Fact and Fiction

THE ABODE OF LOVE (214 pp.)--Aubrey Menen--Scribner ($3.50).

Is Buntism incurable? Many people, including England's witty Irish-Indian novelist, Aubrey (The Prevalence of Witches) Menen, answer with a firm yes. They point out that 1) Buntism has attacked men and women from the beginning of recorded history, 2) there is reason to believe that Buntism is fundamental to life itself.

Buntism derives from Sergeant Matthew Bunt, a British Marine who was two years a castaway on an uninhabited Pacific islet early in the igth century. When prim Captain Overton of H.M.S. Achilles stopped by, Marine Bunt, greeting him on the beach, showed some outer symptoms of extreme Buntism--"a paunch that hung over the belt of his tattered drawers, and cheeks which shook." But Captain Overton did not recognize the signs. "Show me round your little kingdom, Sergeant Crusoe," ordered the captain, "the stockaded hut and the wheat patch and the goat pen, and so on. This promises to be one of the most interesting days of my life."

It was. Despicable Sergeant Bunt was racked by the ailment which bears his name and signifies an obsessive desire for the other sex. He had wasted no time stockading huts or seeding patches. First he had made himself a wife out of old canvas and straw, fully intending (he assured Captain Overton) "to go straight with her." Alas, "just for a bit of variety," Bunt had then made himself a girl friend named Lola, who had long hair of combed ship's rope. When quarreling broke out between the two women, said Sergeant Bunt, he took Lola's side, killed off his wife and buried her (he showed Overton the grave, with flowers on it).

Paid in Pink Shells. It was but a beginning. In a cave, the entrance to which was marked by a ship's red lantern, dismayed Captain Overton found many "immoral effigies" of ladies constructed of gourds and coconut shells. They were brightly but lightly dressed in "a set of signal flags." Inside the cave were bucketfuls of pink sea shells. "I made myself pay one [pink shell] every time I went . . .," Bunt explained, hoping that this example of self-control would show that he had tried at least to keep some check on his Buntism.

Sergeant Bunt is by far the most endearing and best drawn character in this scandalous novel--perhaps because he is a figment of Author Menen's vivid, jocular imagination. Most of the other characters in The Abode of Love have not this advantage. They are real, and so are most of the activities around which Menen builds this rococo piece of history told "in the form of a novel." The Rev. Henry James Prince (who takes the scabrous Bunt under his wing and is the principal character) was a flesh-and-blood renegade clergyman. In the 18403 Prince founded his own religion. With the fortunes of his followers he purchased an estate in Somerset, named it Agapemone (Abode of Love), and moved in with about 60 "brothers" and "sisters." The Abode featured a church with stained-glass windows, but which differed from most churches in its other furnishings, e.g., there was a billiard table, a Persian carpet and "a red sofa near a bright fire."

History is vague as to how many of Prince's "sisters" were also his wives (certainly more than one was), but in Menen's clever hands, Prince's religion is devoted simply and solely to Buntism. Prince's text is St. Paul's: "It is better to marry than to burn" (7 Corinthians 7:9), interpreted by Prince and his followers to mean in effect, "Marry whenever you have an attack of Buntism." In the Abode, attacks were frequent.

Embrace, Don't Wrestle. The Abode was "a place of dalliance, and nothing but dalliance. Sergeant Bunt's two years on his island had taught Prince that such a life could be satisfying for the right sort of person." The creed behind the Abode--that if Buntism is embraced, instead of wrestled with, it ceases to be a problem--may be all very well in real life, but it is usually bad in fiction. A good novel demands what the purists call "conflict," i.e., wrestling, and Author Menen fails to meet this demand. This is the only weakness, and a limited one at that, in a book that should make any sufferer from Buntism able to laugh out loud at his affliction.

History's Pageant

A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES, VOL. I: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN (521 pp.)--Winston S. Churchill --Dodd, Mead ($6).

This book was begun 20 years ago, but History kept interrupting the author. How Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill met those interruptions, especially of World War II, is, of course, celebrated history in its own right. Indeed, Churchill the Statesman so shaped world affairs as to give Churchill the Author-Historian a com paratively happy ending for his massive four-volume work-in-progress, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

The work is an expanded, revised and substantially rewritten version of the single volume Churchill had in mind two decades ago. Subtitled The Birth of Britain, this first volume (approximately one-sixth of which has appeared prior to publication in the pages of LIFE) reaches back to the Stone and Bronze Age mists, and ends in the cruel glare of the last of the Plantagenet kings, Shakespeare's famed villain, crookbacked Richard III. It is written with Churchill's native flair for the dramatic and the renowned prose rhetoric that rumbles like summer thunder and flashes with aphoristic lightning.

King Above Force. It will scarcely seem strange that Churchill has looked upon his ancient island race and found it, on the whole, good. From the Roman conquest to the Norman, from the famed battles of Crecy and Agincourt to the fratricidal Wars of the Roses, from the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas a Becket to the signing of Magna Carta, the History grinds no axes and pulls no surprises.

Churchill has a predilection, an understandable one, for the strong and resolute hero who brings order out of a moment of historic chaos and crisis. And in his heroes one often catches a sharp glimpse of Churchill himself. Of Alfred the Great he writes: "[The] sublime power to rise above the whole force of circumstances, to remain unbiased by the extremes of victory or defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster, to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to have faith in men after repeated betrayals, raises Alfred far above the turmoil of barbaric wars to his pinnacle of deathless glory." If Alfred could pass for an early Sir Winston, so too, perhaps, could the image of Richard, "Cceur de Lion": "He loved war, not so much for the sake of glory or political ends, but as other men love science or poetry, for the excitement of the struggle and the glow of victory." Yet Churchill's summing up of Richard is masterfully caustic: "His life was one magnificent parade, which, when ended, left only an empty plain."

Liberty Under Law. Is history itself, perhaps, only an empty plain full of ghostly paraders? Churchill clearly thinks not. The kings and desperate men, the princes secular and spiritual, the meek and the mighty who throng his pages, are part of a moral pageant illustrating not only the perennial condition of man, but the nascent tradition of individual liberty under law which was to become so distinctively Anglo-American. It is to that tradition that Sir Winston tacitly dedicates his book--"in the hope that contemplation of the trials and tribulations of our fore fathers may not only fortify the English-speaking peoples of today, but also play some small part in uniting the whole world."

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