The Brides of Sometime

A FINE FRENZY (219 pp.)--Noel Woodin--Knopf (paperbound, $1.65).

Mindful that lots of people (some of whom probably read) take vacations in Florida at this time of year, Knopf has issued a volume of hot-weather reading.

In the long run, Author Woodin's novel may be no more effective than a gin and tonic, but at the moment of consumption the sensation is pleasant.

Hero Julian Starke is a poet and a Briton and, consequently, unemployable --"too clever for an executive position, too vague for trade, and too feeble to shift cement bags." He has worked variously and unvigorously as a cabbage rooter, road mender, ice cream hawker, oil company minor-domo and smuggler. As the book opens, he lives in a derelict farmhouse in Gloucestershire, but he is a bohemian, not a beatnik. The distinction lies in the fact that he makes his bed once a week, writes coherent English, and laughs at himself now and then.

And he is enthusiastic about girls."Dear old Carnal Desire," he rhapsodizes. Moreover, he philanders resourcefully; once when he awakened of a morning not quite sure of his hostess, he headed slyly for the medicine cabinet to reacquaint himself. "Miss Betty Hyams, twice a day after meals,'' said the label on one bottle. "I was saved. Betty." The plot, however, is mostly concerned with another girl--healthy enough not to require a medicine cabinet--who comes to share Julian's rustic idyl for a while. When he finds her clasped by a lustful vegetarian, he takes to his bed for several days in disgust, but wakes up to find wild flowers thrusting up through the bleak earth of his gloom; there is money in the mail from an American publisher. At book's end he is planning another poem.

Novelist Woodin's treatise on the poet in commerce is wry, charming and unassuming. The author, who is a poet himself, manages to convince the reader that his hero is one also, by quoting a few lines And the brides of sometime Walked the good hour hauntingly that might have been written by Dylan Thomas, had that Welshman not been afflicted by drink and genius.

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