Munchausen & Editor

PULL DEVIL, PULL BAKER--Stella Benson & Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine, K. M.--Harper ($2.50).

As in a game of "Consequences." Authoress Stella Benson met Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine in the charity ward of a Hongkong hospital. He was an inmate, she a visitor. Aged (77). penniless, shaky but brazen, the old scamp regaled her with such engagingly improbable tales, carried himself with such an unabashed air of grandeur that she was fascinated. A White Russian refugee, by his own account descended from an ancient French family, Count Nicolas spoke and wrote English of a sort; Authoress Benson decided to edit his rodomontadinous reminiscences. Pull Devil, Pull Raker is an antiphonal collaboration: the Count supplies the text. Authoress Benson a disclaiming commentary. Sometimes, when the Count's version sufficiently annoys her professional eye. she balances his account with a rendition of her own. The result is an amusing, sometimes pathetic, altogether entertaining book. The Literary Guild, in summery mood, has chosen it for July.

Count Nicolas has had an adventurous and egocentric life, whose parts do not always fit neatly together. A wild young aristocrat in pre-War Russia, leading a riotous life as an officer in the Tsar's "Horses' Guards" and moving in very "hyg" society, he was also a Nihilist who fled to Paris, was extradited and sent to Siberia. Describing himself as "the Don Juan of Our Days," he was in constant fun-paying arrears. "My good living with pretty gerls cost me planty money and brogth me in the claws of those wampyres of the humanity--the crooky jew usurers." Once he was elected (under an assumed nationality) to the throne of Bulgaria, but a barber recognized him and spoiled it all. He made and lost fortunes at the gaming table, hobnobbed with royalty, became kingpin of a polyglot community in Siberia, escaped to the U. S. ("the Contry of the Gold Devil"), where he pyramided another flimsy fortune, gradually subsided into a broken-down old panhandler in the Orient. When Authoress Benson last heard of him he was in Macao, "where, for the moment, he stands balanced, as though on a steppingstone, about to step into a new life of grand sansation."

The Count's memoirs were full of amorous reminiscence, some of them so explicit that his editor had to censor them; but she has left a flowery residue. At first no one girl was enough for the "Don Juan of Our Days." "The most ones of our officers had sweathearts, but I was to yang and to inconstant to bound me with a gerl; prefair to flay from one to a other, as a butterflay who flay from one flower to a other one." Later he had many a protracted affair--with Angelina, with Olga, with his Aunt Emma, with Lili. "the noty gerl" who betrayed him for another.

At the end of this tug-of-war between Baker Nicolas and Devil Benson, Authoress Benson calls it a draw. Many a reader will agree with her, will sympathize with her bewilderment when she confesses: "I'm uncertain . . whether the Count de Savine is editing me or I him. I am cleverer than he is--I think--but I am not sure whether I see more or understand more. Simply, I say more and I understand that I don't understand."

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