Sportive Fatalism*

The Author of "Futility" Keeps It Up

The Story amounts to the candid, cluttered journal of Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, a young man born in Japan of Russian-Scotch-Spanish-Italian-English-Finnish-Swedish ancestry. He is an Oxford intellectual, serious-minded, he feels, but is engaged for the present with a Major Percy Beastly on a mission to Manchuria for the British War Office. In the life of Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, wars and missions are very unimportant indeed: He spends a lot of time thinking about Life and Death, writing or making jokes about them. Nothing is very important.

In Tokio, he visits his Aunt Teresa, a domineering invalid who in 1914 rapt Emmanuel Vanderflint, her Belgian army husband, to the Far East, chiefly because it was far. With them, ''just like one family," live other refugees, a mother, sister and two daughters Vanderphant. Also Aunt Teresa's daughter, Sylvia Ninon Therese Anastathia --long legs, dark brown hair, hazel eyes, guileless, 16, attending convent. She reads "Questions and Answers" in the Daily Mail. Georges quotes her the poets, plays Tristan and Isolde on the piano. They kiss a little and call pet names.

Georges gets on to Harbin, where Aunt Teresa's menage soon follows. Funds have ceased coming from her brother Lucy in Krasnoyarsk. The Vanderflints are indignant; Lucy writes it was the Bolsheviki; they don't believe him. In Harbin, they all infest a duchess's flat, loaned. Georges and Sylvia are caught kissing. Aunt Teresa is delighted; they shall marry. They are delighted.

Three Vanderphants go back to Belgium but the household is amplified by a Captain Negodyaev and family and woes. Uncle Lucy comes with his family and woes. Every one has a woe. Negodyaev's is a persecution complex; about monthly he rouses his family in the night, bundles them up, poises for flight, then goes back to bed. Lucy's woe is his lost estates; he finally hangs himself, arrayed in Aunt Teresa's silk underwear, stockings and boudoir cap. Georges' is the stink that Beastly makes shaving; Beastly has a tender skin and has to burn his beard off. Aunt Teresa's is her health and the death of her son Anatole, court-martialed in France.

Under this last circumstance, Aunt Teresa cannot bear to lose Sylvia. She breaks the engagement. They acquiesce, Sylvia in self-sacrifice, Georges in indecision. Promptly Aunt Teresa marries off Sylvia to a Belgian officer with a bobbing Adam's apple and canary mustache. On Sylvia's wedding night she sends this docile husband home alone. Sylvia and Georges see what they are missing and sleep together.

Next morning, Aunt Teresa says she is haunted by Uncle Lucy's spectre, gibbering in her lingerie. She orders an immediate departure. Sylvia's husband cannot go, so is left behind. The S. S. Rhinoceros puffs to England with all the polyglots, via Hongkong, Singapore, Ceylon, Aden, Egypt, Gibraltar. Georges, secretly honeymooning with Sylvia, is more satisfied than ever to leave his life and love in the hands of Fate and Aunt Teresa.

The Significance. War being an irrational thing, its aftermath verges on insanity. An analytical person, particularly a racial polyglot, can cope with the welter of causes and patriotisms only by adopting a sportive fatalism. Author Gerhardi's minor characters develop this sociological thesis on a very high plane of comedy. The major characters, who dwell on the border line of high tragedy, give a more intimate demonstration of the same philosophy.

The Author. William Gerhardi, British-born in Petrograd, Oxford graduate, only slightly elaborates his own biography in Georges Diabologh of The PoIyglots, the writing of which has occupied his last two years in some secluded Tyrolese hamlet. He dedicates the book to Edith Wharton because, when he published Futility (with the aid of the late Katherine Mansfield), Mrs. Wharton, to whom he was a stranger, wrote: "Do, for the sake of all of us, keep it up!" His one other book, Anton Chechov: A Critical Study, has, as a critical study, no peer.

*THE POLYGLOTS--William Gerhardi -- Duffield ($2.50).