Oh, Sing Again That Song of Venery

Back in the spring of 1926, that idyllic period which now seems to have been part of the Golden Age, there throve midway along West Eighth Street, in Greenwich Village, a restaurant known as Alice McCollister’s. It had a pleasant back-­yard garden, where tweedy, artistic folk were wont to breakfast on Sunday mornings, equably discussing such avant-­gardist tendencies as Foujita’s painting, the novels of Floyd Dell, and the composographs of Peaches Browning. Every once in a while, the Sabbath peace veiling the premises would be fractured by a piercing clarinet arpeggio from above, and, looking up in irritation, the patrons would perceive a strange figure seated on the fourth-­floor window sill of an adjoining building. His gaunt face was strikingly similar to that of George Arliss, an illusion he fostered by affecting the sort of monocle worn by the star of The Green Goddess. His hair, luxuriant as a fat-­tailed sheep’s, hung low on his neck, and the visible portion of his body was clad in a Russian tunic decorated with red and blue cross-­stitch. Braced in the window frame, his licorice stick wailing forth a freehand version of “Milenberg Joys,” Hilary Tremayne would be notifying the world in his usual heterodox fashion that he was a free spirit. He would also be giving his three roommates, of whom I was the sleepiest, a persistent pain in the fundament.

Considering that we all shared a chamber roughly seventeen by twelve for six months, I knew relatively little about Hilary, but what little I knew was enough. An actor by profession, he had early adopted the name of Tremayne as a stylish variant of his own, which was, I believe, either Troutman or Appenzeller. His major acting triumphs had occurred south of Fourteenth Street, in Restoration comedies at the Cherry Lane, though on one occasion he had impersonated a faun in the Theatre Guild production of Franz Werfel’s Goat Song. Currently, he was attending Richard Boleslavsky’s school of the drama, and he was forever using terms like “dynamics,” “spatial interplay,” and “Aristotelian progression” to explain what went on behind the footlights. Guilfoyle and Froelich, the two other roommates, were the only members of our quartet with any semblance of a steady income. The former, a neat, bloodless youth, worked as bookkeeper at a stevedoring concern down around Bowling Green. He was engaged to a deeply devout girl in Brooklyn who disapproved of his bohemian associates, and, when he was not escorting her to vespers, which was seldom indeed, hovered before the mirror searching his alabaster skin for blemishes. Froelich, a salesman for household appliances and the Don Juan of the fraternity, was no older than the rest of us, but his excursions into a thousand boudoirs had given him a premature suavity and polish that, as he freely admitted, turned women’s bones to water at a single glance. Ninety per cent of the incoming calls on our telephone were beamed at Froelich—lovelorn wives whose husbands were away on business trips and who thirsted for his ministrations, he said, with a self-­deprecatory shrug, and patted his receding hairline. I often wondered why he stayed in the Village, since, like Guilfoyle’s fiancée, he professed intense scorn for its crackpot literati and painters. One day, he enlightened me. He hoped to compose popular songs eventually, and felt he owed it to his muse to steep himself in a milieu charged with significant new rhythms. “Besides,” he added pensively, “there’s a lot of gorgeous quail in this section.”

Wave on wave of such Proustian memories—well, if not waves, a needle shower—buffeted me the other day when, cropping through a Pennsylvania country library, I came across a copy of a book called Leonie of the Jungle, by Joan Conquest. Miss Conquest’s novel was one item of my spiritual pabulum in that remote era—the roast course, you might say. I read it at Froelich’s recommendation (his literary taste was as catholic as his choice of bedfellows), and if it did nothing else, it at least spared me the expense of an electric heater those chilly spring evenings. Though I had long ago forgotten the background, characters, and plot, I distinctly remembered it as a lollapaloosa; even plucking the volume from the shelf produced a vague incandescence in my cheeks, comparable to the effect of a double Chartreuse. I stole a sidelong look at the librarian, nodding over her rubber stamps, and, with a quick, shoplifter’s gesture, whipped it under my mackinaw. Whether it was guilt that made my heart pound all the way home or the evocative powers of the book, I cannot say for certain, but by the time I reached my own rooftree, I was in a lather of perspiration.

It began to dawn on me shortly after rereading a few pages that my crime was doubly heinous in that I had mulcted an object of no value whatever; far from robbing the library, in fact, I had unwittingly done a salutary job of scavenging. Somewhere over the past quarter century, the juice of the novel had calcified, or my nature had so coarsened that it derived very little moxie from the tale of an English girl’s enslavement by a sinister Indian sect. Nevertheless, kleptomaniac and boor though I had become, I still had enough decency not to fling it aside with a snap judgment. Lighting up a Murad to induce nostalgia, and greasing my face with butter to protect it from the burning prose, I wallowed into the text like a Channel swimmer leaving Cape Gris-­Nez.

The heroine of Leonie of the Jungle makes her curtsy to us at the age of seven in a locale largely unexplored in the fiction of the budding twenties—a psychoanalyst’s office. An orphan afflicted with somnambulism and malevolent dreams, she has been brought to a Harley Street specialist named Sir Jonathan Cuxson by her aunt, Lady Susan Hetth. Leonie is a veritable dewdrop of a child, with opalescent, gold-­flecked eyes and a lisp that would melt the glue out of a revolving bookcase. The mention of a possible jog on a pony, for instance, precipitates the following: “ ‘I can’t wide astwide,’ she sighed. ‘I haven’t any bweeches. . . . But I can swim, an’ jump in out of my depff. I learnt in the baff at the seaside!’ ” Inquiries by Sir Jonathan establish that an Indian nurse gained a strong ascendancy over Leonie during her babyhood in India and may even have endowed her with strange psychic potency. The latter supposition is confirmed at the Zoo, to which she is taken by Jan, the Doctor’s son; she handles a ravening Bengal tiger at will, doubtless anesthetizing the beast with her dialogue. “ ‘Poor tiger!’ she was saying. ‘I’m vewwy sowwy for you—I’m sure you’re not so vewy, vewy wicked, an’ if you will bend your head, I will stwoke you behind the ear same as I did Kitty.’ ” Thanks to a chicken-­hearted social system that forbids euthanasia for people who talk this way, Leonie is permitted to grow up and go to boarding school, where she practices sleepwalking almost as intensively as her colleagues do field hockey. In consequence, she is considered rather odd, an estimate that has some physical justification also, for the author says of her hands that “the fingers were like pea-­pods, long and slender and slightly dimpled.” You could hardly expect anybody, let alone a group of teen-­age girls, to warm up to an ambulatory mess of greens drifting around in the moonlight and chanting, “I make oblation . . . let the gods come well willing!” It’s vewwy unnerving, reawwy.

Her schooling finished, Leonie settles down on the north Devon coast with her aunt and there is forced into wedding Sir Walter Hickle, a loathsome, baseborn blackmailer who has been preying on Lady Susan. The union is particularly odious because, before it takes place, Leonie has met Jan Cuxson again and fallen in love with him. Jan, now a physician carrying on his father’s work, chances to spy her during a somnambulistic seizure in which she executes a voluptuous belly dance invoking Kali, the Indian goddess of death. He tries to convince her that she is not daffy, as the evidence would indicate, but simply the victim of long-­range mesmerism from India, interlarding the diagnosis with feverish busses and appeals to marry him instead of Sir Walter. That Leonie should mulishly reject his suit when it is open and shut that they are unavoidably headed for the same ostermoor seems a shade quixotic. Still, Miss Conquest has two hundred pages of Oriental monkeyshines to vend, and no parenthetical smooching is going to upset her applecart. The marriage, therefore, takes place on schedule; Jan, unreconciled, departs for India to track down Leonie’s incubus—presumably by advertising in the incubus column of the Bombay Daily Mail—and en route receives the cheery news that Sir Walter has perished in a fire on his wedding night. This deft bit of author’s convenience effectively preserves the heroine’s virginity for the second half of the book, when it will be called upon to weather truly hideous ordeals, and now the real fireworks begin.

The Svengali actually responsible for Leonie’s trauma, it appears, is a prince’s son named Madhū Krishnaghar, who by sorcery and incantation has been striving to lure her back to the Peninsula to serve as his plaything and as priestess to Kali. His fiendish magic prevails. A few weeks later, we join the bewitched maiden aboard a liner steaming up the Hooghly, sleepwalking thirteen to the dozen. Madhū, a charm boy resembling Ramon Novarro at his prime, has sneaked on at Colombo, and here is the vision he sees as she trips out on deck in her nightgown: “She made an arresting picture as she stood listening intently, her flimsy garment falling away from her shoulders, leaving the slender white back bare to the waist, while she held handfuls of the transparent stuff crushed against her breast, upon which lay a jewel hung from a gold chain. . . . Sweetly she laughed up into his face as she laid one little hand upon the great white cloak which swung from his shoulders, unaware that in moving her hand her own garment had slipped, and that her beauty lay exposed like a lotus bud before his eyes. She came so close that her bare shoulder touched the fine white linen, and the curves of her scarlet lips were but a fraction of an inch from his own; and her whispered words in the eastern tongue were as a flame to an oil well.” Even across the gulf of twenty-­five years, I can still remember the thread of saliva that coursed down Froelich’s chin as he read the foregoing passage aloud to us. His carnal instincts, I suppose, had been so whetted on importunate housewives that he found the sweetmeat irresistible. Madhū Krishnaghar, while sorely beset, displays greater self-­control: “No movement of his body, but he gave a jerk of his willpower which brought the veins out like whipcord on his forehead, and drove the nails deep into the palms of his hands.” In this awkward condition, he is plainly in no shape to wreak his will of Leonie, and she disembarks unsullied at Calcutta, blissfully ignorant, like Clarissa Harlowe, that her virtue is about to undergo further titanic stresses.

For a while, all is fun and games. Leonie turns the heads of the local sahibs, who haven’t seen a podful of fresh peas since leaving Gib; she comports herself splendidly on a tiger shoot; and she pitches some woo with Dr. Jan, who, of course, behaves with gentlemanly British restraint even though the vapor is whistling from his ears. In a scene where he holds her “crushed to the point of agony against him with his mouth upon the sweetness of her neck,” the author grows rather tart because he doesn’t assert himself more strongly. “Heavens!” she exclaims. “What fools some men can be with that jungle animal woman within their hands! . . . Good heavens, why didn’t he take her in his arms and smother her up against his heart, or put a bag over her head, or failing the bag, put his hand before her eyes?” At any rate, bored with his spineless grazing on her neck and his namby-­pamby proposals, Leonie succumbs to the magnetism being exerted on her by Madhū Krishnaghar and takes off on a sightseeing tour of Benares. In the cupola of a temple near the holy city, Madhū, ostensibly acting as her guide, slips her a goof ball that paralyzes her will, and uncorks a plethora of such incendiary phrases as “thou white doe,” “thou virgin snow,” and so forth. Leonie responds with an abandon that would shame a dish of junket: “Wave after wave swept her from head to foot, causing her body, untrammeled by whalebone, to tremble against his, and he loosened the white cloak and let it fall, holding her pressed to him in her thin silk dress, laughing down at her, delighting in her eyes, her mouth, her throat.” Yet before the sparks she has generated can leap into a holocaust, Miss Conquest perversely stamps them out. “He had not the slightest intention of doing her any harm,” she notes, pursing her lips into a prim line, “but with the whole of his vividly mature brain and virgin body, he delighted in the effect of the drug upon the woman he loved.” In other words, just a fun-­loving kid motivated by curiosity, like any adolescent with his first chemistry kit.

The gambol in the cupola, it soon transpires, is merely antipasto for a real shindig at the Praying Ghats, the sacred stairs fronting the Ganges. Here, under the malign influence of Kali, Madhū and Leonie dunk each other in the river, hemstitch their frames with daggers, and generally take advantage of every inch of platitude allowed by the postal laws.

As the pressure intensifies and ecstasy fogs the author’s lens, Leonie enters what can only be described as a chronic state of near-­ravishment: “Leonie lay still, unconscious of the sound and the subtle change creeping over the man who bent down to her, and who, high-­caste, over-­educated, overstrung, aflame with love and afire with the sensuality of his religion, slowly tightened his hand upon the gracious curves of the slender throat.” This and ancillary didos culminate in a whopper of an orgy at an adjacent temple, from which Leonie is delivered with her camisole in ribbons but her chastity, Gott sei Dank, intact. By now, to be excessively blunt, the reader would cheerfully assent to the game’s being called on account of darkness, Madhū awarded the trophy on a technicality, and the arena hosed down. Whatever Miss Conquest’s deficiencies as a novelist, however, she has one inflexible tenet: She never gives short weight.

Jan Cuxson, we discover in a flashback, has not failed his beloved, and through all her vicissitudes has been hot on her scent. Comparatively hot, that is; at the moment, he lies prisoner, chained to a ring in the wall, in the very temple where Leonie was drugged. His captor is a fanatical old priest who forgets to feed him for days at a time and occasionally spits on him, but, like Madhū, isn’t really a bad egg: “The fine old man had no intention of torturing the white man, he had merely bound him to the ring until his goddess should inspire him, her servant, with her wishes.” Gramps, as one is tempted to dub him, reveals to Jan that he consecrated Leonie as a baby to the divinity and that she will ultimately fetch up at his altar to be sacrificed. To save excessive travel and assure himself of a ringside seat at the blowoff, Jan sensibly decides to sit tight and await developments. In due time, Madhū and Leonie descend on the district, pale with exertion, but still full of ginger. They have been skittering all over western Bengal, playing puss in the corner and exchanging speeches like “Thy mouth is even as the bimba fruit, which is warm and soft, and thy chin is like a mango stone, and thy neck like unto a conch shell which I encircle with both hands.” If any prospective Ph.D. longs to investigate the role of the neck in erotic literature, he has a mine of source material in Leonie of the Jungle. At all events, Leonie suddenly throws off Madhū’s spell, realizes her degradation, and spurns his love; he, incensed, hands her over to the priest, and then, just as she is about to be skewered, relents and averts the sacrificial blade. Simultaneously, Jan bursts his bonds, and the over-­wrought author caps her climax with the classic device for finishing any story, “the greatest earthquake that ever swept the Sunderbunds Jungle.” Madhū and the priest, quite properly, are expunged—the latter, with true consideration, releasing Leonie from the hex with his dying breath—and the lovers clinch in the afterglow. “There has been a bit of an earthquake, dear,” Jan discloses in reply to his affinity’s questions, “and you got hit on the head by a piece of falling brick.” Leonie, her opalescent, gold-­flecked eyes like saucers, demands reassurance: “Where are we going to? Where are you taking me?” “To Devon, beloved,” returns Jan, sealing her mouth with honest, Occidental-­type kisses. “To Devon and happiness!”

There is an old saying in my part of Pennsylvania, and I wish I could convey its sonorous beauty in Pennsylvania Dutch, that he who filches library books is a Schwein and that unto him there will subsequently come a day of reckoning. I never dreamt what wisdom the adage contains or how swiftly vengeance would overtake my transgression. Barely had I lifted my head from the last page of the book when my collar button, released from the tension it had been under for the previous two hours, popped off and struck the reading lamp, shivering it to smithereens. The room was plunged in darkness, and as I sat there, stunned, a low, sepulchral, and extremely horrid voice addressed me. “Ham abhi ate hai,” it said forebodingly. “Ham abhi ate hai.” Which, as the least accomplished student of Hindustani knows, means “I come—I come.” It might have issued from the Pennsylvania Library Association or from some recondite Indian deity, but I had no overpowering urge to inquire. With a bound, I lit out onto the lawn, where I could have plenty of room to rassle. I caught a hell of a cold, spent three days in bed, and still can’t figure out a way to return the book gracefully. Has anybody got a reliable fence? Has anybody got a single suggestion or, for that matter, an iota of pity? Me, I’ve got nothing—just rhinitis, a first edition of Leonie of the Jungle, and a podful of remorse.