Query

ONE, NONE AND A HUNDRED THOUSAND --Luigi Pirandello--Button ($2.75).

For ages philosophers have racked their brains over a riddle they call "appearance-&-reality." No answer to it has yet been found. Philosopher-Poet-Playwright Pirandello, who likes to speculate on marginal ideas, takes a flutter on this one in One, None and a Hundred Thousand. Author Pirandello makes his hero ask himself a truly embarrassing question: "Who arn I?" Some of his answers are in the title.

Vitangelo Moscarda, young married man of the town of Richieri, could afford to entertain ideas: his banker-father had left him controlling interest in the bank, with no responsibility beyond signing an occasional paper. His young wife and he loved each other, lived comfortably; but was he content? He was not. His wife called him Genge and thought him a dear silly fellow. Townsfolk called him "the usurer." When he tried to catch a glimpse of himself as he really was, he found-- nothing. The more he brooded over his undiscoverable identity the more despairing he became. Finally, in ah attempt to shock people's idea of him into something resembling his own, he played what seemed like such a strange practical joke that his wife left him, his friends tried to have him committed to an asylum. At the cost of surrendering all his possessions to the Church he kept his liberty, became an inmate in the paupers' home his money had founded.

Author Pirandello's thesis, ingeniously stated and restated through 268 pages, is that everyone has a multiple personality; that if anyone tries to examine deeply his own multiplicity, nonentity, possible unity, he will quickly be called a madman. "Julius Caesar, the individual, did not exist. There existed, it is true, a Julius Caesar that we know from so large a part of his life, and this one undoubtedly possesses a value incomparably greater than the others; not, however, so far as reality is concerned, please believe me when I tell you that."

The Author, though he is known to would-be thoughtful playgoers on both sides of the Atlantic as a deliciously or irritatingly mystifying playwright, got to the ripe age of 45 without writing a play. Born in Girgenti, Sicily (1867) as son of a sulphur-mine owner, he wrote five books of poetry before he was 23, took his degree in philosophy at Germany's University of Bonn, and went back to Rome to teach Italian literature to women. After he had published 20 books of short stories and three novels, a playwright friend persuaded him to dramatize one of his stories into a one-act play. With Six Characters in Search of an Author (produced in Rome in 1921) Pirandello leaped into the limelight. He gave up teaching; from a hermit-like professor he soon became a fashionable and active author-manager, rushing to openings by airplane.

Pirandello enjoys sitting next to strangers at his plays, hearing them confess bewilderment over "what it means." Says he: "People say that my drama is obscure and they call it cerebral drama. . . . One of the novelties that I have given to modern drama consists in converting the intellect into passion."

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