Stravinsky, Here I Come!

THE FEAST (308 pp.)--Margaret Kennedy--Rinehart ($3).

"You filthy little twerp. Get out!"

"All right. I'm getting out."

"If Nancibel has this effect on you . . ."

"You shut your trap about Nancibel. . . Another word about her and I'll shut your mouth for you."

"Nancibel ... Oh, you filthy brute!"

"I warned you."

"My lip's bleeding ... all over the pillow . . . You're rather exciting when you lose your temper. I wish you'd do it oftener . . . What are you crawling about for?"

"I'm looking for my shoes."

No Nymph. This between-the-sheets dialogue, involving an aging vampire and her rebellious gigolo, is one of many things in this novel that will cause admirers of Britain's Margaret Kennedy to grope for their shoes and steal away. In The Constant Nymph Author Kennedy showed that it was quite possible to write a bestseller that, though of no great breadth, was intelligent, sensitive to life and very likable. The Feast catches her with her literary standards down.

"It took her years to work the story out," says the Literary Guild, which is serving The Feast as its April banquet. Why it took so long is hard to say, since there is nothing in the book that has not been done already--either much better by Thornton Wilder and Arnold Bennett or just as badly by Marguerite Steen, Taylor Caldwell and Daphne du Maurier.

Sheep & Goats. A Cornish cliff collapses on top of a seaside resort hotel, squashing everybody but those lucky enough to be away on a picnic. Actually, according to Author Kennedy, the picnickers were more than just lucky: God has been separating the sheep from the goats before blasting that particular bit of Cornwall. Filling in the story for Him, Author Kennedy collects a huge cast of characters and tells minutely why so & so was spared and so & so had to go.

Included in the cast are the owners of the hotel, nine adolescents and children, a clergyman, four lovers and a clutch of frustrated husbands & wives. Culture enters the lobby mainly in the form of such lines as "The strains of Stravinsky ceased ..." and "He looked up from the Times Literary Supplement . . ." Comedy creeps in (looking for its shoes) when, for instance, a doctor mentions "metatarsals" and a sweet young thing asks, "Who did you say met a tarsal?" In a line here & there appear half-suffocated indications that Margaret Kennedy could still, if she wished, write another bestseller as good as The Constant Nymph. Even as God's amanuensis, she has not done it this time.

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