Books: Troy

A TROJAN ENDING—Laura Riding— Random House ($2.50).

Troy's tale is one of the oldest stories in the world. It has been questioned, sifted, dug into by historians and archeologists, reconstructed by poets. Two epics (the Iliad and Odyssey) and a low hill in Turkey, within sight of the Dardanelles, are all that scholars and poets have had to go on. Laura Riding's A Trojan Ending, not to be confused with such mere literary romances as John Erskine's The Private Life of Helen of Troy, probes the dusty pile of Homeric legend with the findings of modern scholarship, discovers in it not a prehistoric frieze of barbarous "heroes" but a valuable prototype of the modern world.

"The story of Troy, now dispersed in mocking legend," says Author Riding, "was the first tight knot that history made in time." Whether or not her unraveling of that knot and its ensuing threads will please all masculine readers, it is an exploration of legend that turns up many a psychological find, pieces together many a broken sherd of human nature. Laura Riding does not tamper with the main outline of Troy's well-known story. But she finds the clue to the Trojan War not in Paris' seduction of Helen but in the opposing temperaments of the Greeks, whose civilization is on the make, and the Trojans, whose civilization is (in the best sense) finished. She makes her mouth piece-heroine a character unmentioned by Homer—Cressida, daughter of the Trojan's Chief Priest of Apollo, ill-famed in literature (by Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare) as a heartless jilt. Chosen as a central character because her "legendary real" identity offers the widest freedom for creating a sensitive female observer, Laura Riding's Cressida is not jilt but "almost in her time what woman may be in ours.'' This Cressida does not leave her Trojan lover Troilus for a Greek lover, Diomedes; she chooses an unhappy life among the alien Greeks to carry on the vital idea of Troy.