Mephitic Glooms

By A.T. Baker

LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS

by THOMAS BURKE

304 pages. Horizon Press. $6.95.

"By daylight a cold, nauseous light hangs about it; at night a devilish darkness settles upon it. You know, perhaps, the fried-fish shops that punctuate every corner in the surrounding maze of streets . . . and the lurid-seeming creatures that glide from nowhere into nothing--Arab, Laskar, Pacific Islander, Chinky, Hindoo, and so on, each carry ing his own perfume. You know, too . . . the cobbly courts, the bestrewn alleys, through which at night gas jets asthmatically splutter; and the mephitic glooms and silences of the dockside."

Thus wrote Thomas Burke, describing the place where he was born and grew up: the brawling, sinister area that was London's Limehouse district before World War I. Out of his memories and a highly developed sense of melodrama, he produced a series of short stories called Limehouse Nights. The book was published in 1916, an era whose image of itself was still that of Galsworthy's Forsytes and the Bellamys of TV's Upstairs, Downstairs. Burke was hailed then as savagely realistic. His book has lived on ever since as a kind of eccentric minor classic, a status that has been recognized by Horizon Press, which recently reissued it with an admiring but judicious foreword by a critic of such probity as Alfred Kazin.

Snakes and Parrots. Burke called his stories "tales" and had no illusion about their realism. In his Limehouse, Fu Manchu stalks opium dens; every flower girl has a "lily-white bosom" and is generally no older than 14--Burke seemed to have a pre-Nabokov feeling for nymphets. There are sharp krisses, malevolent white parrots and deadly snakes. It is, in fact, a never-never land that encloses the reader in a cave of such hypnotic mandarin prose as the following:

"From his pallid face, the boy expressed the bitter essence of contempt which the weak have for all that is piti less and strong. His mouth made rude noises. His fingers interpreted them . . He slouched away, his feet seeming not in complete accord with his knees. A lurid sunset turned a last sickly smile upon him before it died."

They don't write like that any more. Not even Burke did in his later years (he died in 1945), when he had learned sophistication and turned out unmemorable travel books and verse. Too bad. For the charm of Limehouse Nights out lasts fashion -- egregious and outrageous as a Tiffany lamp. .A.T. Baker

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