Sturly

Sturly*

A Gobbet of Gelatine Makes Manifest the Life-Stream

The Story. After the mysteries of a certain wedding, consummated over a moss-bed in the headwaters of a French river, an imperceptible gobbet of gelatine floated down the river into the sea. The gobbet sank, down, down into pelagic depths, attached itself to a rose-colored seaweed and swooned away.

When the gobbet awoke, it had a skin. It could not swim, except ver- tically, like a puppy treading water, until its head grew heavy. Then it took on a tight, corrugated armor-corset. Blue flint chippings-teeth-hedged the emery-paper tongue. Filiform barbels, for probing mud, sprouted under the chin. By this time, the gobbet was recognizable as a fish, a young Sturgeon, Sturly.

From minnowhood, Sturly was curious. Feeding shoreward, along the Continental Shelf, he hailed all creatures-from poor groping Shrimps to surly Shong, the Hun Sturgeon. Curiosity became an unrest, a driving instinct to plumb Life.

One day, on a Mediterranean shoal, Sturly pricked his nose against a crawling globe with reddish spines. The globe chuckled, softly. It was old Echinus, the Sea-Urchin, the malefemale, ancestor of the oceans, in whom are all the joys of love and all human knowledge. Sturly was respectful of his counsel.

"The wise have no need of movement," Echinus would say. "Their active thought supplies its place." Or: "The world was chaos; suddenly there shone a great golden egg; it whirled in space. . . . And then there came the first dew upon the first morning of the world, which was the benediction of God and filled the hollows of the egg with heavenly water. . . ."

"Father," interrupted Sturly, "why did God create Life?"

"To exist. . . . He made it with black and white, with south and north, with positive and negative, with good and evil."

But Sturly did not comprehend. Now grown a mail-clad Titan of 500 pounds, he sounded back into the black-glimmering, life-bearing abysses where it seemed all truth must be hidden. He searched the shimmering shoals and sea-gardens of all the oceans, as it is a Sturgeon's destiny to do. He knew all the fish, which ate which, and observed how the vast submarine cosmoplasm is also a vast necropolis.

He met false gods everywhere-an impious Mullet; a stertorous Turtle, like an island; a Siren, scaled in emerald, with a pearl loin-rope and breasts of mother-of-pearl. She told Sturly that Beauty was God, but vanished when he asked her to reconcile Life with Death. (The wreck of a Corsican mail packet heightened this central paradox; for the long pilgrim Sharks came and a Cuttlefish lifted a lady's dress, seeking his dinner).

Echinus told Sturly also of Love; but after Sturly had mated for several years, even that illusion was manifest. It was not communion with God, but merely Life's ruse for perpetuating the species. Sturly grew old.

When he died, battered ashore by tempest, there was a sweet singing from a spring in the sand. It told Sturly that Death cannot be the end of Life. It sang of reincarnation and the cycles of Life. It sang that Life is its own end.

The Significance. Aesop moralized upon Nature. Fabre scrutinized, dramatized, "civilized" her. Melville made her whale an effigy of the wrath of Yahveh. Maeterlinck superimposed upon her an improbable mysticism.

The author of Sturly, in 126-pages, without slighting his ichthyology, not only constructs an intimate natural biography; he also evolves a crystalline artistic metaphor-simple, lofty, profound-for the entire theory of bio-chemical metabolism and the Life-stream. To the layman, whatever his philosophy, it will be an arresting book; a re-readable book.

The Author. Pierre Custot, modest Frenchman, offers Sturly, not to scientists, not to novel-readers, but "to those who like to meditate beside the sea." He has spent years voyaging in strange waters, years pondering fish in books, tanks and hotel bedrooms as well as in their less accessible homes. For reproducing an English Sturly in the finest nuances of submarine color and motion, Author Custot owes thanks to Translator Richard Aldington.

For Detectives

THE LONG GREEN GAZE -Vincent Fuller-Huebsch ($2.00). Reading a detective story, did you ever want to be the detective? Here is your chance-unless you gave up crossword puzzles for Lent. A rapid murder story unfolds -rich old lady, priceless emerald, circle of relatives, mystical Babu-soluble only through the answers to eight puzzles discovered near the crime-scene. For quitters and non-detectives, the answers are sealed in the back of the book.

Georgian

THE LORING MYSTERY -Jeffrey Farnol-Little, Brown ($2.00). Out of his early Georgian property room, Mr. Farnol brings another grand collection of Hessian boots, shirt frills, snuff boxes, rapiers, gleaming dirks. These he disposes as skilfully as of yore. The plot lurks excitingly -how young David Loring came from Virginia to inherit his father's English estates and was tangled, at the peril of his life in the cunning of his Uncle Nevil, diabolical usurper. Murder creeps by night; Anticlea Loring (foundling, not blood-cousin to David) has flaming red hair and a high temper; wedding bells peal over the bad uncle's grave. The minor characters do not quite catch their Dickensian accent, but Farnol is Farnol through the thickest of thick and the gayest of thin.

Trivia

THE SHALLOW END-Major Ian Hay Beith-Houghton, Mifflin ($3.00). This book is dedicated to "the average British crowd"-God bless its sensible heart! Stimulated by the thought that "the shallow end is often much deeper than we think," the gallant Major considers, among other trivia: Midnight Revels (at home and abroad), Legal Cruelty (English courts), Universal Uncles (radiorators), A Rest Cure (English billiards), Graven Images (Madame Tussaud's famed waxworks), Royal and Antient (droll golf talk), The Springs of Laughter (Musical comedy). The vein employed is gentle satire of patent absurdities. Manners are mildly abused; the reader mildly amused. The soundings of the shallow end remain about as charted.

* STURLY-Pierre Custot. Translated by Richard Aldington-Houghton Mifflin ($1.50).