Poets in Love

THE IMMORTAL LOVERS (344 pp.) --Frances Winwar--Harper ($4).

"I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,--and this is no offhand complimentary letter that I shall write . . . and there a graceful and natural end of the thing . . . In this addressing myself to you--your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart--and I love you too."

When this arrow, dipped in the hot ink of a young poet, transfixed the heart of dear Miss Barrett, one of the most celebrated love stories of the 19th Century began. Nor did it end with the end of the lovers' lives. The Browning story has gone on, as Elizabeth prophesied, "through love's eternity"--though it is not exactly the kind of eternity Elizabeth may have had in mind. It was current a few years ago in a hit play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and in a Hollywood movie in which Robert Browning and his wife appeared like figures in a wax museum--faintly distorted, prettily tinted to public fancy.

The Immortal Lovers wipes the paraffin smirk off their faces. As in her past performances (lives of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Oscar Wilde, George Sand, et al.), Biographer Winwar makes the facts highly readable. The true love story of the Brownings is just as exciting as the semi-fictional versions of it, and far more warmly human.

The main differences: Elizabeth was no lovely hothouse orchid. She had curls, said one visitor, which were "like the pendent ears of a water spaniel, and poor little hands, so thin that when she welcomed you she gave you something like the foot of a young bird." Browning himself, with his big, bumped nose, was scarcely Apollo reincarnate. And Old Man Barrett, though rather like an ogre, was hardly as black as hell's chimney after all; Elizabeth called him "Sweet Puppy."

The lovers' idyl was in reality saddened by Elizabeth's repeated miscarriages and poor health, by Browning's continual worry over his lack of recognition, by the freezing disdain of "Sweet Puppy," who never forgave Elizabeth for marrying.

Still, it was something of an idyl to the end, which came to Elizabeth in Florence, 15 years after their marriage. She died, wrote Browning, in his arms, "kissing me with such vehemence that when I laid her down she continued to kiss the air with her lips . . ." Browning died in Venice, 28 years later, but he was not buried in Florence beside Elizabeth as he had always hoped. Westminster Abbey offered a burial in the Poets' Corner, and Browning's son thought it proper to accept.

Practicing Pessimist

THE BARKEEP OF BLEMONT (280 pp.)--Marcel Ayme--Harper ($3).

Since the war, French fiction has been obsessed with the theme of the Resistance movement. Usually it portrays the movement with the moralistic, black & white simplicity of Zane Grey on the subject of cowboys and rustlers. In dealing with the theme in The Barkeep of Blemont, French Novelist Marcel Ayme has granted it some of the complexity it possesses. Because he has gone beyond mere slogans and asked himself how people actually felt and behaved immediately following France's Liberation, his novel shines with quiet credibility.

Its tragical-comical hero is Leopold, barkeep in a war-damaged town. Leopold, a man of directness, folk wit and occasional sentimentality, attends to his business, drinks a fabulous quantity of wine, affectionately abuses his wife, and is instinctively contemptuous of all fanatics. When bombed-out schoolchildren recite Racine in his bar, used as a part-time classroom, tears creep down his vast purpled cheeks. Fancying himself a tragic poet, he works now & then on the first scene of a drama of which he is to be the hero. Sample:

Let me take Astyanax, we're getting

out of here,

No sense waiting till the cops grab us

from the rear.

Down with Politicians. But Leopold's life is complicated by the political intrigues that zigzag through the town. When a loudmouthed rascal who has found refuge in the local branch of the Communist Party denounces him as a protector of a fascist, Leopold is thrown into jail. There he suffers agonies because he is deprived of his wine. When he is finally released, he bellows his denunciation of all politicians--Communists, Gaullists, "the whole bloody country"--in the town streets. A war profiteer whom he has mocked gets Leopold arrested again. While resisting, he is shot and killed.

The Barkeep of Blemont hardly manages to encompass the round story of the Resistance and Liberation; there was more altruism, idealism and common sense to it than Author Ayme admits. But he does strike a stout blow for the easygoing natural man in his perennial struggle with those to whom "an idea or creed takes precedence over life itself." The rest of Author Ayme's assumption is that the easygoing fellow is doomed from the start.

Up with Pity. Even among the innumerable literary pessimists of Paris, 48-year-old Marcel Ayme sets something of a record in his skepticism about the human, race. A dour man with big ears and a considerable resemblance to Buster Keaton, he has a reputation for his provoking silences in company. (When Andre Gide kindly congratulated him on one of his plays recently, Ayme stared at the old master without saying a word.) In his books, there are only two emotions Ayme has any use for, humor and pity.

Politically, he has been no more distinguished than his hero Leopold. During the war he acted as if there were no war, contributed stories to collaborationist papers. When others, writing in French magazines, denounce his wartime course, he shrugs them off as "professionals of the Liberation." His friends have tried to excuse him by saying that he wrote anti-racist stories which the Nazi censor rejected, but he himself offers no defense for what he did or did not do. As a practicing pessimist, he prefers to meet such, questions, as he does most others, merely with a silent stare.

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