No Takers?

SANTA CLAUS: A MORALITY (18 pp.)--E. E. Cummings--Holf ($ 1.50).

Wrapped in a style as translucent and endearing as white tissue paper (with here & there a spangle), this playlet uses none of the stunting with language by which E. E. Cummings is known as the most wayward--as well as the freshest--of U.S. lyricists. But it definitely belongs on the grown-up side of the Christmas tree.

Its hero is a moth-eaten Santa Claus who finds no takers for his gift of "understanding." The carnival figure of Death appears, as in a medieval morality play, gives him a skull mask and persuades him to be a salesman. In the guise of Science, Santa Claus successfully sells "knowledge" now, not understanding. Something awful happens to his customers, however. Santa Claus then has to face a defrauded, angry mob:

If you all have been tricked and ruined --so have I. And so has every man and "woman, I say. . . . We have all of us sold our spirits into death, we are all of us the sick parts of a sick thing. . . . --How should our sages miss the mark of life, and our most skilful players lose the game? your hearts will tell you, as my heart has told me: because all know, and no one understands. . . .

Santa Claus is saved from being lynched by a child, who sees through the devil's mask and identifies him. And Santa's gift, which no one would take in what Death has described as "an age of salesmanship," finds a touching--and universal--taker in the end.

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