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LIFE AMONG THE SURREALISTS, by Matthew Josephson (403 pp.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $6). Matthew Josephson roared through the '20s like the New Culture Special, stopping here for some Dada nihilism, there for surrealistic analysis and along the way meeting up with Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Malcolm Cowley, Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane. With these qualifications, his memoirs might be expected to say something significant. But although his anecdotes are amusing and interesting, they are only dimly illuminating. Somehow the fact that Hart Crane was a drunk and had a penchant for throwing his typewriter out a window becomes more important than his poetry. All in all, the book brings to mind a remark of Joseph Conrad's: "In plucking the fruit of memory, one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom."

NIGHT DROP, by S.L.A. Marshall (415 pp.; Atlantic-Little, Brown; $6.50). "Slam" Marshall, famed war correspondent for the Detroit News and a retired brigadier general (Army Reserve), here undertakes to tell what happeaed when the paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions dropped behind enemy lines in the dead of night on Dday. Most of them got lost. They fought or drowned in swamps that air reconnaissance had failed to reveal. They stumbled through Normandy's hedgerows in uncoordinated fashion, fighting from ambush and being ambushed. Some cowered on bridges and in apple orchards. Others became heroes. Old Soldier Marshall frequently becomes a bore describing intricate flanking movements (the maps are always on another page), but he offers some vivid vignettes. Among them: "The battle scene in modern warfare is commonly an empty landscape. To feel fire all around, see comrades fall by the score, yet not one living target in sight is the average lot of the infantryman."

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