High Jinks in Hell

THE LOVERS (362 pp.)--Kathleen W'm-sor~Appleton-Century-Crofts ($3.50).

It is not only the great writers who trademark their work. Lesser authors, too, car. take the language in their bare hands and mash it into a pulp which is peculiarly their own. Thus, although many of Shakespeare's best lines might have been written by one or another of his contemporaries, no living writer can quite reproduce the "feel" of a characteristic line by Kathleen Winsor: "They stood together, his legs widespread"; "He swept the hair off her neck and put his mouth there"; "He smelt like weeds rotted in water." Even longer stretches of Winsor prose have that touch of pure Amber. "She had been surprised at the discovery of an eager sensual appetite within herself. It had been in hiding, apparently, for most of her life . . . and then one day it had appeared." "It was one of the few times he had met a woman who did not instantly flare her nostrils, sniff, and come bounding at him."

As these extracts hint, Author Winsor's eagerly awaited new book is about what she calls "primal" relations. Her publishers profess to believe that in The Lovers she has "unearthed the roots of the conflict between the sexes with candor and rare understanding," but this is not quite true. The Lovers has candor, all right, and its understanding is as rare as a steak cut from a live cow, but Author Winsor is not a writer who employs her pen as a grub hoe. What she investigates are not concealed roots but visible furnishings: "His body . . . had the ... apparent hardness of polished mahogany." "Her breasts [were] bare and the nipples speckled with silver flakes."

The Lovers consists of three novelettes. Each, in its own way, describes the impingement of polished mahogany upon silver flakes:

P: On Roaring Mountain by Lemonade Lake is about an adulteress who is shot dead by her husband and goes to Hell. The Devil is there to meet her--"a naked gigantic man" with "flat muscled belly and symmetrical widespread legs." He is "reckless," "virile," "resistless," "incontestable," "beautiful," "sinister," "primordial and unrestrained, fierce, overmastering, intemperate," "an essence ... of masculinity" fraught with "potent magnetism"--in brief, "the man every woman hopes she'll be raped by." Whenever the Devil fulfills these hopes, it causes a thunderstorm to break over Hell; much of Roaring Mountain is devoted to this special type of weather reporting. Cf The Silent Land's hero is one of the finest, go-gettingest he-men in contemporary writing--a Winsor version of Lanny Budd. Miles Morgan's eyes were "green, speckled with bronze." He had "fieriness . . . gaiety and a sense of poetry in everything he did"--which included reaching under Heroine Amoret's sweater and giving her a sharp pinch. But Miles is at his best when he reaches behind the Iron Curtain and does his pinching there. "He got behind ... for a few days and, after many dangerous escapades, had got out again and written his articles, which were considered to be the most important contributions to international understanding so far attempted."

P:In Another Country features Eric, of whom it is said: "You're like a cathedral --all the lines meeting and resolving." Eric is afraid of falling in love. So when he meets Dulcie, a virgin, and notes her "merry pliant beauty," he limbers up his "brown hairy chest and arms"--and then backs away nervously, gone all weak in the buttresses. "Virgins," explains Author Winsor, "gave him some qualms of conscience ... He felt too responsible to their mothers." This sort of weakness in a Winsor man is, of course, intolerable to a Winsor woman. Dulcie goes after Eric in the form of a panther, but he breaks her neck. Then Dulcie's mother changes into a huge tiger. "Its claws fastened high into his back and ripped him open." This is the weakest of the three stories, because the symbolism isn't up to scratch.

What is odd about The Lovers is that Author Winsor should have bothered to enlist the aid of the supernatural throughout. She is no Edgar Allan Poe, no Walter de la Mare. She has no imagination, no gift for abstract thought, no tendency, in fact, toward thought of any kind. She writes not with her feet but her pores. She has made her name by being, to sex, what nine-year-old Daisy Ashford, in The Young Visiters, was to high society, and it is hard to know what has led her to muffle her impulsive ignorance with sophisticated stuff. All her admirers will hope that in her next book there will be no such dull stains on the polished mahogany.

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