The Trojan Horse

by Christopher Morley

[Lippincott, $2.50]

HERE is a challenging version of the immortal Troy story, the most frequently rewritten of all poetic legends. The Iliad itself was a rewriting of earlier legends, but it is n’t the Iliad that Mr. Morley lays irreverent hands on. He starts with the mediæval and Renaissance accounts of Troy. Helen is in the story, but she and Paris count for little. Achilles and Hector are subordinated. Cressida is the heroine, Troilus the chief lover.

The Iliad provides a group of themes, any one of which could be stressed. There is the fighting. of course, which Homer reported with a zest almost joyous, as though war were a sublime sport. There is also the tragedy of war, which for Homer was chiefly a sense of the shortness and the vicissitude of life. There is also the moral responsibility of the leaders in war or in any other public enter prise. In the original cycle of Homeric poems there was also an account of what happened to the surviving Greek heroes on the way home and after they got there; the Odyssey is the one remaining example. The return of Agamemnon and his death at the hands of Clytemnestra, with the resulting tragedies, we know from the Greek dramatists; and Helen’s resumption of domestic life after the war, and her relation to the Clytemnestra episodes, we know from a beautiful passage in the Odyssey and from loss famous references. Of Cressida’s love story the Iliad tells us nothing. She was imagined by the Middle Ages.

Mr. Morley agrees that war is a sport, but he strips it of glamour and shows the Homeric heroes as average soldiers, dull and vulgarized by the prolonged conflict. His heroines are such women as such soldiers consort with between fights. The noncombatants are neither better nor worse than the civilians of 1914-1918, That is, they have the proper attitude toward their side of the quarrel, they pursue their selfish interests with a singular callousness, they persuade themselves that the callousness is a heroic fronting of reality.

For his literary form Mr. Morley has gone to the theatre and taken a leaf from the musical comedies of the jazz era. Much of his book is printed as the dialogue of a play, with stage directions. There are incidental songs, there is any thing else that might provide good entertainment without regard to chronology, historical fitness, or other limitations. He sets the scene in this description of Troy: ‘Among mediæval walls and classic temples we see perpendicular modern skyscrapers, radio towers, filling stations, and a seaside roadhouse down by the beach, Sarpedoni’s Shore Dinner. A concrete road, with a yellow taxi moving, runs on neutral ground between the lines from the city to the shore.‘

The heroes returning from battle are represented as football players between halves. There is a colored trainer who rubs them down. Anterior. getting ready for the shower bath, exclaims, ‘Snappy work to-day.’ Æneas replies, ‘Boy, am I set for chow.’

There is a newspaper, the Evening Trojan, owned and edited by Pandarus. There is also a radio station which broadcasts the battles, sometimes on a commercial hour.

In other words, we have here not a story of Troy at all, but a very biting satire, almost too biting, of the shallowness and vulgarity we to-day put up with. Only in the last chapter does beauty emerge, and then only in a release of regret.