Daydream

ISLANDIA--Austin Tappan Wright--Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

He was a busy professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, the head of a family, gregarious, a voracious reader of books on travel and poetry. To those who knew him best, the late Austin Tappan Wright seemed the last man in the world to have much time to spare.

Yet when he died in 1931 he left behind him, in some 5,000 handwritten pages, a bulk of secret work which might have sweated the remotest of recluses. Even as reduced to portable size by his daughter Sylvia, Islandia runs to 1,013 pages. It is a strange, absorbing book.

A work entirely of the imagination, Islandia is the most thorough piece of "escape" reading available for this summer. It is perhaps the most sustained and detailed daydream that has ever seen print. And its chief interest (of which the author seems to have been scarcely conscious) is as a psychological document. In these thousands of hours of purloined time, Professor Wright was not himself--or was more himself than Professor Wright was. He was a young Harvard graduate named John Lang, and the year was 1907, and a rich uncle had secured him the first U.S. consulship in Islandia.

Islandia lay south of the equator. It was the southernmost tip of the Karain Continent. There is even a map of it (see cut). Its seasons were Windorn (winter), Grane (spring), Sorn (summer) and Leaves (fall). It had a climate, a terrain, a history and a literature all its own, all of which Austin Wright invented. Its inhabitants wore what the English of that period would have called "rational dress" (knickers of navy blue broadcloth were correct for men), and their furnishings and architecture rather suggest the tastes of Frank Lloyd Wright (no kin to the author).

For breakfast they ate "smoked blue-fish,, bread crisp like a cracker, chocolate and fruit." The words "spiritual" and "immoral" did not exist in their vocabulary. In lieu of the chameleon word "love" they talked (just a bit tediously) of apia (sexual desire) and ania (a high regard "justifying the physical"). They had no formal philosophy, little interest in abstract thought; they practiced a hedonism tempered with kindliness.

There were old and great Islandian families, but none were vastly wealthy, and none knew want. They were free from venereal diseases, and very vigilant lest foreigners import them. They felt a reverence for the soil in which the esthetic and the utilitarian were inseparable. When Consul Lang tried to sell them on the time-saving uses of U.S. farm machinery, they were far less interested in time-saving than in the indecent strain which would be put on their horses.

While John Lang was consul, they faced the greatest crisis in their history. Islandia was almost totally nonindustrial, but rich in natural resources. Representatives of England, France, the U.S. and (most insidiously) Germany worked with Islandia's progressives to open it to the plunderous wonders of international cooperation. As U.S. Consul, John Lang's duties were clear.

So were his convictions--at first. But friendship with the agrarian conservatives confused and incapacitated him. When Washington relieved him of his post he was glad; gladder still when his conservative friends won in Islandia's parliament. Later on, he even took up arms in Islandia's defense, and won what was rarely offered a foreigner: an invitation to spend his life there.

Slow-paced, lucid, and almost without temperature, the tale of Lang's and Islandia's crisis is effortless, fluent reading, spun out in inexhaustible detail. Nowhere on its surface, does it really take tough hold of what it is talking about. But between the lines, and somewhere beneath the full consciousness of its author, it is powerful and revealing in a sense that such fantasies as More's Utopia, Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson could not be.

Those books, products of the youth and prime of an age, blazed with hope and energy. The product of modern time, Islandia is vivid chiefly with the desire for complete escape from the actual world. It tries to make that escape so detailed, so palpable, that it will outrealize reality. It also tries to anatomize (and to dream solutions for) those pressures which have made escape so desirable.

In his career as consul, his personal relationships, and his cloven allegiance toward the U.S. and Islandia, John Lang is forever tortured by indecision and emotional tepidity. He is confused between the ethics of a cultivated New Englander and the ethics which are assigned to Islandians. As Lang says to the American girl whom he ultimately marries, "those who are free of pressure can be sure."

What those pressures were, he seems never clearly to have known. But they were sufficient to bring on fears of responsibility, headaches, moments of amnesia. The psychiatric amateur will recognize them as symptoms of that disease which has afflicted nearly every great symbolic modern hero since Quixote-Panza and Hamlet: schizophrenia.

Islandia is what painters would call a trompe-l'oeil, on a vast scale. It is a remarkably ingenious mural, curious, pleasing to any idle eye, and mildly allegorical. It is also a manifesto, illuminating if unintentional, of modern psychological defeatism.

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