No Raspberry

HELENA (247 pp.)--Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($2.75).

Britain's old King Coel, a Roman puppet of the 3rd Century, may have been a merry old soul, but his daughter Helena was a sober young gentlewoman. She made a proper marriage to the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus, and bore him a son who became Constantine the Great. After Constantine had accepted Christianity, the Empress Dowager Helena--by that time a doughty dame of 80 or so--undertook the arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. While there, she discovered in an abandoned cistern two baulks of timber which a great part of the Christian world has ever since accepted as the pieces of the True Cross of Christ.*

Or so Evelyn Waugh, picking his way through facts and legends, tells Helena's story./- Satirist Waugh has put away his satire this time. The religious theme of Helena runs close to the ruling passion of Waugh's life, his adopted Roman Catholicism--perhaps too close to it. Any man with his heart in his mouth must either blurt the whole thing out or be content to say almost nothing at all. In Helena, Waugh says almost nothing at all about his own feelings, about his characters, or about the religious motives that compelled their lives. Not even St. Helena herself is much more than a dignified old lady of purpose.

Waugh makes no great claims for his new book; he calls it "just something to be read; in fact a legend." Yet there can be little doubt, especially when page after page of Waugh's sky-blue prose goes purple with emotion, that the author intended his legend to be literature--a lovingly wrought story that would take its place in the Christian Apocrypha.

Several times in his writing life--in his study of Jesuit Edmund Campion, in Brideshead Revisited, and now in Helena --Author Waugh has tried to clear the satiric brambles out of his literary field, and to plant in their stead the herb of grace. He has had no very impressive crop so far, but most Waugh readers don't mind. They can be pretty sure another season will bring forth a bucketful of raspberries on the old Waugh briers.

*Slivers of this wood are still preserved and venerated in shrines throughout Christendom. In the Middle Ages, the hawking of spurious slivers became a scandal, and it was largely to reassure the faithful that a 19th Century Frenchman, Rohault de Fleury, devoted years to measuring the certified pieces still in existence. Their volume, according to De Fleury, was only 4,000 cubic centimeters, or about 2% of the probable volume of the cross.

/-Waugh follows a 12th Century legend in having Helena born a British princess. The more accepted view: she was born a commoner in Bithynia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.