Of Baggages and Kings
GREEN, MONTGOMERY M.
Of Baggages and Kings Reviewed by Montgomery M. Green The Death of Kings. By Charles Wertenbaker. Random House.478 pp.$3.95. King Richard II, who mooned around urging people to "sit upon the...
...The deep-dyed villain of the piece is an editor named Angus Griswold, an ex-Communist who has adapted Leninist methods to the crucifixion of mixed-up eggheads...
...These self-crowned monarchs are five ink-stained editors and the publisher of a powerful newsmagazine which the book's foreword solemnly assures us does not represent any particular journal...
...But, in spite of all the Kinsey stuff, Mr...
...In both cases, the demoniacal subject never quite emerges from the swirling smoke and brimstone clearly enough to be identified...
...One blue-eyed houri --called, perhaps symbolically, Fanny --negotiates the entire round of the royal bedchambers, and ends up as wife of the hero-narrator, Robert Berkely...
...He is never actually seen...
...He replied: "The scenery is wonderful, but the cast is lousy...
...Like Richard, these "kings" fall on their faces at the end--all except Louis Barron, the "power-hungry" publisher...
...Wertenbaker's extended treatment of the "China Lobby" in the Reporter two years ago...
...In their personal lives, these journalistic potentates most of all resemble Henry the Eighth or Farouk...
...Griswold reminds one of Mr...
...Wertenbaker's name disappeared from the Christmas-tree masthead of Time in 1949 after some 15 years in the upper branches...
...Through a devilishly elaborate frameup engineered by Griswold, Dick Elgin, perhaps the most confused of all the kingly pundits, is sent to jail for perjury by the "wolf-faced" counsel of a Senate investigating committee...
...Wertenbaker's book is not merely a better-written Forever Amber...
...Between-times, she takes on the staff of the London bureau, plus all other foreign correspondents who happen not to be too drunk or engrossed in a poker game...
...Their downfall is recorded in some masterly if over-introspective writing, and most of the action takes place in bed...
...King Richard II, who mooned around urging people to "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings," was himself a bit of a sad sack in the play...
...But somehow, while vaguely conceding that the five unhorsed "kings" were wrong and the kingpin Louis was right, the author fires his barbs at the latter while treating the former as noble if bathetic figures...
...The final 75 pages pack a political Mickey Finn of truly Lattimorean potency...
...In those rare passages where he is allowed to speak, Barron makes infinitely more political sense than the other five principals put together...
...He skulks in crowded elevators, behind dark glasses and a shielding newspaper...
...So are the "kings of the revolution" whose sad stories are told in Charles Wertenbaker's novel, The Death of Kings...
...and (2) Alger Hiss was framed...
...The dual point is made that (1) anti-Communists, and especially former Communists, are poisonous...
...These ideas develop through schizophrenic maunderings by the various cuckolded idealists --paradoxically, as they are reaching the realization that Louis Barron had clearly foreseen the Communist menace while they had not...
...The whole novel recalls the story about the Broadway comedian who, on arriving in Hollywood, was asked what he thought of the place...
...The similarity to the Hiss case is by no means exact, but it is made perfectly obvious nevertheless...
...The wife-swapping that takes place among these idealistic young world-savers is surpassed only by the traffic density of their mistresses...
...Griswold lurks in sinister obscurity, just off stage to the Right...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 15
