Slivovitz

ESPRIT DE CORPS (104 pp.)--Lawrence Durrell--Dutton ($2.75).

The gap between a totalitarian state and a "Titotalitarian" one is so narrow that even a writ of habeas corpus cannot pass through it, but the Tito version may be more tempting to the satirist. In this book Anglo-Irish Novelist Lawrence Durrell, who once served with the British embassy in Belgrade, leaves his steamy Mideastern cabals (Balthazar, Justine) for airy Balkan spoofs. The eleven grotesque tales in Esprit de Corps (subtitled Sketches from Diplomatic Life) do not all come off, but the best of them extract a flavorsome slivovitz from the Titoesque.

In The Ghost Train, Belgrade's whole diplomatic corps is invited to travel by special train to Zagreb for Liberation Day. The uneasy diplomats are herded into "three long coaches made of painted and carved timber." The locomotive ("abandoned before the war by an American film company [and] tied together by wire") is stoked "white-hot" by "hairy men in cloth caps who looked like Dostoevsky's publishers." At the stop of Slopsy Blob ("named after the famous Independence fighter"), the roof of the ambassadors' coach carries away most of the top of the station and lays the diplomatic heads open to a hail of fragmented woodwork. Crushed, splintered, bruised and filthy, the diplomats at last stagger forth at Zagreb to the notes of the liberation anthem sung by the partisan choir.

Another yarn, Call of the Sea, tells of a banquet and ball given by the nautical-minded British ambassador on a log raft in Belgrade's Sava River. It is a superb affair until the raft slips its moorings and makes a break for the Danube. Passing under Belgrade castle, the soused "Flower of European Diplomacy" is spotted by Comrade-Gunner Popovic, who takes the diplomats for hostile Czech paratroopers. Hoping to distinguish himself, possibly even to win his country's "Order of Mercy and Plenty with Crossed Haystacks," Popovic puts a safety match to the castle cannon and rips the log-riding diplomats asunder with a mixed charge of "beer bottle tops, discarded trouser buttons, cigarette-tins and fragments of discarded railway train."

The amusing and more than half-convincing theme of Author Durrell's book seems to be that, in certain vital respects, Marxism has not altered the Balkans from the dear old musical-comedy days, when their wars were fought by Chocolate Soldiers and their diplomats were outmaneuvered by Merry Widows.

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