Little Boy with Wind Machine

GO TO THE WIDOW-MAKER by James Jones. 618 pages. Delacorfe. $7.50.

When recently interviewed, James Jones had left his home in Paris and had gone vacationing in Florence--"to escape," he grunted, "the book reviewers." There is, alas, no escape.

His fifth and latest novel, called a "masterwork" by his publishers, is too big to ignore. Publicity assures a healthy increase of his fortunes (he earned more than $2,000,000 from the 6,500,000 copies that his first four books sold), but neither ballyhoo nor sales can refute the conclusion that Jones is a one-novel writer. His first book, From Here to Eternity (1951), at least projected a brutally candid image of the professional soldier between wars. Jones wrote it at white wrath out of his own experience in the peacetime army in Hawaii. The wrath is gone now; what remains is spillover Spillane combined with horrid Hemingway.

Melted Ears. Decameron (Ron) Grant, 36, is a playwright with the genius of an O'Neill and the sexual insatiability of a Sukarno. He is strictly a four-letter man, and he has manhood problems and a domineering mistress--an older woman who with her husband nurtured the young playwright's talents in his more golden days. To rediscover himself, Grant heads for the Caribbean to go skindiving. In addition to a shark or two, he spears beautiful Lucky Videndi, and as he tries to work out a modus vivendi with her, he alternates between ocean and bed. In fact, Jones devotes so much of the book to plumbing such depths that the reader gets a queasy feeling of sea-sackness.

Jones's writing has if anything grown worse since Eternity. Thus, his narrative power: "He had never been so sexually excited in his life; the heat of it was so great he was afraid it would melt his ears, ignite his hair and burn the top of his head off." His gift for simile: "Grant suddenly felt amiable again, like a man who has just been relieved of a serious constipation." Metaphor: "I want to know what makes the wellsprings of human character tick."

Refuge in Bravery. And what is the philosophical crux--or crotch--at which Jones stabs--or grabs--in the end? Sex, naturally. All men, don't you see, are really small boys playing at being men. They are all victims of penis envy. As little tykes, they worried that their organs would never grow as large as Daddy's. "I think maybe the whole world is all like that," Ron tells Lucky. "Russians, Chinese, Americans; Presidents, Prime Ministers, Heads of State; everybody. All of them trying so hard to grow up to Dad's, Dad's thing. And remaining small boys inside because they just can't."

This is the theme of the play which, at the end of the novel, Grant sets out to write. "It all takes place on board this schooner, this schooner, cut right in half down the middle, on the stage," he explains. "We'll even haul up sail, and everything. Have a wind machine in the wings, see? Does it sound kooky?"

Lucky is impressed. "It doesn't sound kooky to me," she replies. "I think you're a fine man . . . Would you like to make love to me?"

"I sure as hell would."

And there goes the wind machine.

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