ANNA AND THE KING OF SIAM—Margaret London—John Day ($3.75).
When Anna Leonowens entered the service of the King of Siam, that progressive monarch had 9,000 women in his harem. They lived in a small city adjoining his palace. In the center was a garden and artificial lake, where the princesses bathed and picked water lilies. There was a theater, a gymnasium, a temple where Anna Leonowens taught English. There were blacksmith shops, slave quarters, barracks for the amazon guards. King Mongkut and a few priests were the only men allowed inside its high stone walls.
From 1862 to 1867 Anna Leonowens lived there. When she got out she wrote articles for the Atlantic Monthly, lectured, turned out two forgotten books: The English Governess at the Siamese Court, and The Romance of the Harem. Last week her story was revived.
Singapore Schoolmarm. Anna arrived in the Far East in November 1849, by 1862 was reduced to teaching school for officers' children in Singapore.
When the King of Siam invited Anna to Bangkok, the royal summons read: "And we hope that in doing your education on us and on our children (whom English call inhabitants of benighted land) you will do your best endeavor for knowledge of English language, science, and literature, and not for conversion to Christianity. . . . We beg to invite you to our royal palace to do your best endeavorment upon us and our children. ..."
What makes Anna and the King of Siam quietly engrossing reading is that ts fantastic story is true. Author Margaret Landon heard about Anna during her own ten-year stay in Siam. She read Anna's books and, in a chance meeting in 1939 in Evanston, Ill., met people who had known Anna. Anna and the King of Siam consists of 391 pages (with neat line drawings by Margaret Ayer) condensed from Anna's own discursive, old-fashioned writing. It is "75 percent fact, and 25 per cent fiction based on fact." Gilbert & Sullivan King. The King of Siam was a character out of Gilbert & Sullivan — except that when he tortured people, they died. When Anna arrived at Bangkok she met the full force of cold, Oriental impoliteness. She was insulted, neglected, frightened, sneered at, as soon as she was safely in the King's grasp.
The thick-necked, barbaric, half-naked Prime Minister of Siam himself met her at the ship — but only to tell her that she was most unwelcome, that no arrange ments had been made for her care. Anna gritted her teeth, stayed on.