THE DOCTOR OF MAGIC

By Frank Deane'24. The Press of James Decker, Prairie City,Illinois. 61 pp. $2.50.

In reading this imaginative and suggestive poena by Frank Deane, the pseudonym for a member of the Class of 1924 who desires to be nameless, I was reminded of two well known quotations from Shakespeare, " 'Twas strange, 'twas passing strange," (Othello, 1), and "There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, 1.) For this story of the case of Dr. Draussen,incarcerated in a high class mental asylum, "disturbed, uncooperative, tense and restless," gripped by MAGIC, or as the doctors have it in the jargon of the psychiatrist: "A case of grandiose paranoia (delusions of magical power) with a typical symptomatology," is strangely disturbing. Frank Deane is not the first poet to mock the pretensions of science; in fact it has recently been done by no less a poet than Robert Frost. There is much that is evocative in this poem and between the lines. And when Dr. Draussen walks through a closed door leaving no footprints nor any evidence whatever of where he went, one's assumption of mystery in this world of ours is quickened. Nor is he ever seen again, and when his wife disappears from her home, and is never again seen by her friends and relatives one thinks of Poe's Ligeia, of the power of the Will, of voodoo and black magic, of Mephistopheles and Dr. Faust, and of the puniness of human knowledge.

A most interesting and creative piece of work.