Corn-Squeeze Artist

WATER OF LIFE (621 pp.]--Henry Morton Robinson--Simon & Schuster ($5.95).

This is a three-generation novel in which the generation is ceaseless, the dialogue deathless, and the drink strong at all times. Novelist Robinson populates his pages with gamblers, gypsies, whores, cutpurses, counterfeiters, country maidens, Mafia men. Harvard professors, necrophiles, lesbians, and good, honest Indiana farmers. He afflicts them variously with lust, greed, chronic childbirth, madness, lung surgery and death by water, gunshot, prolonged beating and Addison's disease. As it is customary for costume novelists to concern themselves also with a certain amount of factual information--the politics of Lorenzo's court, or the intra-igloo mores of Eskimos--Robinson acquaints his readers along the way with the history and techniques of the U.S. whisky industry from 1840 till Prohibition.

Between seizures of hot blood and high deeds, the heroes--one for each generation --make corn squeezings. They are artists who operate the pot still as if it were a pipe organ, mixing corn and small grain with boiling water, adding yeast, and from this wort--which is what the mash is called--distilling clear ethyl alcohol. Redistilled to remove foul-tasting fusel oil, aged for color and character in charred oak casks, the alcohol becomes whisky. Robinson is so explicit that an attentive reader with no fear of federal agents could try it himself.

The real villains of the novel are the unscrupulous distillers--who make cheap whisky by adding prune juice to grain neutral spirits--and the temperance wowsers. The author writes of these malefactors with great eloquence and contempt, accusing the former of betraying mankind for profit and the latter of sexual irregularities.

Robinson follows the rigid conventions of historical melodrama. The land he describes contains no skinny women or frail men: all sexual union is of seismic intensity, heroes rise to wealth and power but pay with fearsome personal tragedy. Once these are accepted--and they are not really much harder to swallow than Moliere's convention that all husbands are cuckolds, or Homer's that all heroes above the rank of lieutenant colonel enjoy godly guidance --Robinson's book is entertaining enough. Obviously the author, who wrote a much-admired exegesis of Finnegans Wake (with Joseph Campbell) as well as a bestseller about a clerical Organization Man called The Cardinal, knows that his costume throbbers are nonsense. Unlike Taylor Caldwell, for instance, who writes the same sort of novel with more earnestness and less skill, he stops every few chapters and snickers at himself with a pun or a Dos Passosian aside. And if the reader celebrates each such instance by pouring himself three fingers of pot still whisky, he will reach page 621 handily.

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