Mrs. Menelaus*

She Launched a Thousand Scandals

The Story. The early life of Helen of Troy may not have been private--or at any rate Professor Erskine chooses to summarize it in two sentences: "So they all intended well. But Paris saw Helen face to face." The story begins when the topless towers of Ilium were falling: Menelaus sword in hand storms into Helen's room to kill her, looks and exclaims: "Helen, it's time we went home."

So they got Helen with her strange fascinating beauty, accustomed to what she wants, and baffled by her inability to come at what she most wants--life. At Sparta, the servants are taken aback when Menelaus restores her to her old place in his home, and Menelaus has to remind them that he has changed: "And we've been through the war, you should remember. Nothing can be quite the same again."

Their daughter Hermione has been trying to save her mother's reputation by spreading the account that Paris took Helen (and some of the furniture) against her will, but that she never went to Troy--she had been staying with a lady and gentleman in Egypt. Helen will have nothing of such an alibi. She tells her neighbors that she is not repentant of "the bitter bridal bed where the fair mischief lay by Paris' side." It was inevitable. In fact Menelaus was to blame. Helen says: "I think a decent man could lose his wife without bringing on a war."

Hermione is shocked. Hermione wants to marry her cousin Orestes. Helen does not like the straight-laced young fellow and would prefer her to marry Pyrrhus, the daredevil son of Achilles. Then there is the rumor that Eteoneus, the gatekeeper, brings to Menelaus: "Your sister-in-law Clytemnestra--your double sister-in-law, I might say; your wife's sister and your brother's wife--has been living with Aegisthus ever since Agamemnon went to Troy."

"There! I never liked her," exclaims Menelaus. "I'm shocked, but not surprised. . . . But after all it may be only gossip."

Eteoneus replies: "These rumors that spread about beautiful women are often malicious or envious, as you say, but they're rarely exaggerated."

Helen nags Menelaus to have Pyrrhus come on a visit but he recalls to her that he had admitted one good looking young man to the house with no good result. Insulted, Helen ejaculates, "I left this house once, and I can do it again. . . . I'll stay on the one condition, that you insult me no more. Do you wish me to stay?"

He does, and he shortly looks with more favor on Pyrrhus as a possible son-in-law, for Orestes' father, Agamemnon, comes home and is murdered by Clytemnestra, who is in turn killed by Orestes. Surely it would not do to make an alliance with such a family. But Orestes meets Pyrrhus on the road and kills him after a quarrel, and Hermione elopes with Orestes.

Then it is Helen who is more inclined to look with favor on Orestes than is Menelaus--and Hermione grows jealous, for Helen is still Helen. The last scene is laid as Telemachus comes to the house seeking tidings of his father, Odysseus. Helen gives him a cup of wine. "He took it from her, his hand touched hers, and she smiled at him. It was as she had said; he forgot all his sorrows--as it seemed, forever. But the magic, he knew, was not in the wine."

As Menelaus once remarked: "The only thing about her I understand, is her looks, and I don't understand how they last so well."

The Significance. As Aeschylus wrote the tragedy of Agamemnon's homecoming, so Mr. Erskine has essayed the comedy of Menelaus' return. It is a comedy of manners--all conversation (and plenty of it), witty, charming, subtle. Much of it is new as milk still warm from the udder, and much of it is old as human nature. It is cast in the shape of a modern novel, and yet, as regards the number of characters for example, it almost conforms to the rules of the old Greek drama. It is a fastidious tidbit for lovers of refinement, polished facets of philosophy, shrewd comment on human nature.

About ten years ago Mr. Erskine published a work entitled The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. His portrait of Helen is of a woman who believes in the moral obligation to be intelligent and who suffers from the natural obligation of being beautiful.

The Author. John Erskine is a professor of English at Columbia University. He is 46, and most of his life has been devoted to writing and editing things resembling textbooks, and to employing more or less of his cleverness in speaking to more or less appreciative audiences. He has now turned his wit loose and decided to write something that appeals to himself.

*THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HELEN OF TROY--John Erskine--Bobba-Merrill ($2.50).