MPs had a parliamentary ticker-tape in the crush' room) into

something more disseminated and at the same time better rooted.

Although biography is miles removed from • -

the composer of Wozzeck have fared if not finan- cially helped as a young than by his family; or,

conversely, if his music had not been brutally proscribed by the Nazis; or, again, if in 1935 drugs which are now a commonplace had been there to cure the blood poisoning which killed him in his creative prime?

CHARLES REID

Who Live in Mexico

The X in Mexico: Growth within Tradition. By Irene Nicholson. (Faber, 36s.)

Mexico is a perverse country. Flamboyant in its machi.imo, it is yet curiously feminine, secretive, hard to nail down. Since the revolution of 1910, things Aztec have been at a premium, Spain has been in the doghouse. Yet the only truly living culture in Mexico is the Hispanic; the Indian has been 'liberated,' but his culture remains mar- ginal and fragmented as ever.

Again, the revolution began as an agrarian rising (Zapata, Pancho Villa), and later built itself a semi-Marxist, proletarian image—as in the murals of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros. Yet the upshot has been a wealthy, powerful middle class—entrepreneurial and bureaucratic— and the relegation to the end of the queue of those rural masses for whom, according to official ideology, the revolution is still being 'made.' (A paradox admittedly not peculiar to Mexico's revolution.) Anti-Americanism is the very motor of Mexican nationalism; yet no country has let itself be so dominated by American capital—or has profited so much from it. Highly seductive, then, Mexico is nevertheless a hard country to write about. She hurls herself at your senses; knock, and you'll never get a straight answer. Which is also why the best books about Mexico are themselves somewhat perverse. Attempt a straight narration, and you will never rise to the theme—and probably be dull into the bargain. Two of the best self-studies by Mexicans—Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, Samual Ramos's Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico—are brilliant and perverse in just this manner. They are bold, clinical, shameless self- exposures--which extract, nevertheless, a certain plus for the Mexican from their revelation of the nihilism and introversion of his nature. Foreign writers, too, have seen something of this:

Fanny Calderon in the 1830s, Charles Flandrau at the turn of the century, Lawrence in the 1920s, more recently Malcolm Lowry and Sybille Bed- ford. None of the foreigners, admittedly, has grappled with the economic-political side of Mexican history. Yet it is arguable that this is What is interesting about Mexico today: the rest IS for the archaeologists and the tourists.

Irene Nicholson's The X in Mexico is to be welcomed, then, in that it represents an attempt

to put all the many Mexicos into a single book.

Economics and the welfare state are not neglected, neither are the Indigenous Institute and its efforts to restore ancient Indian folk-

ways. An earlier book, Firefly in the Night, gave English readers a conception of the extraordinary

beauty of ancient Mexican poetry---something to Put against all those stone altars and obsidian knives. Here a gallant attempt is made to press

The intention is .admirable, yet the result un- satisfying. The facts, of course, are all there: indeed, perhaps no better 'introduction to Mexico,' in the handbook sense, has ever been done. A minor quarrel with the book might be that Miss Nicholson is a little too inclined to cheer on her favourite team and even, when necessary, to clamber into the arena herself. But my own quarrel with her book is rather that it is too little perverse, too little exasperated, too little ridden by those furies one meets in the pages of Octavio Paz and Samual Ramos. I do not suggest that the foreigner who, loves Mexico must undergo the same self-laceration as these intelligent, sensitive Mexicans. But a portrait without contradictions (they are often politely known, in Miss Nicholson's book as elsewhere, as 'contrasts') is really no portrait at all. Indeed, i: comes dangerously close to a public relations job.

For all its usefulness, then, Miss Nicholson's book does seem to fail in this crucial respect. Mexico is messy, paradoxical, bloody-minded. From her books, I would judge Miss Nicholson to be really far too nice a person to write about that country.

JOHN MANDER

Bull

Allenby. By Brian Gardner. (Cassell, 30s.) The Educatiun of an Army. By Jay Luvaas. (Cassell, 50s.) The German Officer Corps. By Karl Demeter. Translated by Angus Malcolm. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 50s.) IN the Great War, as in its successor, the brightest of our generals' reputations were won in the Middle East. Partly, it may be, because our enemies in this theatre were less formidable; partly also because it is to conflict in the barren, far-off, neo-colonial regions that the qualities of the British officer seem best suited. It is here also that they have established a continuitj, of talent, almost an apprenticeship, where these qualities —none the less formidable for their continuous

The Sounding

Thirty-three years ago today Hart Crane thought twice, and chose the sea.

It was a moment. Something, A gull, a porpoise, a dory or shark

Must have seen it happen—

Something is always watching, Though it may not understand.

Or what it understands is what it sees, And this, too, is life—

To be known for what you are not, A shirt-tail flare in the wind, a child's Delight in accident: the high-wire scream.

This too is the reason it happened: For the accumulation of alien eyes Makes every man a stranger to himself, Both Christ and tempter. Invoke the one, The other's face will smack you, blind as the sea . . .

You cannot have both. You cannot begin again.

DAVID WEVILL ew AI Ar AYAIVAI A/ AK

on Parker

THE PLOUGH BOY

The story of Michael Davies who was sentenced to death for the murder of a young boy in a gang- fight on Clapham Common. After three months in the condemned cell he was reprieved and has always maintained that he was innocent. Tony Parker examines this claim and in a disturbing commentary tells how it came about that Davies was, in the opinion of many, wrongly convicted.