Minor Major

A PASSION IN ROME (352 pp.)--Morley Callaghan--Coward-McCann ($4.95).

In the lexicon of the dust jacket, writers do not write novels any more; they write major novels. The phrase, once the reviewer's last cymbal crash before his closing chord of adjectives, has become a generic tag, like "short story" and "hot dog." Thus cold frankfurters are cold hot dogs, not cold dogs. Accepting the publishers' ploy, critics must now confront a new literary phenomenon: the insignificant major novel.

The most recent book to attain its majority before it left the publisher's delivery room is A Passion in Rome, by Morley Callaghan, a 58-year-old Canadian, whose work has the compelling attraction, to lovers of literary underdogs, of being largely unread. Alfred Kazin, a critic of high reputation, has called its author "a fine artist," and Edmund Wilson, whose stature is even more Olympian, wrote last year that Callaghan's work "may be mentioned without absurdity in association with Chekhov's and Turgenev's."

Readers aware of these critical benisons will be baffled long before they finish Passion. Could Kazin have been joking? Is it possible that Wilson does not care much for Chekhov and Turgenev?

Callaghan's hero is Sam Raymond, a high-priced photographer who despises his craft and yearns to be, naturally, a painter. At 39, he has decided that his canvases are worthless and his life pointless. He flies to Rome to do a picture story on the dying Pope Pius for a Canadian weekly, and there, wandering about late at night, meets a drunken, beautiful girl. Sam asks directions of her, and she drifts on. But later, though he did but see her lurching by, Sam realizes that he is in love. He decides to find the girl and salvage her. In the effort to save her, he finds a justification for his own life. At the Sistine Chapel, facing Michelangelo's Last Judgment, the failed painter delivers a soliloquy. " 'Okay, Angelo,' he said to himself grimly. 'I came into that chapel of yours expecting a big lift. That finger of God of yours came right down and you stuck it in my eye. Maybe my canvases should all be thrown out. Or some landlady will use them to cover holes in the wall in some cheap rooming house. But maybe it's as big, even a bigger thing to do something with a life.' "

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but in this earnest, dull book, Callaghan proves only that Sam is a sod and the girl is a tedious alky. Chekhov, anyone?

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