Bourbon & Magnolias

TIGER IN THE GARDEN (278 pp.)--Speed Lamkin--Houghton Mifflin ($3).

The advice most commonly dished out to hopeful writers by their literary elders is: write only about the things you know. It is perfectly good advice, as sound as it is trite, but sometimes discouraging to youngsters who discover that what they know has long been grist for other writers' mills. Young (22) Louisiana-born, Harvard-bred Speed Lamkin knows a lot about the decline and decay of the old plantation set, who made small talk while energetic commoners made big money and powered the New South. In his first novel, Tiger in the Garden, Lamkin boldly washes some old sectional linen in public, as if it hadn't already been scrubbed by the Caldwells, Weltys and Faulkners.

Even before World War I it was plain that the artistocratic Richardsons had run their course. When daughter Caroline suddenly married Jim Conway, a poor-but-ambitious townsman with super sex appeal, it seemed like a signal for the whole family's disintegration. Then old Mr. Richardson died ingloriously in a hotel room from a surfeit of food, drink and women. He left just enough money for beautiful Mrs. Richardson to keep the fine old house and her social prestige, and to send young Percy and Byron to the University of Virginia. While Jim piled up a fortune in oil, handsome Percy Richardson went in for bourbon, Negro women, homosexuals and, finally, suicide. Byron was content to be a small-town lawyer and live in a cottage. Mrs. Richardson died of cancer, unreconciled to the fact that her daughter had deserted her class.

But the Richardsons had the final victory. Jim might be rich but he never got accepted socially. Huey Long backed him for Congress but dropped him quick when Jim's political rival exposed his affair with a dashing socialite. When Jim lost his fortune in the Depression, he salvaged what he could and settled down in the old Richardson house to live out a life of hate and Gothic horror with Caroline. Caroline went looking for an anodyne. "Find me a young gentleman roomer," she urged her cousin. "A strong young man. Please, please do that for me!"

It is true that Tiger in the Garden is made up of old ingredients: miscegenation, aristocratic drunks and flowerlike ladies, languid Southern talk and fiery Southern tempers. By now any writer, even Faulkner, can use them only at the risk of flirting with caricature. It is nonetheless to Author Lamkin's credit that he has almost succeeded in bringing an old story to life and already writes well enough to handle a new one.

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