For the Singing Birds

CADENZA (223 pp.)--Ralph Cusack--Hougton Mifflin ($3.50).

Several remarkable platters of pressed peat have been offered the reader in recent years, the more bizarre of them including At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O'Brien (alias Myles na gCopaleen), and The Ginger Man (TIME, June 2), by J. P. Donleavy. Ireland's Ralph Cusack, an eccentric horticulturist and ex-painter, has written Cadenza as if to prove that O'Brien and Donleavy were squares and that James Joyce was well within his rights when he borrowed the English language and returned it in a condition unfit for use by the original owners. Cadenza is a maddeningly clever and occasionally poetic tale which concerns the identity --in a shifting foreground of misplaced time and mistimed space--of a wantonly Irish character called Desmond.

Dreamlike Vision. Desmond yammers and rants his life story from within a railway carriage that shuttles between Dundalk and Dublin. He is queer for trains, and, as the scenes seen from the windows unfold and blur into episodes from his raffish life, it is clear that he is queer about a lot of other things, too--notably small steamboats, chaffinches, a girl called Yvette, and an uncle with the improbable name of Melchizedek. Desmond begins his maniacally brilliant reveries after a gaseous bout at the dentist's, where he acquires new crockery, i.e., false teeth, and a desire to rehash every event in a bizarre, vagrant life.

The tale has the aggravating quality of a dream, but there is no denying its hallucinatory vividness. It is like seeing a film spliced together from five different movies and provided with a narration from a sixth, for Desmond has the confident conviction of the reality of his fantasies possessed only by the very mad. Through it all runs a wild vein of comedy mixed with bits of loony wisdom; e.g., "All birds that don't sing make me hungry: all birds that do make me sad."

The baffled reader may well ask, in Desmond's own words: "God damn it all to Hell, what on earth [is] going on?" Yet he will be persuaded by Author Cusack's virtuosity with word and image that the confusion has its own logic.

Bits of Stone. From the first page in the dentist's chair, where his false fangs are shattered like a "cheap teacup," to the last, where his skull is shattered by a junkman's hardware, it is never quite clear whether or not these are real events or visions induced by laughing gas. Like Baudelaire's true voyagers who leave for the sake of leaving, Desmond travels a long way sitting down. What is real is the poetry. Desmond's train at first seems actual enough, with slogans penciled "by obscenely-minded orangemen": "To Hell with Hitler. Down with Dublin. Up Kerry all the Time." Yet it is not quite a train either; it is "suspended between the north and the south like a star in the sky and not touching this earth: like a homing pigeon with no home, twisting and twirling, like a peregrine . . ."

Railway porters, French whores, ferocious Irish colonels, obsessed priests, poets, lovely girls and frustrated concert violinists loom up in the story and disappear. Each page of the book has its verbal delights, but it is doubtful if Cusack has made a true mosaic of his brilliant bits of colored stone.

It is probably unfair to complain about fact in a book of this sort, but it might be mentioned that there are no crocodiles in the Murrumbidgee River.

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