably apocryphal --remark: "Eppur si muove" ("Nevertheless it moves"). The heat was not really turned on until Galileo was 69, when Pope Urban VIII in a personal pet had the sick old man scared into recantation.

Most of these facts might be got more handily (and possibly more accurately) from an encyclopedia, but Harsanyi's 572-page novel provides for leisured readers a better-than-hack picture of Italy's late Renaissance cities, courts and manners. As a novelist Harsanyi has at least one artistic moment that Flaubert would have appreciated: As Galileo kisses the yellow hand of his mistress's dead father he can only think how like it is to hers.

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