Mixed Fiction

THEREFORE BE BOLD, by Herbert Gold (256 pp.; Dial; $3.95), is a fond, amused, amusing look backward at adolescence by an author whose other works include a hip novel, The Man Who Was Not With It, and a collection of psychologizing short stories about young separateds, Love and Like. As in his other books, Author Gold, 36, shows considerable skill, inconsiderable passion (or heart, as the song writers have it), and a tendency to roll his phrases around in his mouth now and then in the manner of a winetaster.

Dan Berman (IQ 149 by Stanford-Binet, one disappointing point short of genius) and his friend Juicer Montague (IQ a dandy 162) are 15-year-old men who live in Lakewood, Ohio in the late '30s, admire Omar Khayyam, Thomas Wolfe and Ben Hecht, the poet, and discuss serious matters. This is how Dan recalls one conversation: "Hee hee hee, snickeree. 'Who is our real mother?' Hee. 'Maybe your father was my father, Juicer. It's possible.' Snickeree. At last these questions, and others as pure, slipped away from us, and now the extremest demands haunted our flimsy idealistic heads: What could we move with our bare hands that would be worth the moving? Whom could we love that could ever love the likes of us?"

Some of Novelist Gold's lines are finely foolish--Dan, roaring Omar on the Lake Erie beach, is "a Demosthenes with pebbles under the tongues of his shoes." One or two images are apt to stir the soul--Dan and a buddy, sneaking out of a second-story window, "vlooped down the drainpipe like two messages in a department-store tube." Dan lusts after Rosalie Fallen, rubs faces with Pattie Donahue, very nearly vloops with Eva Masters, does so gladly (and improbably) with a commercial lady named Black Lil. And marries, in the happy epilogue, beautiful Lucille Lake, girl harpist. The book, as its author confesses, is a "piratical, lying map of boyhood," which is the only kind worth having, and perhaps the only kind there is.

THE EYES OF THE PROUD, by Mercedes Salisachs (302 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), shows clearly that the umbrous streak in the Spanish character that accounts for the popularity of the corrida has had its effect on the nation's literature. The result is that Spain's fictional heroines suffer at least as much wear and tear as her fighting bulls. When the reader meets pretty, pregnant, unmarried Eulalia trudging toward the Catalan fishing village that cast her out months before, the outcome of Author Salisachs' novel is not hard to predict. Sure enough, 300 pages later the tarnished maiden lies dead from loss of blood in a seaside cave, her squalling love child beside her. The man she adored vainly (he of high degree, she of low) has been beaten to death, and the man who loved her vainly is jailed for murder. The cruel sun beats down.

None of this touches an American reader deeply; what is of interest is that having satisfied the requirements of tradition, the author provides a gentle but undeluded view of her villagers. The priest, Father Roque, is a good but henpecked man who, when vexed, is fond of wondering how his idol, Cardinal Spellman, would deal with his parishioners. "Oh, Lord, let her eat fewer raw onions, let her abstain from onions, let her learn to abhor them," he implores, after listening in tears to his harridan of a housekeeper. Among Father Roque's other trials are an arrogant matron who will not bathe ("Imagine finding yourself naked in a puddle of water!"), a telephone operator who like most of her sisters answers a driving call of curiosity, and virile fishermen who give silent Spanish lessons to gringas. Perhaps most appealing is the all-too-friendly girl who tells Father Roque in the confessional, "Self-denial? But, Father, don't deprive me of the one thing that's free."

Even star-crossed Eulalia can be amusing when she commits morning sickness into the decolletage of a tormenting matron. The author has the characters for a good farce; what she lacks is invention--the talent for that instant of heightened awareness, the moment of falsehood.

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