World's End

I LIVE UNDER A BLACK SUN--Edith Sit-well--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Of England's group of brilliant, middleaged, aristocratic women writers, whose leading light is Virginia Woolf, six-foot Poet Edith Sitwell is the most backwardly brilliant of them all. Obscure in her poetry, subacid in her satire, she finds the 18th Century real, the present ghostly.

I Live Under a Black Sun, her first novel, combines all these quiddity qualities. It contains two interwoven stories.

One, comprising most of the book, is an intense, imaginative version of Swift's tormented love life with Stella and Vanessa.

The other concerns a poor girl who marries the German who killed her lover in the World War. During Swift's madness the two lovers appear as his servants. Few readers will be able to follow Author Sitwell's symbolical connection between the modern world and the egomania that drove Swift to destroy the lives of Stella and Vanessa because he would neither live with them nor leave them alone.

In the modern world Swift's egomania is translated into "two nations, the rich and the poor, walking to their death in opposed hordes, [bound together by] a cannibalistic greed, hatred, and fear. . . ."

It is a world like T. S. Eliot's Wasteland--an end-of-the-world world where "in the muttering heat, the race of pygmies runs, worm's spawn beginning in the worm's shape, ending with the worm, pullulating, multiplying, and festering, conglomerating their littleness, spreading and aggrandizing it under the huge sun, joining together in a love that is the joining of the cloven maggot, engendering little hopes, little fears, throwing up small sprays of dust, spray by spray, till they have made a universe of dust." In vigorous poetic passages like this, I Live Under a Black Sun sometimes produces a darkly exciting agitation--something like the distress of chickens when an unseen hawk is overhead, or like the uneasiness of readers who do not know what the author is driving at.

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