Adolescent's Daydream

GERALDINE BRADSHAW (415 pp.)--Calder Willingham--Vanguard ($3.50).

The naturalistic or sweaty-shirt school of novelists is hard up for scholars these days. But old Professor James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan, The Road Between) has one young fellow in his composition class who, Farrell thinks, is making "a permanent contribution to American literature." Calder Willingham is his name.

Willingham's first novel, End as a Man, published in 1947 when he was only 24, was a keyhole report on life in a Southern military college; righteously indignant in one breath and droolingly prurient the next, it read like the notes of a small-town peeper on the broom closet of hell. Some critics went part way with Farrell's estimate of Willingham, but others rebuked the book as a discharge of childish hostility by a very young man. But when the book was twice taken to court for obscenity (and twice acquitted), readers caught the scent. End as a Man sold some 35,000 copies.

Author Willingham went on to have an adolescent's daydream. Geraldine Brad-show, his second novel, is a 415-page, grab-by-grab description of how a smart bellhop tries to seduce a dumb-Dora elevator girl. It takes time: boy gets girl in bed on page 141; but girl is still standing off boy on page 414. The Willingham method is, of course, one way to keep a reader's attention. Nonetheless,the author sometimes seems hard put to fill space: "You come by here around six. All right?"

"Right."

"Check on that?"

"Check."

"Double-check?"

"Check."

"No, man! Not check, double-check"

"Double-check."

"Triple-check?"

When the inspiration for such dialogue fails, Willingham fills in with obscenity. By page 318, even the hero is overcome: "The verbal diarrhea. It's getting me down. I'm sinking."

Under that kind of verbal assault, so is the naturalistic novel. Fifteen years ago, with such figures as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passes and the early Farrell in the crew, young novelists rushed to sign on the happy ship. But in the hands of those who seem to think of life as just another four-letter word, it becomes a drifting derelict.

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