Purple Passion

DEAR AND GLORIOUS PHYSICIAN (572 pp.) -- Taylor Caldwell -- Doubleday ($3.95).

Perennially bestselling Novelist Taylor (This Side of Innocence) Caldwell has essayed a life of St. Luke which will suffocate most readers in its lavender logorrhea. Lucanus. as the author calls the Greek physician who wrote the third Gospel and the Acts, meets all the specifications for women's historical fiction. He is lithe, blond, radiantly handsome and invincible at fencing, foot races, discus-throwing and the standing broad jump. He is an accomplished linguist and, of course, a shrewd internist and master surgeon; he often needs only a short talk or a touch of the hand to heal the sick.

But the physician rages against God; a girl he loved when they were both children died before she reached adulthood.* The plot devices through which he is brought back to religion are soapy and soporific; it is enough to mention that Lucanus pays a call at the imperial court in Rome, where the Empress Julia, rouge-breasted and panting, urges him to orgy. But at the last minute, Lucanus begs off. whereupon nasty old Emperor Tiberius realizes that he is the first decent man to show up in Rome for years and gives Lucanus a dandy ring.

The book becomes almost worth reading when, in one incredible passage that may well benumb the entire Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, the author has a tribune tongue-lash the Senate: "You, Romans, friends and countrymen, have heard me before. I come not to honor Rome but to bury her." Author Caldwell ends her story as Lucanus meets Christ's mother, in a din of paraphrased Hail Marys and purple Passion ("She stood against the background of the hot and brazen mounts, and it seemed to him that she had grown very tall, and that she was clothed in pure light, and that her face beamed like the moon when it was full"'). In short, the book--a sure bestseller--is about on a par with the five-and-ten plaster statues of the saints and prettily painted picture postcards of Christ.

*Greene, then active as a movie critic, wrote a magazine article which referred to, among other things, her "dimpled depravity." In 1938, Shir ley sued for libel, won a $10,000 settlement.

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