Rapier Envy, Anyone?

By Brad Darrach

"Name of God! ... Will you stand your ground, you mangy dog!"

Fury mounting above his terror, Leach...stretched himself in a lunge in the Italian manner, the whole body parallel with the ground and supported...upon his left hand. He sent his point ripping upward under de Bernis'guard. But de Bernis...passed his sword from side to side through the captain's extended body. Standing over Tom Leach as he lay coughing out his evil life upon the sands, Monsieur de Bernis ruefully shook his head.

"Too fine an end for such as you, my Captain."

The man to praise or blame for this phlebotomous episode was an enigmatic Italian named Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950) who grew up in Portugal and wrote in English. In 47 years he produced 38 sometimes absurd but usually irresistible novels for the cloak-and-sword trade. Over the years they have sold millions of copies and managed to survive six decades and 13 productions of more or less appalling filmflam.

In more innocent times--which may roughly be reckoned from the birth of Homer to the death of Errol Flynn--all boys (and the occasional girl with rapier envy) turned to martial romance for a chauvinized vision of what they would be when they grew up. Despite the fact that Underdog and Bionic Woman now mold the taste of young audiences, Sabatini may be in for a revival. Ballantine Books has reprinted in paperback 100,000 copies each of so-so Sabatini (The Black Swan, Captain Blood Returns, Mistress Wilding). Three examples of super-Sabatini (The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche, Bellarion) are to follow. Quickly, one hopes. At his worst Sabatini is a hypnotic yarn spinner. At his best he is a semiserious novelist who, like Dumas pere, uses melodrama as a billboard to lure the casual pleasure seeker into a performance more moving and intelligent than he expects.

Why is a book by Sabatini almost impossible to stop reading? For the same reason it's almost impossible to stop watching the magician saw the lady in half. In Chapter 1 this author invariably tempts the reader to identify with a courageous young man, then thrusts the young man into marrow-freezing danger. From there on the suspense rarely lets up.

Sakers and Slush Lamps. Atmosphere is another Sabatini attraction. From a mind crammed with historical minutiae he fans a rich dust of authenticity over his scenes. In The Black Swan and The Sea Hawk, when a sailing ship fires off a broadside, Sabatini draws on his vast vocabulary of sailor latin to inform the reader that a battery of sakers on the gun deck of a galleass is bombarding a galliot with langrel that has collapsed its topgallants and smashed a few slush lamps. He is just as sure-footed ashore. When Sabatini finishes describing Captain Blood's hangout, the pirate fortress at Tortuga, any attentive reader could build a scale model in his basement, right down to the little green lizards on the breadfruit trees.

Sabatini's talents as a stylist lie well to the south of, say, Sir Walter Scott's. He is a Monte Pythonesque coiner of cliches: rubies have a fearless tendency to "glow like live coals," and Frenchmen sputter expletives like "Name of a name!" and "By example!" Yet in the next sentence Sabatini can turn a flashing phrase (a eunuch's hands are two "bunches of fat fingers").

Sabatini solves the problem of plot with a decisiveness almost unique in literature. With topical variations he tells the same story in every book: wrongfully accused of a crime, the hero (Oliver Tressilian in The Sea Hawk, for instance) flees or is transported to a wild part of the world where simply to survive he is forced to become a pirate. Yet in his heart he remains true to his ideals and the woman he loves.

Just why these loves endure--necessities of plot aside--is a sobering speculation. Sabatini's heroines are the icy clots of all time. The author gives them such nobby names as Priscilla Harradine and Rosamund Godolphin and runs on about the "lissome beauty" of their "milk-white" necks. Alas, from the neck up they are self-righteous schoolmarms. From the neck down they might as well be buried in mothballs.

Sabatini's heroes, those none-too-sharp blades, don't seem to mind. They all suffer from a terminal case of pedestalism. They can stand up to any man alive ("I'll burn the brains of the first man who advances farther!"), but one glance at the heroine's chill charms throws them into hilarious spasms of unworthiness. "I have done dreadful things," Charles de Bernis confesses to his lady love. "My proper mate among women would be some unfortunate soulless drab... nor yet am I so lost as to presume to woo any woman of another kind. Then I should be damned, indeed."

When a a tear of pity falls on his hand from her angelic eyes, Charles warbles a little oratorio of gratitude: "I thank you for that tear dropped on the grave of a lost soul." Eventually the hero always does propose, of course, and then he gets what he deserves: the heroine. The average Sabatini villain is altogether keener about sex--just as one might expect of a fellow with "long hairy arms" and "a low, animal brow" plus "a thin cruel beak" of a nose "between a pair of quick-moving eyes." The heroine invariably calls him a "beast."

"I'll give thee cause to call me that!" one villain replies, and "with a snarling laugh" he rips away the heroine's bodice. "There's pearls!" he exults. "Pearls!" Unfortunately, the hero arrives in time to prevent a jewel robbery that even the most ardent feminist might applaud.

Sabatini was clearly infatuated with romantic camp. But he longed to explore loftier modes of historical fiction. In midcareer, he suddenly produced The Sea Hawk, the first of several novels in which the same old formula is fired with such passion and anguish that literary sleuths, if they concerned themselves at all with Sabatini, might thoughtfully ponder his themes of injustice, revenge and reconciliation, and conclude that much of his so-called escapist writing may actually be rooted in a deep source of private pain.

2,000 Words a Day. No hint of such a source comes to light in the little that is known of Sabatini's reclusive life. The son of an Italian operatic tenor and an English soprano, he was raised in Oporto, Portugal, where his father found work as a singing teacher. The boy went off to school in Switzerland and at 17 got a job as a clerk in London. One day in 1901, rising 26 and bored with answering foreign mail for a rubber company, he dashed off a short story in English and sent it to a magazine. Within a year he had brought out his first novel, The Suitors of Yvonne.

In researching his stories, Sabatini said later, he read survey texts, then studied primary sources and leafed through the dramatists and letter writers of the era to pick up "the living reality of the past." Thereafter he wrote about 2,000 words a day.

Well-muscled and of medium height, with reddish hair and flashing hazel eyes, Sabatini had the look of an outdoorsman. He married twice (in both cases Englishwomen) and had two chil dren. As the money rolled in, he bought an old mill on a famous salmon stream, the river Wye that coils its way between Wales and England; and there, more English now than the English, he played the country gentleman. "It leaves me cold," he told an interviewer in the early 1920s, "that men should write better novels than mine. But I hate a man who can kill more fish."

Whatever his inspiration, Sabatini wrote his masterpiece (and bestselling title) in 1920. Everything came together in Scaramouche; the strongest moments in his other novels barely equal the weakest scenes in this book. The hero is a witty young lawyer whose best friend is skewered by an aristocratic swordsman on the eve of the French Revolution. The hero vows to hound the aristo to destruction--only to find the absolute powers of the monarchy arrayed against him.

Dance on the Abyss. As revolution is fomented, Sabatini tracks his hero through dazzling careers of evasion and revenge. To elude the police and pursue his enemy, he becomes in succession a republican agitator, a celebrated actor and a political assassin. The final confrontation of hero and villain produces a wild surprise ending.

In Scaramouche, the author's usual demand for personal justice is transmuted into a passion for social justice, and this merging of private and public feeling lends the novel a universality Sabatini nowhere else achieved. In the Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr, he has made one of the subtlest villains in romantic literature, a good man perverted by a bad idea (aristocratic privilege excuses any crime) into a perfectly sincere monster. In Scaramouche, the hero, he has created his Hamlet.

"He was born with the gift of laughter," Sabatini announces in the novel's opening sentence, "and a sense that the world was mad." Scaramouche, in fact, is the type of the homme engage, the modern intellectual activist. All his acts are the free acts of a man who dances his existence upon the abyss of nothingness. Today the notion that only the crazy are sane in a world gone mad would hardly rattle an espresso cup. It was not so in Sabatini's time. By a singular stroke of intuition, he created an existentialist hero almost a decade before Jean-Paul Sartre raised the banner of existentialism.

Brad Darrach

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