The Frayed Cuff

THE BENDER by Paul Scott. 320 pages. Morrow. $4.95.

Losers, by and large, tend to be weepers. And weepers tend to be bores. But George Lisle-Spruce, the down-at-heel non-hero of British Novelist Scott's newest book, is neither. He watches himself sinking for what may be the last time with a detached compassion that is as refreshing as it is rare in an age much given to voluble self-pity.

At 43, George is a shambling compendium of symbolic British upper-class weaknesses--most of them unwittingly acquired, along with his fringe status as a gentleman, to appease the memory of his socially insecure, non-U mother. He has never held a real job. He is sterile. For years he has been trading on a gentleman's voice and a gentleman's manners, and the kind of charm which, like the -L-400 a year income he inherited during World War II, no longer goes as far as it once did. "At some point, now impossible to define," he reflects, "his face had ceased to inspire confidence of the right sort, even in bars." With no prospects George hangs on, in present-day London, a kind of frayed cuff whose very existence is a reproach to the bustling stuffed-shirt society he inhabits.

A somewhat Galsworthian catastrophe forces George to the first commitment of his life. His cheerful young niece is got with child by, of all things, a plumber's helper. He decides he must help her. He concludes that the only way is to kill himself so that the girl will get his small nugget of otherwise untouchable capital. But he drinks too much and his ten-gin resolve to die dissolves into a sentimental 20-gin binge.

What might have been just one more dreary cup of bitter British literary tea is laced with George's rum ruminations on himself and his family's past. In the space it takes many a modern writer just to clear his throat, Scott sketches in a man's whole lifetime and draws in detail a haunting character--part bounder, part victim, part humble appraiser of how badly he has played the hand that life has chosen to deal him. Blessed or not, Scott seems to say, the poor in spirit will never inherit the earth. But, possessed of the fewest illusions about themselves, they alone can afford to view the world with pure compassion.

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