Surrogate Shaw

VOICES OF A SUMMER DAY by Irwin Shaw. 223 pages. Delacorte. $4.95.

What ever became of Irwin Shaw? Anyone who read fiction 20 years ago knows why the question is important; during the '40s Shaw wrote a large body of short stories good enough to be mentioned with those of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. They were brief, stinging fragments, told in a voice wholly Shaw's own. They were not, most of them, about joy, but they seemed to have been written with joy; this was writing done wonderfully well for no more complicated reason than that the author took pleasure in doing it.

Then, in a literary disappearance as abrupt and unexplained as Ambrose Bierce's, Shaw vanished. He was replaced by someone else named Irwin Shaw, who produced the swollen, solemn war novel The Young Lions. The craftsman's joy in a job done as well as a man could do it was missing; the book's two elaborate plots alternated like the footfalls of a tired man clumping upstairs to bed.

Long Musing. The surrogate Shaw then wrote The Troubled Air, a weakly novelized tract about witch hunting in broadcasting, and two ladies' novels, Lucy Crown and Two Weeks in Another Town. The present novel appears five years after Two Weeks in Another Town. The wait was worthwhile; it is only the novel that is not.

The hero of Voices of a Summer Day is Benjamin Federov, a New York businessman who is "no longer young, and. although at a distance his slimness and way of moving gave a deceptive appearance of youth, close-up age was there, experience was there, above all around the eyes . . ." Federov spends a summer afternoon watching his 13-year-old son play baseball in a Long Island beach town, musing between innings about the life that has made his eyes all crinkly with experience.

The trouble is that Federov, an unperceptive man, is not a very good muser. His memories have an odd qualify of seeming secondhand, as if he had anthologized them from Jerome Weidman's up-from-the-Lower-East-Side novels--he even contrives to appropriate the durable episode in which the poor Jewish boy waits tables at a party for rich, contemptuous Yalies and their glossy dates, hardens his honest heart and resolves to get his.

Lost Position. The game ends; Federov's reflections dissipate, having amounted to no computable sum of meaning or meaninglessness. The reader, if he finishes the novel, finishes it without the faintest notion of why the author began it. To this riddle there is no clue in Shaw's recent pronouncement that a writer "is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper; he is on a journey and he is reporting in, giving his position at certain moments of that journey: 'This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.' " Shaw may think he is on Long Island, but this seems doubtful; he has spent the past several years living a comfortable expatriate life in Klosters, a Swiss ski resort. Of course Shaw may have been talking about the geography of the soul, but there is nothing of the inner eye's witness in his novel about Federov. His writing once had this quality; it no longer does, and the loss is severe.

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