Try at Tragedy

THE GATES OF AULIS--Gladys Schmitt--Dial ($2.75).

In this first novel, with great seriousness and intensity, Miss Schmitt makes a try at a genuine U.S. tragedy. Too few U.S. writers try that, and almost none succeed. Miss Schmitt deserves a medal for valor, not for success.

Carl Hasselmann and his sister Ellie, provincial, supersensitive Americans, dwell in the uneasy revulsions of a sort of spiritual incest. They represent, respectively, the frigid, inhumane predicament of mind-without-spirit and the equally suicidal predicament of spirit-without-mind. Carl's mental drive stretches him flat on the altar he has built before a hypnotic social theorist. Ellie is impelled to sacrifice herself to the "resurrection" of an aging, rich sophisticate. The earlier phases of these relationships are ground out with a skillful, meat-grinder tenacity worthy of tougher meat.

But about 500 pages on, in a long, catastrophic chapter, the whole machine flies apart, giving off humanistic, neo-christian, marxian, capitalistic and fascist sparks which generate great excitement, but not the terrifying image of man-at-the-edge-of-doom which was intended.

In manner, as in matter, Gladys Schmitt is unqualifiedly ambitious, almost Elizabethan. Even in the act of love her heroine's mental talk runs, for a full page, like this: "No, wait, wait for me. Do not leave me among old injustices and unanswered calls. Hold me, bear me up lest my hand, trailing back through fathomless water, encounter a dead man's face." Rather more successful is Carl's image of Ellie: "Oh, she is mad ... she veers like an abandoned ship on wild water by night, all sails down, and the wheel spinning first left, then right, and rats pattering over the empty decks, and one bell ringing constantly through chaos, a bell still saying loudly, love, love. . . ."

Gladys Schmitt was born in Pittsburgh in 1909, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where she began a close study of the texts of Proust and Mann. The Gates of Aulis, which took her five years to write, is the winner of the biennial Dial Press Award "for an outstanding novel that concerns itself realistically with the problems of adjustment which face young men and women of America today." Last month Gladys Schmitt went back to Pittsburgh to spend a year in research, preparatory to writing a novel about King David.

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