The Cad's Cad

MEMOIRS OF A PUBLIC BABY (232 pp.)--Philip O'Connor--British Book Centre ($4).

Greeted in Britain by the brassiest of literary fanfares, this volume by a minor English poet performs the complicated parlor trick of 1) confessing to a slew of sleazy sins, 2) confessing to be confessing "to worm my way into the graces ... of society," 3) confessing that all the confessing is too mixed up with the drama of "self-presentation" to be deemed "true" confession. The book is an account of how Author O'Connor developed out of precocious childhood into a state of adult infantilism bordering on lunacy.

O'Connor was definitely his mother's son, but, Mother being what she was, he may not have been his father's. That, at least, is his own account. Critical Britons attributed Mother's dark skin, social gaucheries and infantile giggle to the fact that her grandmother was Burmese. Father was "descended from the last High King of Ireland" and expressed his royalty in the form of detestation of "gainful occupation." As Father soon disappeared, Mother was forced to live by her wits--which she did in a London cellar with an "uncle," known as "Jacko" or "Poor Old Bobby Bingo."

Messiah & Wolf. So precarious was Mother's way of life that young O'Connor once spent two years near Boulogne with a French family before Mother was able to raise the money to fetch him back. A few years later he was handed over permanently to a guardian--an atheist who wanted "something, as we say, to 'lavish his love upon.' " O'Connor embraced "bohemianism. surrealism and D. H. Lawrence." Between a weakness for Communism, a yen for "snatches of Nietzsche," and the desire to be both "a Messiah" and a wolf, he turned into a fantastic "actor" who studied his various faces in the mirror and chose the one he would wear as carefully as a dandy choosing a suit.

He soon wore "red trousers and bobbed hair," wrote surrealist poems that he knew were nonsensical ("one funny one went through three anthologies"), graduated to a mental hospital where he was classed as "schizophrenic." For a while he lived with a Scotch-Greek girl of 17, who took baths "with an old man for ten shillings, and bought [our] food."

Rubber-Walled Cell. Later a wealthy woman called "L" became O'Connor's mistress and patroness, bought him erector sets, clockwork trains, motorcars, liquor, and phonograph records ("Tchaikovsky for ... relishing misery . . . Stravinsky for hangovers"). All the while, she "walked by "my side, never-ceasing in her disciple's adoration." But by the time the two of them had spent all "L's" capital, she had reached the stage where she "complained of Indians staring at her" and attacked O'Connor with chopper, razor blades and cutlery. Soon, "L" was tucked away "in a rubber-walled cell." O'Connor came to the brink of the same fate. "Through lack of a normal sex-life . . . and through drink, delusions set in . . ." A couple of years later, "I phoned a psychiatrist: 'Shall I,' I said, 'hold on, or come to you?' He said: 'Hold on'; which I did." Slowly, "I ... began to feel my way to health--of a kind."

But what is health? Author O'Connor finds it readymade for him to put on in the wise words of Montaigne: "The grandeur of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise in grandeur, but in mediocrity." If O'Connor had held to this maxim as stoutly in his prose (which is often sheer gibberish) as he has in taking the "road to conformity," Public Baby would have been easier to take as a memorial to an ill-spent life.

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