A TRIP TO PARNASSUS

A semi-satiric safari begins with a Cabinet Minister's personal discovery and public praise of an unknown poet, Ambrose Lewis, and launches the search for the man whose only volume of verse had appeared a few years ago- and is now out of print. Only Conan Williams, a former newspaperman, his drinking companion and his disciple, knows that Ramsay Macdonald Jones (Ambrose Lewis), a frequenter of dockside public houses, had drowned- by misadventure. The hunt for Lewis continues- in the press, by his publishers, by the woman who had loved him- a novelist- Cordelia, and Conan, not one to overlook the opportunity, assumes his identity and sustains the hoax until the final terminus- at a publisher party.... Sometimes indelicate, sometimes outlandish, this has some moments of humor as it ticks off the ignis fatuis of talent and fame- but at best it's a literary jape of a rather special appeal.