Pierroph i le
Pierrot. By Kay Dick. (Hutchinson, 30s.)
ON an inside flap of the cover, a healthy-looking blonde gazes quizzically at you over the left ear of a miniature dachshund. This is the authoress, holding you like some bright-eyed Modern Mariner; but there is anxiety, too, behind that glittering eye, because Miss Dick knows she is a successful novelist, knows you are going to ask what she is doing in this quasi-scholarly galley, and is uncertain whether to disarm you with science or blandishment. The anxiety is under- standable, for after a few pages of her Quest for Pierrot it becomes apparent that in spite of energy and enthusiasm Miss Dick is no natural scholar, and her attempts to erect a preliminary structure of generalisation resemble nothing so much as a game of spillikins played with boiled spaghetti. This is a very feminine book, but once both you and she have accepted the fact, all goes swimmingly. Miss Dick had bought a painting of an unknown Pierrot (rather a ghastly one, I think, but no matter), and this was her starting- point; for it came to obsess her, drove her to seek out the truth about Pierrot, his stage history, the growth of his personality, his appearances in art and literature, his reflection or censure of society. Here are her findings.
They are fascinating. Obsessive research has made her genuinely illuminating about the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte, and most of all about her hero. She traces him with a wealth of detail from his early-sixteenth-century beginnings as Piero (the victimised and destitute younger brother, honest but sly) to his subse- quent incarnations as Bertoldo (rustic, clownish but sensitive), Bertoldino (more lithe and humorous), Pagliaccio (vulgar, pitiful, idiotic), Gian-Farina (grimmer, more grotesque), Gros- Guillaume (fat and witty), Pedrolino (still naïve, but beginning to be elegant), and at last as him- self: to his years of fame, culminating in the Funambule-Pierrot of Deburau: and his decline to the maudlin-macabre figure of fin de siècle and the vulgarisation of English panto. The trouble is that the whole text becomes pierromor' phic, as if it actually were the biography of someone who had lived for 500 years, br, although Miss Dick must have read hundreds 01 scenarios (and how far were they ever written down?) she is reluctant to give chapter and verse' tell you just which Pierrot she means, and when and where and whose. Often, too, her general's' tions are merely glib, as when she characterises Brighella as 'the spiv, the teddy-boy. the delinquent, the rock-'n'-roller.'
All the same, much emerges of real interest: and apart from Pierrot, one learns a lot about his companions. I had never realised that Colunl' bine was a keen reader of books, or that Halle: quin showed marked homosexual traits; and shall now have a keen eye for the Pantaloons, Captains and Pulcinellas among my own acquaill' tance, and those rarest ones, the Pierrots, with their sly integrity. JOHN HOLMSTRO°
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