Mandarin & Mucker

DEATH OF A HIGHBROW (256 pp.)--Frank Swlnnerfon--Doubleday ($4.50).

A quiet voice on the BBC announced that Tom Curtal was dead. In his darkened study, over a supper of claret and dry biscuits, 79-year-old Graham Stanhope was at first shocked, then breathed in relief, "Thank God! Thank God!" With Curtal dead. Stanhope became Britain's unchallenged grand old man of letters.

Best of all. he was finally freed of the terror of Curtal's malicious pen.

Thunderous Picnic. The death ended a literary vendetta as implacable as any feud in the Kentucky hills. Tall, handsome Stanhope and rude, arrogant Curtal spent a lifetime competing for women, fame, friends, disciples and the minds of men. Atheist, lecher and revolutionary.

Curtal had been an "unquenchable noise'' ranting against society with books as poorly argued as they were eloquent. With an egotist's insight into the vanities of other men, he had jeered at Stanhope as "the lonest lago, who kept his finger wet to catch the faintest wind of change"--a verbal wound that still bled after 40 years.

Where Curtal was "like thunder at a Dicnic," Stanhope resembled high tea under the vicar's elms. Born into the Establishment and determined to stay there, Stanhope found the leisure to write poetry and critical appreciations of Corneille by marrying wealthy Adelaide ("A good wife. An invaluable partner. Such a relief when she died"). Stanhope was not without weapons: his unflappable poise was buttressed by arctic sarcasm that could condescend to Curtal as the "idol of mediocrity" who picked up other men's ideas as a robin does crumbs.

Angry Bastard. Unruffled, and showing no scars. Stanhope is prepared to play the game by mouthing conventional praise of the dead Curtal on a BBC memorial program. But he is not prepared for Curtal's illegitimate son, an angry young man who is writing his father's biography and comes to probe the old antagonism. Curtal died, his son tells Stanhope, by laughing himself into a fatal hemorrhage while mimicking Stanhope's mandarin manner. The son's brutal questions lead Stanhope back into a past as dangerous as a minefield, where every step triggers explosive insights and revelations. By the final pages. Stanhope has progressed from prig to pitiful human. As his own life ebbs, he slowly realizes that Curtal's death had lost him not a hated enemy but a warm friend.

Veteran Author Frank Swinnerton is 78, about the same age as the leading character in this new novel, which is his 35th and one of his finest. A friend of such giants as Bernard Shaw. E. M. Forster and John Galsworthy. Swinnerton's talent was somehow overshadowed by his contemporaries. H. G. Wells ruefully confessed to Arnold Bennett that Swinnerton "achieves a perfection that you and I never get within streets of." In Death of a Highbrow, the perfection is still evident in the cool, muscular style, and in his merciless view of man's behavior relieved by what Bennett called Swinnerton's "mysterious touch of fundamental benevolence."

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