Books

The Tents of Wickedness (Little, Brown, $3.75) is the fourth novel by Peter De Vries, who claims to be a "serious novelist writing comic novels." Perhaps it is this lofty image of himself that is responsible for the fact that his novels grow progressively unfunnier. Tents is populated by characters out of his second novel, Comfort Me with Apples (Playboy After Hours, July 1956) but the humor has become hydroponic, its wan roots not in the rich loam of human experience but in the chemical tank of in-group literariness and private winks. There's small need to go into the story, for all De Vries stories are pretty much the same: intricate sex structures in which the protagonist, though he may get as far as actually climbing into bed with a lass, never makes out, or if he does, discovers in the final chapter that the illegitimate child he thought was his, isn't. What is Mr. De Vries, in spite of himself, trying to tell us? By conveniently making his hero a frustrated literary man, De Vries is able to pepper the book with parodies of prose-writers Faulkner, Proust, Marquand, Dreiser, Thurber, et al., and since apparently he also wants to dispose of several verse parodies from his trunk, he invents another character who writes "derivative" poems. The whole effect, a couple of too-brief funny scenes notwithstanding, is of a pastiche Scotch-taped together for the amusement of Mr. De Vries' cronies. The familiar De Vries puns are still display d, some twice ("Legal Tender Is The Night" appears on pages 135 and 253). If Mr. De Vries were not umbilically tied to The New Yorker, that magazine might conceivably comb Tents for a series of excerpts publishable under some such title as Infatuation With Sound Of Own Cash Register Department, for we have "metallic women with eyes like nickels" (p. 5), "women with eyes like coins in whose metallic laughter ..." (p. 103), "Pity was the underside of the coin of contempt" (p. 108), "... That flabby impressionability thanks to which a man standing barefoot on a coin can tell whether it is heads or tails" (p. 117), "Even her feet were changed. She wore no shoes as yet, but there was something about them that it took me a second to place. She had been walking through money, that was it, lots of money ..." (p. 118), " 'So having failed in one life he migrates to its opposite; but it's not its opposite really, since it's simply the other side of the same coin' " (p. 145), " 'I'm going to hand you a coin with your eyes closed. I want you to hold it in your fist and tell me what it is' " (p. 240). Dear Mr. De Vries: we are cruel only to be kind. As the only comic novelist in the country worth a damn, why don't you straighten up?

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In case you are not up on these things, an Abasab is a one-hundred-foot-long blister, a Bard is a pen that looks like a pencil, a Jazzabar is a drunk jazz quartet, a Pammer is a photograph of dinosaurs, and a Wonsome has the same meaning as Bard. These definitions are culled from a six-year-old's Dictionary of Goofy Words, which is only one small part of H. Allen Smith's latest, Don't Get Perconel with a Chicken (Little, Brown, $2.95). Like his Write Me a Poem, Baby (Playboy After Hours, November 1956), this is a collection of kiddie creativity. From it, you will learn that "Denver is just below the 'O' in Colorado," that "Abraham Lincoln was shot by Clare Boothe Luce," that "Pins are a means of saving life by not swallowing them," and a lot of other indispensable stuff.

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The Cool World (Little, Brown, $3.75) by Warren Miller is the world in which teenager Duke Custis moves. The locale is Harlem, and Duke's occupations are many and varied: he is second in command of a gang which maintains its own headquarters and supports its own prostitute; he makes his living by pushing marijuana. Duke's major ambition, though, is to own a gun with which he can lead his fellows into battle against a neighboring street gang. The story is raw and real and sometimes universal to the point of discomfort, as when Duke's gang, preparatory to waging war, spends hours deliberately working up hate against its "enemy." It's to society's shame and the author's credit that there's nothing artificial about this novel, powerfully told in the protagonist's own vernacular. It makes for a couple of fast hours of compelling and disturbing reading.

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In one of the most two-fisted indictments of the year, Judge John M. Murtagh, Chief Magistrate of the City of New York, and Sara Harris, a sociologist and writer, unabashedly lay bare the pathetically inept and stupid narcotics laws extant in the United States. The book is Who Live in Shadow (McGraw-Hill, $4.50), and it is the authors' contention that our current drug laws are unjust because the penalties "fall mainly upon the victims of the traffic -- the addicts -- rather than upon the dope racketeers." The laws -- and Murtagh backs his ire with documented evidence throughout -- make no distinction whatever between the violator who is a profiteering pusher and the addict, the sad little sick simp who gets hooked by the drug and nabbed by the cops. Main target of the attack is Commissioner of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger, who for 30 years has maintained that the addict is nothing more than a common criminal, has advocated the punative, prohibitory approach to the drug problem, which has been an obvious failure (there are more addicts in the U.S. today than in all other Western countries combined; more users in Manhattan alone than in all of Europe). Anslinger turns a deaf ear toward the methods that have worked in England (there are less than 400 known addicts there), where doctors are allowed to dispense drugs to users and to treat them in their own offices, practices forbidden in the U.S. Murtagh and Harris offer a list of solutions to the U.S. drug problem, and also a horrifying look at the way the Mafia operates and at the life of a junkie. This is a sober, eye-opening book that should be read by everyone.

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Latest victim of jazz-novelitis is Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin, no less. His Blow Up a Storm (Random House, $3.95) boasts the three standard ingredients of all such tomes: the frustrated cat who goes to hell, the marijuana party in the rich dame's pad, and the interracial romance. It also goes in for elliptical dialog that suggests Hemingway crossed with Al Morgan (typical clipped sentences: "Forward to seeing you, Woody" and "There's a wild"). There are, for jazz fans, weird anachronisms by the dozen (pre-Repeal Billie Holiday and Roy Eldridge records); indeed, the entire plot is based on a rewrite of jazz history that's anachronistic in itself, viz. a popularly successful mixed band in 1932-33, years before even the precedent-setting Benny Goodman Trio dared appear in public, and a full decade before anyone could have organized a completely interracial septet like the one Kanin depicts. The author's narcotics terminology, too, is a little mixed up; a pot-smoker, for instance, would never be termed a hop-head, a person addicted to opium. These objections aside, this is a better-than-average novel. The narrator, like Kanin himself, is a saxophonist manque who turns playwright, unwinds through flashbacks the rise and fall of Woody Woodruff, a trumpet player with more talent than soul, a man in turn arrogant, bitter and pathetic. The death of a pep-pill-gobbling Negro drummer in his septet is the key to a plot that shows keen insights into the musicians' minds. But like all jazzmen portrayed in novels, they are given too romanticized and unreal metaphysical dialog; nevertheless, they are far more credible than the usual cardboard cutouts, and there is among the Negro characters enough variegation to avoid any suggestion of stereotyping. It's a readable amalgam of psychological and racial nuances, nostalgia and Well-schmerz, and for all its superficial weaknesses, we suspect you'll dig it.

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The Challenge of the Spaceship (Harper, $3.50) by astrophysicist and science-fic-tioneer Arthur C. Clarke is a timely volume containing some fascinating and informed speculation concerning man's conquest of space. Too timely, perhaps: in point of fact, only a bit more than half the book fulfills the promise of the title; for the rest, it is rather obvious that a book-length accumulation of writings by Clarke has been hastily assembled to cash in on current curiosity about space, and the inevitable result is some repetitiousness and some material which has nothing much to do with the announced topic. These deficiencies aside, though, Challenge is commendable. Clarke writes easily and fluently on the concrete and the abstruse, the practical and the purely speculative aspects of the dawning space age, and occasionally his fertile imaginativeness combines with his scientific knowledge to create delightful humor, as when he composes a Martian scientific paper which proves beyond doubt the impossibility of sentient life on Earth. Despite the visibility of the volume's patchwork seams, it is a provocative and exciting job.

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If author Lawrence Lipton is to be believed, Venice West, California -- a déclassé resort turned slum -- is the new Jerusalem of Beat, surpassing in its dedication to the conformity of the self-styled non-conformists such older enclaves of the disaffiliated as San Francisco's North Beach and New York's Village. Lipton, the middle-aged sage and father confessor of the place, says Venice West is a hipster beachhead on the frontiers of our square civilization, a wildlife refuge for those barbarians who assail it not with the weapons of war "but with the songs and ikons of peace." The Holy Barbarians (Messner, $5) is a highly readable, revealing, affectionate, partisan portrait of this new Beatburg, its inmates, and its songs and ikons of peace -- which include spontaneous poetry read to jazz, pot, horse, undemonstrative but free-wheeling sex, a vocabulary as rigid and stunted as the Regular Army's, and a directionless intellectual voracity. Lipton documents it all, with case histories, taped conversations, and his own frequently sapient analyses of topics whose chapter headings are self-explanatory (The Loveways of the Beat Generation, The Euphoric Fix, Down with the Rat Race: The New Poverty, Cats Possessed: Ritual and the Beat, among them). The cats of Venice come through as excrutiatingly voluble, extremely self-centered, humorless about themselves, rather inartistic despite their claim to sole ownership of honest creativity, and brutally contemptuous of the square world which they deem to owe them a living. If you want to get turned on to beat behavior, however, this is the best guidebook going.

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At the turn of the century New York City was the crime capital of the country. 1900-type sin was loud, lusty, cheap and anarchical. Crime was run in a crude and inefficient fashion. One man changed all that. He was Arnold Roth-stein, who, before he died of a bullet in the belly in 1928, had originated and molded to near-perfection practically every big-time hood technique. It was "A.R." who originated rum-running during Prohibition, who backed the first of the modern gangsters, Jack "Legs" Diamond, who was the first to see the possibilities in highjacking. But Rothstein was much more than a mere racketeer. He was an underworld executive, a master politician; he was a financier for every kind of criminal enterprise, and above all he was a gambler. Rothstein would bet $150,000 on a poker hand, once made $850,000 on a single horse race. He was a calculating gambler, no plunger, and he usually won. He made book, too, starting as a "lay-off" or "come-back-money" specialist (one who accommodates other bookmakers who find themselves overextended on one side of a proposition). Rothstein established the investment technique that has made modern organized crime really powerful: burying crooked money in legitimate enterprises. He never spent a day in jail, but he was probably the most important single figure in the history of American crime. Leo Katcher's full-scale study of him, The Big Bankroll (Harper, $5), is a thoroughly fascinating account of the incredible life and times of a man who could tie up $2,000,000 in narcotics but still be persuaded to loan, at outrageous interest, the $25,000 that kept Abie's Irish Rose on Broadway. Katcher's research has been thorough, including such minutiae as substantiation of the fact that Rothstein, like most compulsive gamblers, had little interest in sex, or anything else except making money by every criminal means that a resourceful, inventive and totally asocial mind could conceive.

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Half-Irish, half-Hindu Aubrey Menen is known for some half-dozen books which logically combine Gaelic wit with Delhic wisdom. His latest, The Fig Tree (Scribner's, $3.50), hurls some tolerably aimed shafts at current scienceolatry; it's a ribald romp about a bumptious British biochemist who, to his horror, produces a roaring aphrodysiac. In Italy, no less! Hired to improve the yield of Neapolitan flora, Harry Wesley grows a treeful of figs whose priapic properties are positively Vesuvian. But alas, since this is Menen, the only two people to taste them are the most asexual pair in the world: Harry himself and his buddy Joe Bellman, a rotund, rubicund American remittance-man whose only passion is food. ("Shall I never enjoy another meal?" he wails un-Americanly. "Only women, women, women, women!") They proceed to wrestle alternately with their consciences and with any female in sight until their erratic, erotic exploits become a cause célèbre, even penetrating the chaste walls of the Vatican. Despite the modern setting, Menen imparts a baroque, Renaissance flair to the book, and though it occasionally slips off into baroquefort, you'll find some of it yeasty indeed.

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Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Doubleday, $4) is just that: diamond-faceted gumbeating held with and recorded by the famous composer's friend, Robert Craft. The old (in years only) master thinks and speaks with a mountain spring's clarity and brisk, bubbling on-rush, which is not to say that he is all wet. Musical theory is "Hindsight. It doesn't exist. There are compositions from which it is deduced." Music critics "misinform the public and delay comprehension" of new works. Jazz can be "a kind of masturbation that never arrives anywhere" and "at its rare best ... the best musical entertainment in the U.S." (he admires Shorty Rogers). " 'Experiment' means something in the sciences; it means nothing at all in musical composition." The "music of the future"? "It will very much resemble the 'music of the present': for the man in the satellite -- super-hi-fi Rachmaninov." But Stravinsky's most winning comments are about people -- people in general ("The French will do absolutely anything to get [theatre] tickets except buy them") and specific people he has known, loved, despised: Rodin, Proust, Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot ("that kindest, wisest and gentlest of men"), Chaliapin ("that idiot from every nonvocal point of view, and from some of these"), Picasso, great friend and fellow-worker of his youth, with whom he was arrested in Naples for urinating against a wall, Debussy, who flattered him to his face and insulted him behind his back, the dying Ravel ("Gogol died screaming and Diaghilev died laughing, but Ravel died gradually. That is the worst"), his great teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, in his coffin ("I could not help crying. His widow ... said, 'Why so unhappy? We still have Glazunov.' It was the cruelest remark I have ever heard, and I have never hated again as I did in that moment"). In May of 1953, Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas decided to collaborate on an opera, and the composer built an annex to his Hollywood home to house the blowsy Welsh poet for the duration of their creative labors. "I wrote him October 25 in New York and asked for word of his arrival plans in Hollywood. I expected a telegram ... announcing the hour of his airplane. On November 9 the telegram came. It said he was dead." Stravinsky can paint vivid images with words second only to those he paints with tone: of Bach's instrumental writing, he enthusiastically says "You can smell the resin in his violin parts, taste the reeds in the oboes"; and of the alto saxophone, an instrument he does not esteem, he can yet say that its "juvenile-delinquent personality floating out over all the vast decadence of [Berg's] Lulu is the very apple of that opera's fascination." One is therefore reminded of Shakespeare's eloquent Antony claiming "I am no orator" and silver-tongued Othello insisting "Rude am I in my speech" when this brilliant, dynamic old man says "I lack words and have no gift for this sort of thing...." There are plenty of photographs, plus letters from Dylan Thomas, Debussy, Ravel.