The Peripatetic Reviewer

THE preservative of London and the reason why its beauty has survived the worst that bombs, callous contractors, and motor traffic can do is the determination of its guardians to mellow the present with the past. The height of St. Paul’s Cathedral sets the ceiling for the new office buildings going up in the City, and the same standard of taste preserves such a little gem as St. James’s Street. Max Beerbohm recalls being shown by his friend Laurence Binyon, the late Keeper of Prints in the British Museum, “a very ancient little watercolour drawing. The foreground of it was a rather steep grassy slope. At the foot of the slope stood a single building, which I at once recognised as St. James’s Palace. Beyond the Palace were stretches of green meadows; and far away there was just one building — the Abbey of Westminster. And I thought how pained the artist would have been if he had foreseen the coming of St. James’s Street. . . . Yet I could not find it in my heart to deplore the making of that steep little street, destined to be so full of character and history.” Three hundred and fifty years have passed since that artist did his drawing, and we who tread the “grassy slope” today see it as the quintessence, the capital of man’s taste. Here are the famous clubs: at the top of the slope, White’s with its reckless wager book and its legends of Charles James Fox, Pitt the Younger, and the three-bottle men; Boodle’s, the most lovely façade on the street; the massive stone solemnity of the Conservative Club (the Club, as one wit put it, to end all clubs); the Carlton, where one looks to see, and often does, a peremptory M.P. motioning to a cab with his furled umbrella; and Pratt’s with its scarlet and black interior and its preposterous stuffed fish — this was once the furthest limit for an officer on duty at the Palace, and here one waits, as he did, sipping sherry while the chop or Dover sole is grilled on the open hearth.

This is a man’s street, and such women as appear are here on sufferance, walking as some English wives do at a discreet distance to the rear of their impatient spouses. He may be shopping for hats at Lock’s, who have made the best since Rufus King was our minister to the Court of St. James; Lock’s made them for Mr. King as they did for Lord Nelson, and the shop has the same appearance and the same civility as when they were served. Close beside Lock’s the temptingvintages of Berry Brothers draw one into their savory establishment. Their wine cellars run under St. James’s and were especially reinforced to resist the weight of the heavy gilt coaches bringing Charles II back to the throne. Below Berry’s look for Pickering Place, where the bucks from White’s once used to duel — you’ll see where bullets scarred the walls — and where Emma and her Horatio once had a hideaway.

A man might want to look at a shotgun at Henry Atkin’s or pick up some dry flies — and the latest stream gossip — at Ogden Smiths, who advertise their calling with a gigantic golden fishhook over their door. At the Map House on one corner you get the large-scale beauties you will need if you are planning to walk the Roman roads or explore the chalk downs in search of such Saxon landmarks as the Cherne Giant or the White Horse. Just above the Map House is the Blue Ball Yard, the arched entry to a cobbled court where the stagecoaches used to load; the look of the place, with the tiny rooms opening on the gallery, makes you think of Dickens. Further uphill is a plate-glass display of the Rolls-Royce, still incontestably the best-looking car in the world. You halt at the curb and then step out on the zebra crossing (which British drivers respect punctiliously) to get your foreign currency at Lloyd’s Bank, and re-emerging you glance down at the Palace gate where a Guardsman in scarlet tunic and bearskin is going through his solemn, solitary drill. Now if your wife has been making persistent reminders about lunch, perhaps you had better pause at Prunier’s for the sharpest, tastiest Potage Homard here or in Paris. Only London could compress so much of the past and present within the space of five hundred yards.

HENRY MAXIMILIAN BEERBOHM, affectionately known as Max, was born within sound of Bow Bells on August 24, 1872, and for the first thirtyseven years of his life London was his heart’s desire. When he came down from Oxford in the early 1890s he was in great demand, for he was a charming conversationalist, a deft and daring cartoonist who held up for impudent laughter the royal and literary personages of his day, and an essayist of witty and delightful precision. He followed George Bernard Shaw as dramatic critic of the Saturday Review; it was Shaw who called him “the Incomparable Max,” and indeed he was, a dandy in the most cultivated degree.

In 1910, following his marriage, he moved to Rapallo in Italy and thenceforth he saw London intermittently and with nostalgia. He resented the changes which altered the city during the two world wars, but he never lost his affection for its old ways or for those who had given it luster in his youth. In his posthumous volume, MAINLY ON THE AIR (Knopf, §3.75), we hear him speaking pensively, reminiscently, critically, in the fragrant broadcasts which the BBC coaxed out of him in his retreat.

Here are his magnificent reanimation of George Moore which he wrote in 1913 and delivered in 1950; his sensitive evaluation of Lytton Strachey which was the Rede Lecture in Cambridge in 1943; an essay in dry point on T. Fenning Dodworth, the bore of all time, who might easily have been included in Seven Men; his endearing take-off of the London music halls; an ingenious paper on windows, “Fenestralia” he calls it, which I first heard him talk about when we had tea together under the beeches at Abinger Common in July, 1943; and the essay which is for me the very essence of this book, “Hethway Speaking.” In this illusory piece with its delicious vignettes of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Meredith, Tennyson, and Browning, Max confesses that he is drawing from notes made many years earlier, notes for a book to be entitled The Mirror of the Past. It was never written.

Mainly on the Air, with its blend of the written and spoken word, is as close as we shall come to that mirror. There are small lapses in the editing, as, for instance, the repetition of “even” three times in two sentences, which Max would have caught had he lived to correct proof. But who dares tamper with prose like this?

London-born and a graduate of Oxford, MARY RENAULT served as a nurse in World War II, and her first three novels were written in offduty time. After the war she traveled in Greece, and the months she spent in Athens and on the Aegean Isles opened up a new world whose reality became ever more believable as she compared the legends with the recent findings of archaeology. Her novel about Socrates, The Last of the Wine, was praised by critics for the skill with which she re-created the atmosphere of Athens, and in her new book, THE KING MUST DIE (Pantheon, $4.50), she has brought the same clear Attic quality, the same power to persuade the reader that this is the way things happened.

The King Must Die is the story of Theseus, an Athenian less than a god and more than a man. Grandson of Pittheus, the king of Troizen, and by legend the son of Poseidon, the Theseus who emerges from Miss Renault’s pages is slow to discover his true paternity. Of less than average height and heft, he has to learn the tricks of the Egyptian wrestlers before he can hold his own; he has the quickness which is accelerated in danger; he has the gift of leadership, and his faith in Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, gives him confidence in the deep and makes him aware of those moments when the god tries to tear the earth apart.

The novel is the story of Theseus’ youth and of his coming of age. It tells of his boyhood at Troizen and of the protracted journey which he makes to discover himself to his true father, Aigeus, the king of Athens. With one companion in his chariot, he crosses the Isthmus and on his way destroys Skiron, the robber.

At Eleusis he must fight for his life and his kingship, and having won he must continue to put down the matriarchy which passionately strives to enmesh him. At Athens he is saved from Medea’s poisoning, but the recognition by his father and their hope to unify the two kingdoms are cut short by the arrival of the ominous ship from Crete. Lots are drawn for the youths and maidens whom the Athenians are obliged to send every year as tribute to the Minotaur, and Theseus, who is of the right height and perfect build for a bull dancer, volunteers to go. With his entry into this slavery, we enter the most glowing pages of the book.

Miss Renault centers her story in the Bull Court, and how well she tells it, how magnetic and believable she makes this touchy, quick, tough, and highly sexed young man. His hold on his bodyguard of Eleusians and the forethought and discipline with which he cares for the Athenian slaves: these gleaming proofs of his leadership are what make the story live.