Ring Of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell.
211 pages.
Dutton.
A5.

Only once in a very long while comes a book that gives the reader a magic sense of sharing a rare experience.
"Ring Of Bright Water" by Gavin Maxwell is just that -- a haunting, warmly personal chronicle of a man, an otter, and a remote cottage in the Scottish West Highlands.

"He has married me with a ring of bright water", begins the Kathleen Raine poem from which Maxwell takes his title, and it is this mystic bond between the human and natural world that the author conveys.
The place is Camusfearna, the site of a long-vanished sea-village opposite the isle of Skye.
It is a land of long fjords, few people, a single-lane road miles away -- and of wild stags, Greylag geese, wild swans, dolphins and porpoises playing in the waters.
How Maxwell recounts his first coming to Camusfearna, his furnishing the empty house with beach-drift, the subtle changes in season over ten years, is a moving experience.
Just the evocations of time and place, of passionate encounter between man and a natural world which today seems almost lost, would be enough.

But it isn't.
There is Mijbil, an otter who travelled with Maxwell -- and gave Maxwell's name to a new species -- from the Tigris marshes to his London flat.
It may sound extravagant to say that there has never been a more engaging animal in all literature.
This is not only a compliment to Mijbil, of whom there are a fine series of photographs and drawings in the book, but to the author who has catalogued the saga of a frightened otter cub's journey by plane from Iraq to London, then by train (where he lay curled in the wash basin playing with the water tap) to Camusfearna, with affectionate detail.

Mij, as his owner was soon to learn, had strange, inexplicable habits.
He liked to nip ear lobes of unsuspecting visitors with his needle-sharp teeth.
He preferred sleeping in bed with his head on a pillow.
Systematically he would open and ransack drawers.
Given a small ball or marbles, he would invent games and play by himself for hours.
With curiosity and elan, he explored every inch of glen, beach and burn, once stranding himself for hours on a ledge high up a sheer seventy-foot cliff and waiting with calm faith to be rescued by Maxwell, who nearly lost his life in doing so.

A year and a day of this idyll is described for the reader, one in which not only discovery of a new world of personality is charted, but self-discovery as well.
In the solitude of Camusfearna there had been no loneliness.
"To be quite alone where there are no other human beings is sharply exhilarating;
it is as though some pressure had suddenly been lifted, allowing an intense awareness a sharpening of the senses".

Now, with the increasing interdependence between himself and Mij came a knowledge of an obscure need, that of being trusted implicitly by some creature.
Two other people in time shared Mijbil's love: "it remained around us three that his orb revolved when he was not away in his own imponderable world of wave and water;
we were his Trinity, and he behaved towards us with a mixture of trust and abuse, passion and irritation.
In turn each of us in our own way depended, as gods do, upon his worship".

Yet the idyll ended.
The brief details of Mijbil's death lend depth to the story, give it an edge of ironic tragedy.
Man, to whom Mij gave endless affection and fealty, was responsible in the form of a road worker with a pickaxe who somehow becomes an abstract symbol of the savage in man.
But then, through a strange coincidence, Maxwell manages to acquire Idal, a female otter, and the fascinating story starts once more.

One is not sure who emerges as the main personality of this book -- Mijbil, with his rollicking ways, or Maxwell himself, poet, portrait painter, writer, journalist, traveller and zoologist, sensitive but never sentimental recorder of an unusual way of life, in a language at once lyrical and forceful, vivid and unabashed.
This reviewer read the book when it was first brought out in England with a sense of discovery and excitement.
Now Gavin Maxwell's Ring Of Bright Water has widened to enchant the world.
New York
-- The performances of the Comedie Francaise are the most important recent events in the New York theater.

They serve to contradict a popular notion that the Comedie merely repeats, as accurately as possible, the techniques of acting the classics that prevailed in the 17th century.
On the contrary, the old plays are continually being reinterpreted, and each new production of a classic has only a brief history at the Comedie.

Of course, the well-received revivals last longer than the others, and that further reminds us that the Comedie is not insensitive to criticism.
The directors of the Comedie do not respond to adverse notices in as docile and subservient a manner as the Broadway producers who, in two instances this season, closed their plays after one performance.
But they are aware of the world outside, they court public approval, they delight in full houses, and they occasionally dare to experiment in interpreting a dramatic classic.

In France, novel approaches to the classic French plays are frequently attempted.
The government pays a subsidy for revival of the classics, and this policy attracts experimenters who sometimes put Moliere's characters in modern dress and often achieve interesting results.

So far as I know, the Comedie has never put Moliere's people in the costumes of the 20th century, but they do reinterpret plays and characters.
Last season, the Comedie's two principal experiments came to grief, and, in consequence, we can expect fairly soon to see still newer productions of Racine's "Phedre" and Moliere's "School For Wives".

The new "Phedre" was done in 17th century setting, instead of ancient Greek;
perhaps that is the Comedie's equivalent for thrusting this play's characters into our own time.
The speaking of the lines seemed excessively slow and stately, possibly in an effort to capture the spirit of 17th century elegance.
A few literary men defended what they took to be an emphasis on the poetry at the expense of the drama, but the response was mainly hostile and quite violent.

The new "School For Wives" was interpreted according to a principle that is becoming increasingly common in the playing of classic comedy -- the idea of turning some obviously ludicrous figure into a tragic character.

Among the Moliere specialists of some years ago, Louis Jouvet tried to humanize some of the clowns, while Fernand Ledoux, often performing at the Comedie, made them more gross than Moliere may have intended.

Apparently, Jouvet and Ledoux attempted just these dissimilar approaches in the role of Arnolphe in "The School For Wives".
I say "apparently" although I saw Jouvet as Arnolphe when he visited this country shortly before his death;
by that time, he seemed to have dropped the tragic playing of the last moments of the comedy.

Arnolphe, it will be recalled, is a man of mature years who tries to preserve the innocence of his youthful wife-to-be.
The part can lend itself to serious treatment;
one influential French critic remarked: "Pity for Arnolphe comes with age".

Accordingly, at the Comedie last year, Jean Meyer played a sympathetic Arnolphe and drew criticism for turning the comedy into a tragedy.
But the stuff of tragedy was not truly present and the play became only comedy acted rather slowly.

Wisely, the Comedie has brought Moliere's "Tartuffe" on its tour and has left "The School For Wives" at home.
Tartuffe is the religious hypocrite who courts his benefactor's wife.
Jouvet played him as a sincere zealot, and Ledoux, at the Comedie, made him a gross buffoon, or so the historians tell us.

Louis Seigner, who formerly played the deluded benefactor opposite Ledoux, is the Tartuffe of the present production, which he himself directed.
His Tartuffe observes the golden mean.
His red face, his coarse gestures, and his lustful stares bespeak his sensuality.
But his heavenward glances and his pious speeches are not merely perfunctory;
of course, they do not reflect sincerity, but they exhibit a concern to make a good job out of his pious impersonation.

Occasionally, Seigner draws some justly deserved laughs by his quick shifts from one personality to another.
The whole role, by the way, is a considerable transformation for anyone who has seen Seigner in his other parts.
His normal specialty is playing the good-natured old man, frequently stupid or deluded but never mean or sly.
Here, he is, quite persuasively, the very embodiment of meanness and slyness.

Seigner is the dean of the company, the oldest actor in point of continuous service.
In that function, he helps to rebut another legend about the Comedie.
We are often told that the Comedie has, unfortunately, life-contracts with old actors who are both mediocre and lazy, drawing their pay without much acting but probably doing real service to the Comedie by staying off the stage.
Seigner, however, is a fine actor and probably the busiest man in the company;
among his other parts are the leads in "The Bourgeois Gentleman" and "The Imaginary Invalid".

In Moliere's farce, "The Tricks Of Scapin", Robert Hirsch undertakes another of the great roles.
Here some innovation is attempted.

To begin with, Scapin is a trickster in the old tradition of the clever servant who plots the strategy of courtship for his master.
Hirsch's Scapin is healthy, cheerful, energetic, revelling in his physical agility and his obvious superiority to the young gentlemen whom he serves.

Hirsch says that he has given the role certain qualities he has observed in the city toughs of the real world.
And surely his Scapin has a fresh directness, a no-nonsense quality that seems to make him his own master and nobody's servant.

Django Reinhardt, the ill-fated gypsy, was a true artist, one who demonstrated conclusively the power of art to renew itself and flow into many channels.

There is hardly a jazz guitarist in the business today who doesn't owe something to Django.
And Django owed much to Louis Armstrong.
He told once of how he switched his style of playing to jazz after listening to two old Armstrong records he bought in the Flea Market in Paris.
It was the first jazz he had heard.

Django, who was born Jean Baptiste Reinhardt in Belgium and who died in 1953 in France, was an extraordinary man.
Most of the fingers on his left hand were burned off when he fell asleep with a cigarette.
And this was before he began to play his startlingly beautiful jazz.

You can catch up with him -- if you haven't already -- on RCA-Victor's album.
"Djangology", made up of tracks he recorded with Stephane Grappelly and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.
This is a choice item and Grappely deserves mention too, of course.
He is one of the few men in history who plays jazz on a violin.

They play: "Minor Swing", "Honeysuckle Rose", "Beyond The Sea", "Bricktop", "Heavy Artillery", "Djangology", "After You've Gone", "Where Are You, My Love"?
"I Saw Stars", "Lover Man", "Menilmontant" and "Swing 42".

All this is great proceedings -- get the minutes.

Kid Ory, the trombonist chicken farmer, is also one of the solid anchor points of jazz.
He dates back to the days before the first sailing ship pulled into New Orleans.
His horn has blown loud and clear across the land for more years than he cares to remember.

Good Time Jazz has released a nice two-record album which he made.
He is starred against Alvin Alcorn, trumpet;
Phil Gomez, clarinet;
Cedric Haywood, piano;
Julian Davidson, guitar;
Wellman Braud, bass, and Minor Hall, drums.

The set contains "High Society", "Do What Ory Say", "Down Home Rag", "Careless Love", Jazz Me Blues", "Weary Blues", "Original Dixieland One-Step", "Bourbon Street Parade", "Panama", "Toot, Toot, Tootsie", "Oh Didn't He Ramble", "Beale Street Blues", "Maryland, My Maryland", "1919 Rag", "Eh, La Bas", "Mood Indigo", and "Bugle Call Rag".

All this will serve to show off the Ory style in fine fashion and is a must for those who want to collect elements of the old-time jazz before it is too late to lay hands on the gems.