The Atomic Blues

THE NEW MEN (311 pp.)--C. P. Snow --Scribner ($3.50).

THE HOUND OF EARTH (250 pp.)--I/once Bourjaily--Scribner ($3.50).

These books are bedside bulletins in the form of novels about two scientists who suffer a crisis of conscience over the atom bomb. British Novelist C. P. Snow charts the crisis in stately prose; U.S. Novelist Vance Bourjaily prefers a honky-tonk jazz tempo. But they both reach an annoyingly simple and characteristically 20th century diagnosis--life is a dirty trick.

The hero of The New Men is a run-of-the-treadmill English physicist named Martin Eliot. Early in World War II, Martin decides that he wants 1) success and 2) a hand in licking the Germans. Both goals take him to Barford, a British version of the U.S. Manhattan Project. In this taut, but clubby setting, life begins playing its dirty tricks on him. His restless wife gets a reputation for sleeping around. A brilliant physicist named Walter Luke easily outsprints him to become scientific top dog on the project. Martin buttons his pride and his lip. When the U.S. makes the atomic bomb first, Martin is British enough to want Britain to have one too, and alert enough to warn Luke about a Red subversive in the group.

But when Barford hears about Hiroshima, Martin drafts a blistering letter to the Times: "No state has ever before had both the power and the will to destroy so many lives in a few seconds." A worldly-wise older brother cannot prevent him from throwing up his government career by turning down the head post at Barford when it is offered him. This is a peculiarly empty gesture, since Martin's ethical fuse has sputtered far too long to make any moral explosion convincing.

Intellectual Hoofer. "I'm a woundlicker," says Hero Allerd Pennington halfway through Author Bourjaily's The Hound of Earth. It takes Physicist Pennington to the end of the novel to bare his wound: "I was loyal to science, and it was a higher loyalty than loyalty to country. A scientist didn't work for his country, I thought; he worked for knowledge." After the atomic bomb is dropped, Allerd develops such an unwillingness to work for his country that he abandons his wife and two children and while still in uniform deserts his army post in a Southern atomic installation. Fleeing the FBI, he caroms all over the U.S. for seven years, comes to rest for five weeks and the better part of Author Bourjaily's novel in a San Francisco department store. Allerd signs on as a stockroom clerk, but spends most of his time doing an intellectual hoofer act. Among his basic conversational dance steps: the Reverse Cliche Tap ("People have always spoken to me about themselves; it's because I have a dishonest face and am a poor listener"), the Ambiguity Waltz ("You have the face of fate and the body of immortality"), and the Existentialist Mambo ("That's a goal ... to have sought pointlessness ... in order to deserve the inevitable comfort of one's death").

Dubbing himself "King Al No. -1," Allerd holds court over a set of fellow oddballs. The oddest: an Indian who believes his people can reconquer the U.S. by blowing up its sewage systems ("A devastating new weapon. Smell."), a Lesbian who drinks milk from a baby bottle, a homosexual, a Harvard graduate who scouts the society pages for the names of new brides and phones them from pay booths at 4 a.m., a seven-foot Santa Claus who tampers with little girls. Author Bourjaily (whose first novel, The End of My Life, was hailed by some critics for its "lyric emotion") evidently has some method behind all this distasteful madness: he tries to show that the times are out of joint. But by the time King Al No. -- 1 is put behind bars, it is clear that the dirty tricks that life has played on him cannot compare to the dirty trick his author has played on life.

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