PROMETHEUS
fantasia on the life of Professor J. R. Neave, otherwise known as Ironfoot Jack," and many of his London readers will feel, examining the portrait opposite the title-page, that they have
seen the subject before: the long feminine lock of greasy hair falling over one shoulder, the black " artistic " tie and wide- awake collar, the strong merciless mouth and the too-massive forehead, like the blank space of an advertisement hoarding, the eyes which fix you a little too candidly, the general impression of fallacious wisdom and of owlish con- fidence—that beak and nose are ready to close, but only upon a mouse.
Where is it that we have seen him? Let him answer in his own words as he did to Mr. Benney when he learnt that he was to be the hero of a biography : "I don't want readers to get wrong ideas about me. It's only a nacciden we met in a dive. It ain't my natchrel environment. I'm an intellec- tual, so say we met in the Cafe Royal." When Mr. Benney first met him he was making cheap jewellery in a café while he
drank tea. He tried to sell to a young prostitute a bottle of home-blended scent. A long and bizarre life lay behind.
He was born in Australia and deserted by his father when his parents came to England ; his mother died and he was sent by his respectable Camberwell grand- parents to a Boys' Home (we can summarise his activities there in the words of the Calvanistic head, "The hand that put blacking in the porridge last week was the same hand that burned the holy books "). He escaped, joined with gypsies, begged, told horoscopes, became a strong man at fairs, invented a Mer-Monkey with the help of a shark's back- bone and a chimpanzee's skull, and with the aid of a discarded tombstone constructed a mummified Angel-Man—a survivor of the Fall, had his eyes opened by Bacon to the occult resources of the English language, started during the War a
new Religion of the Sun in a Charlotte Street basement with a group of a dozen ardent and hungry women. There seems to have been no end to the passionate and high-minded in- genuity of the Professor. Mr. Benney pants behind, some- times unconsciously falling into the prose style of his hero :
"It was that hour when the living, impalpable night has grown faint and bloodless before the imminent menace of dawn, and the still ingathered hosts of the inanimate imprint upon the world their stark spatial statements."
This is the kind of "sesquipedalian verboojuice " that the professor would appreciate.
But if Mr. Benney sometimes adopts a little too easily the vocabulary of his model, it is a small price to pay for a fascinating book and an intricate piece of research. How intricate can be seen in the matter of the iron foot. How did the professor get his injury? Mr. Benney prints without comment six different versions. They graduate from a fairly modest adventure with a shark in a pearl fishery, by way of Thibet, to an encounter with a bloodhound when he was rescuing a girl from an aristocratic sadist in the English countryside.
No, the life cannot have been easy to compile. It is not so much a real man who emerges as something rather better—a legend : a kind of fairground Prometheus bating the Gods (even the Mer-Monkey was used in a Cathedral city to cast scorn on orthodox religion). Perhaps the only indisputable facts are those with which the book closes, when Professor Neave was sent to prison for running a disreputable club called the Caravan. He wrote to his wife from the Scrubs— the wife who had succeeded Zenobia, the leopard woman, and Mrs. Bulbus, the sun-worshipper—" My darling wife jiney XXX send me your fota as all the men heir have fotas of their Ideals." Oh, undoubtedly that powerful face with its Bohemian pigtail and its baseless conceit is that of a man Incurably bitten by the abstract. G. G.
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