Smoke, Froth, Snort!

Two young lovers strolled arm in arm into Death's own mausoleum. "The urn can be our cup of passion," said the young woman joyfully, "and the ashes will make a carpet for love."

While they were inside, Death remained outside and prepared to destroy mankind. Death was presented as a grotesque buffoon called Nekrozotar, dressed something like a frogman, with huge teeth painted over his upper and lower jaws. "Aiee," cried Nekrozotar. "Smoke, froth, snort: animal! Make way for death! Shake the bells, set up altars, light candles, spray holy water, gnash your teeth, cry with bloody tears, chew ashes, devour each other, kiss each other, go to the left, go to the right, go up, go down, burn incense. The old world is going to perish. Hiue! Hey!"

After the end of the world, the lovers emerge from the mausoleum to find a universe cleansed. "The hour will come when you will ripen and burst, and we shall harvest the fruits of our love," the young man says. "A trace of us will remain, etched in flesh, and nothing more eternal will ever be built more proudly or more boldly than the flesh of our flesh perfumed with ash."

Fad Coming. These were fragments from A Song for the Dance of Death, by the late Belgian Playwright Michel de Ghelderode, performed on CBS's religious series, Lamp Unto My Feet. The program's host hailed Ghelderode as a sort of dark messiah of the implied positive, whose generally malevolent characters actually yearn steadily for God. Other critics have said that in this century of despair, no more despairing voice--they variously compare it to lonesco's and even Brecht's--has rolled through the black caverns of the absurd.

Ghelderode was a recluse who lived most of his life in a room full of marionettes, dress-shop dummies, swords, armor and sea shells. His work was somewhat ignored in Europe and almost totally in the U.S. He died last April--and now it seems that he is about to surface as an intellectually fashionable fad.

Critic Eric Bentley once nominated him for a Nobel Prize. Theatre Arts printed his Pantagleize last summer, with an awed introduction by young Playwright Jack Richardson. As is necessary for any great name about to be "discovered," he has his complement of American professor-knights, who, while constantly deploring a world that has taken insufficient notice of their writer-king, are always ready to skewer anyone else who dares to mention the hallowed name.

Unexperienced Sounds. Michel de Ghelderode often took his inspiration from the canvases of Flemish painters. His Magpie on the Gallows, for example, takes its name and theme from Pieter Brueghel's painting, in which sturdy peasants dance defiantly in the shadow of the gallows. In a series of radio interviews recorded in Ostend twelve years ago, known to fans as "The Ostend Interviews," Ghelderode offered probably the only deep glimpse into his habits and personality that he permitted during his lifetime.

In the interviews, he proved for any doubter that behind the strange and medieval obscurities of his work, there was not a simulated intelligence but a wide and eccentric one, bent on its own course. He drenched himself in the horrors of Inquisitional Spain (one of his best plays is the one-act Escurial). He was a believer in the supernatural; he considered the human senses incomplete, and he was convinced that there are sounds, colors and perfumes that man has never experienced. "To the title of intellectual, which stinks, I prefer that of artisan," he said, "which has a good smell."

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