'Norman's Letter,' 'Excursion' -- Tittilating But Unreal

An eccentric is supposed to be lovable and/or laughable. On occasion, he can be pitiful as well. But eccentricity and tragedy generally are incompatible, and herein lies the failure of Norman's Letter.

Sir Norman Charles Evelyn Light-wood, Bart., the writer of this "letter," is an English baronet of vaguely indefinite parentage and vaguely indefinite gender. His sexual hang-ups are presumably traceable to experience gained in his mother's bed. His illegitimacy is traceable to his uncle's having had a similar encounter with the good Lady. All this leads one to wonder whether this over-used four-poster might have been the cause of Norman's sister's difficulties as well. She is a lesbian who, dressed as the man she always wanted to be, gains a high post in the German Nazi Party.

But speculations about his mother's bed are beside the point. Her we have Sir Norman, fantastically wealthy, illegitimate, weak, gullible, and queer. He is victimized as a matter of course. His first tormentor, his mother aside, is a nightclub singer named Lily Vail who gets him to marry her so that she can divorce him, thereby gaining fame via scandal and fortune via alimony and blackmail. He is later a victim of a sculptress whom he commissions to create an enormous "Ritualistic Orgy of the Titans" in front of his desert home; her American Indian husband, who convinces Norman that he should raise goats for fun and profit; a mystic who receives no comprehensible messages from above; and finally a young American he picks up and who kills him.

If Norman were a light-hearted eccentric, and if he hadn't been murdered, this would be what is nauseously known as "a fun book." But Norman is a poet. He masquerades as the translator of a non-existent Egyptian-Greek poetess named Oum Salem. But his poetry, apparently, is known and not so horrendously bad as one might expect. And the poor man really doesn't deserve to die.

Norman is not a real person, and he would be amusing as a fantastic. But when real things happen to him, he is too ridiculous, too affected, and