Anyone who dares to delve into the condition of 20th century American life is most probably doing it to earn a doctorate. Not so author Alexander Eliot, 43, an out-of-place, out-of-sorts, self-styled recluse who, on the pine-clad slopes of Mount Pentelikon, near Athens, pondered the question, put down his answer in the dozen meditations of this new book.

Winds of Legend. Anxiety in Americans, says Eliot, stems from their “basically sound awareness that pleasure is not joy.” Money can buy pleasure but joy costs more, and can be gained only through “creative work and love.” In his personal search for these elusive commodities, Eliot quit his job after 15 years as Art editor at TIME, and fled the U.S. for the Mediterranean littoral.

Descended from a long line of scholars headed by his great-grandfather, who was president of Harvard and editor of the five-foot shelf, Eliot ignores headlines and the cold war and makes his study nature. What he finds ”from the eagle-hung abyss below Delphi to the song of the local vegetable man”delights him, and he passes on his delight to the reader in prose that is sometimes eloquent, sometimes merely latter-day inspirational. “The stars rained down their incandescent spears in sharply patterned salvos upon Mount Pentelikon and me. Staggering a little with my face uplifted, rapt in the ringing of a dark-silver gong, I felt the winds of legend sweep between my ribs, and the fires of yearning and the tongues of dread.”

His eye ranges widely and perceptively over ideas and legend. It may light on the aging Admiral Christopher Columbus, appearing on deck in the darkest watch of night “hollow-eyed and crumpled, like a dry, wind-driven, scurrying leaf.” Or on Diogenes: “His castle was an upended wine vat by the gates of Corinth. Alexander the Great called on him there. All radiant, the Conqueror leaned down across the neck of his white charger, doffed his golden helmet and inquired what he might do for Diogenes. ‘Move on,’ Apollo’s man suggested. ‘You’re in my light.’ ”

Secret Heart. In trying to prove his thesis that ancient myths embody intuitive wisdom that is only now being proved out, Eliot indulges himself in many a long reach. Aphrodite, goddess of love, was able to renew her virginity simply by bathing in the sea. Now “astrophysicists relate that our life-giving sun renews its virginity also, by dint of a circular chain reaction. Every nucleus of carbon and nitrogen in the sun returns to its pure state once in five million years.” This is ingenious rather than convincing, provocative rather than wise. And in his secret heart, Eliot knows it for the word game it is. But like the juggler who danced before the altar, Eliot is giving praise to the wonder of creation in his own way.

“A big, fat, lewd, philosophic work of fiction, pure and impure; a free-for-all, with Rabelais as a referee.” Thus Alexander Eliot describes Love Play, a work of dazzling verbal pyrotechnics, razor-keen wit, and outrageously hilarious (and to some readers, no doubt, simply outrageous) sexual high jinks.

Love Play is the title of this novel in play form and the spirit of play animates its pages: the soaring lyric play of delightfully divergent ideas, and the ribald, earthy play of the bodily passions. Leading the list of players is the books wondrous heroine, Ellen Freeman, a girl of high ideals and fervent desires, with a golden voice and a golden body, equally generous with both. Ellen is a Lolita past the age of consent, a Candy sans illusions: she is an all-American fantasy come true.

For these and other vivid characters, both male and female, young, middle-aged and old, the author has created a magnificently entertaining divertissement. Scintillating, shocking, wildly funny by turns, Love Play is the most original book of the year.

Result: his first novel, Proud Youth, published this week by Farrar, Straus and Young. Written with strong poetic undercurrents and a Gide-like simplicity of style, Proud Youth explores the spiritual and physical impulses of a young brother and sister in love with each other. Says the Saturday Review: “Because of TIME’s belief in, and practice of, anonymous journalism, Eliot has spent seven years on this break for anonymity and is just about prepared for anything. Which he had better be, since one of the themes of Proud Youth is brother-sister inces” Another subject for controversy in Eliot’s novel: one of the major characters, a Roman Catholic priest, who as the family’s friend and confessor pits his conviction and authority “against the enormous energy, flexibility and daring of youth.”

A descendant of many illustrious New Englanders, including Harvard President Charles William Eliot, Novelist Eliot was born in Cambridge, educated as North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, once worked in the promotion and sales department of the Associated American Artists. In 1942, he came to Time Inc in MOT’s Cinema Production Department , left the company the following year, and returned in 1945 as a TIME writer. Artist as well as critic, Eliot designed the dust jacket for his book after completing the nine drafts of his novel “I had to learn to write fiction, but I hope my second novel won’t take quite so long”). Meanwhile, there is still the question of his first novel, which may become a fall conversation piece as its main theme, I believe, says Eliot, not adolescence or incest or religion, but a struggle between the forces of life and those of death in the soul of the hero.”

Hardcover Jacket photo by Diane & Alan Arbus

Proud Youth Paperback c 1958 (Courtesy James Stier)

Proud Youth first signet paperback edition from 1955 (Courtesy James Stier)

Proud Youth first signet paperback edition from 1955 (Courtesy James Stier)

James Stier website