The Devious Way: A Novel in Verse

By THEODORE MORRISON

NOT more nimbly did Monsieur Jourdain spout prose than Mr. Morrison speaks poetry. Talk about the poet lisping in numbers! Here is a teacher of English whose vernacular is verse and to whom rhyme, rhythm, assonance, and all the tricks of the poetic trade must have come with his mother’s milk, he is so practiced in them. Whether he lectures in iambics or alexandrines I cannot say, but certain sure he thinks in meter, and verse is his native tongue.

The fluency and naturalness of his “Novel in Verse” whisk away all sense of affectation. Mr. Morrison sets out not to write a poem but to tell a story — and an excellent story, too. For an hour and thirty-five minutes — I have timed it — it drives the war clear out of mind. The plot is modern, quite on the edge of the future, but the problem beneath is old as woman. The author takes it back to Cressida, but I dare say Lilith pondered over the virtue of constancy.

Old as Lilith too is the brooding of Fate, in whose hands we are all so roughly molded. The reader is struck also by the vigor of the poet’s, or shall we say the novelist’s, characterization. The contrasted lovers, Christina their beloved, her intimates Renny and his wife, who in the spirit of true friendship interfere to cure, — or to kill, — even the vitriolic aunt, all are drawn neat as silhouettes in outline but with a sense of the realities and in three dimensions.

The story too is human, with the rush and hurry of drama about it, mounting to its climax in approved intensity, from the tossing of cocktails —

to the plumbing of desperate experience and the philosopher’s ultimate query: —

Mr. Morrison’s judgment has often been at odds with the social structure. Not for want of his endeavor does the incorrigible remain uncorrected. Now he takes it for what it is. For his art, acceptance of the universe is a great gain. A broad highway lies ahead and his feet are on it. Viking, $2.00.

ELLERY SEDGWICK