BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON—Rebecca West—Viking ($7.50).
One day in 1934 British Novelist Rebecca West, who was listening to the radio in a hospital, called her nurse and said:
"I must speak to my husband at once. A most terrible thing has happened. The King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated."
"Oh dear!" said the nurse, "did you know him?"
"No."
"Then why do you think it's so terrible?"
The nurse's question made Rebecca West remember that the word "idiot" comes from a Greek root meaning a private person, and that idiocy is a "female defect" of women intent on leading their own lives.
The assassination of Alexander led Novelist West: 1) to think back to other political murders she remembered from her youth; 2) to go to a private projection where she had the newsreel of the murder of Alexander run over & over again; 3) to make a trip to Yugoslavia; 4) to write Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an omnibus record of her journey—part travelogue, part history, part philosophical and political asides—one of the most passionate, eloquent, violent, beautifully written books of our time.
Three Murders. The murder of Alexander is only the first sinister chord struck in this intensely symphonic book. First of Author West's youthful memories was the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth by the anarchist Luccheni in 1898. "He was an Italian born in Paris of parents forced to emigrate by their poverty and trodden down into an alien criminal class: that is to say, he belonged to an urban population . . . which wandered often workless and always traditionless, without power to control its destiny. It was indeed most appropriate that he should register his discontent by killing Elizabeth, for Vienna is the archetype of the great city which breeds such a population. . . . Luccheni said with his stiletto to the symbol of power, 'Hey, what are you going to do with me?' He made no suggestions. ... It was the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit to offer suggestions. . . ."
When Novelist West was ten, "Alexander Obrenovitch, King of Serbia, and his wife Draga were murdered in the Palace at Belgrade, and their naked bodies thrown out of their bedroom into the garden. . . . The crime lingered in my mind only because of its nightmare touches. The conspirators blew open the door of the Palace with a dynamite cartridge which fused the electric lights, and they stumbled about blaspheming in the darkness, passing into a frenzy of cruelty that was half terror. The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.
.. . "But now I realize that when Alexander and Draga fell from that balcony the whole of the modern world fell with them. It took some time to reach the ground and break its neck, but its fall started then."