The Sound of Stephen Longstreet

THE LAST MAN COMES HOME--Stephen Longstreet--Random House ($3).

Author Longstreet might have called his book The Sound of an American if he had not used that title a few weeks ago for the novel he wrote under the pen name of "David Ormsbee" (TIME, Sept. 21).

Amusingly illustrated by the author, The Last Man Comes Home (not to be confused with his Last Man Around the World) is the testy fable of a cocky young Brooklynite author who fled West "from the demands of the ladies' clubs who wanted to look at me." Taking a boat down the Yellowstone River, he followed its course into the Missouri, where the dangerous waters "purr like a competent Jesuit." There, he testifies, he shook off the plagues of his civilization: book reviewers, columnists, "theories and the dirty fingernails of people who make them."

His boatman was Indian James Peachpit. Jimmy, who was troubled by "the primal values of sex," had murdered his wife one hungry winter night because she talked too much about sardines in oil. As they swept down the river the red man chanted Old MacDonald Had a Farm. He also filled in a Sears, Roebuck order form every night, "showed the mordant brilliance of his race" by never mailing it. Author Longstreet was sorry to leave this last remnant of savage America.

Author Longstreet hoped to enlist. But when the Army doctor asked him if he was shy at being examined without his pants on, He Man Longstreet said "No"; he was promptly classed "schizophrenic."

Then he had hopes of being a secret agent. Foiled again, he decided to comb the war effort. He traveled fanatically through plane factories. Then he went to sea with a convoy. His skipper always wore a nightshirt because torpedoes struck as soon as he put his pants on. Later a compromise solution was worked out; the skipper wore one of the sailors' pants.

Touring America served to strengthen Author Longstreet's passionate loves and hates. His chief loves: Peachpit types, the soil, the little man, large women. His chief hates: Aristocratic women "with blue blood knocking like carbon in every vein," women who frequent beauty parlors ("worn necks are slapped with cold grease"), film producers, bankers, morticians with the slogan DIE NOW AND PAY FOR IT LATER.

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