Life with Genius

HERITAGE (309 pp.)--Anfhony West --Random House ($3.75).

Dickie Savage's schoolmate meant it when he exclaimed: "You are a lucky beast; I'd love to have exciting parents like that." Dickie's mother was the great actress, Naomi Savage--beautiful, talented, unpredictable. His father, Max Town, was one of the world's most famous writers. Dickie saw dad's pictures in the papers; his novels were everywhere; and everything he said was taken seriously by serious people throughout the world. But there was one great drawback to being the son of Naomi and Max: they were not married and never had been.

Dickie lived with his mother, and the first time he ever saw Max was when the great man visited him at school accompanied by his German mistress. Right in front of the horrified headmaster, she asked Max to father a boy for her, just like Dickie, whom she could take back to Germany.

As the son of famed British Writers Rebecca West and the late H. G. Wells (who were never married, either), Novelist Anthony West has a pretty fair idea of what it means to be a Dickie Savage. In Heritage, his third novel and his best, he gracefully charts young Savage's uncertain course from childhood hurt to freewheeling young manhood. In other hands this could have been a sour book; instead, it is intelligent, witty, and tolerant toward the childishness of the great.

Both Naomi and Max were good to Dickie only when it made them feel good. But the first time he saw mamma on stage, her performance made him cry. He knew then that the theater meant more to her than Dickie Savage. As for Max, he had his books to write, his pleasures to enjoy, his mistresses to cope with. But he tried to keep Dickie virginal, scolded him for wanting to be a poet, tried in fact to keep him from doing what Max Town had done.

When mamma marries a dull and decent man, then leaves him again for the theater, Dickie is the least surprised person in England. When one of Max's mistresses dies on his hands, and he, at 60, goes off with another, that too seems reasonable enough. With World War II just around the corner, Dickie Savage has in fact grown up and become a bit blase. Heritage does not say that creative people are exempt from the rules of ordinary decency. But Author West tries to understand them and suggests that even illegitimacy and neglect are not too much to endure for the rare privilege of growing up with genius.

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