The World's Too Lovely

THE ADVENTURES OF WESLEY JACKSON (285 pp.) -- William Saroyan -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

It took a world war to slow down William Saroyan's output. Even critics who found his 20-odd books and plays raddled with verbosity and cuteness conceded that they were sometimes beauty-spotted with comic genius. Saroyan, out of the Army now, is 37, a bit heavier, a bit graver, and a well-domesticated citizen of San Francisco. He lives in a two-story stucco house, with wife Carol and two children (Aram, 2 1/2, and Lucy, four months), sprinkles the lawn, and sits at his work desk studying the Racing Form with practiced eye.

Wesley Jackson is his first post-Army book, and his second novel (the first: The Human Comedy). He wrote Wesley in "36 or 37 days," and explains: "I think something done swiftly has a little more art in it, and by art I mean cohesion."

Remembering how the movies botched The Human Comedy, even though it "gave the movies a very rich terrain to work in," he is meeting filmland feelers about his new book with un-Saroyanesque silence. Says he: "My hunch is that it's nearly a great book. That is something you hate to say, but that's my feeling."

His hunch is wrong. It is more like a parody on almost all his worst weaknesses. He has loosened his loose, gabby prose until it is as flabby as Nesselrode custard. His hero, Private Wesley Jackson, is a writer--of the Saroyan persuasion. He even has the Army job Saroyan had: writing scenarios for training and documentary films. And just to moisten the damp resemblance, Saroyan makes him a precocious Californian: Wesley is published in the New Republic when he is only 18--but it never goes to his head. Nothing does.

Scared Girl, Crazy World. Wesley gets his life direction (to find "his girl") while unconscious with pneumonia. But all the poor boy can find are careless loves. Like all Saroyan's "little people," he dreams of many "higher things," including a son as yet unconceived. Finally, in London, he finds "his girl"--an epitome of those vacant people who tinkle brightly through Saroyan stories like Christmas-tree bells.

"She had a sweet little face with the upper lip lifted away from the lower in a kind of child-like perplexity, and all sorts of soft thick yellow hair tumbling down. She was all small and white, with the hands of a baby, and little baby legs and feet. But what she had that broke my heart were big staring blue eyes--the amazed eyes of a scared little girl in a crazy and ferocious world."

And so to bed. "When the fellow and the girl have become one another, when they are the same person, well, then life has begun, and forever after there is no end--there just naturally can't be any end when the two of them are together and the same person because in the nature of things that's it, that's the idea, that's what all the shouting's about . . . that's Christmas come, that's the Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven, that's the song and the dance, the old river laughing, the ocean all happy, the wind full of kisses, the sky open arms, the tree jumping for joy, the rock all humming, the night gone whispering, the day come strolling."

After the European invasion Wesley returns to his wife, now beautifully pregnant, and the book concludes with another Saroyan solo flight: "... and oh the world's too lovely for death. The world's too sweet for murder. Breathing's too good and seeing's too wonderful. Human beings must not murder one another. They must wait for God to take them in His own good time."

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