Liberal's Crackup

By George Dickerson

DIDMAN by John Speicher. 262 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

The haunted WASP protagonists of John Speicher's novels seem to have a fatal weakness for social causes they cannot call their own. In Looking for Baby Paradise, a young Ivy League Lancelot risks life and sanity as a youth-recreation worker among the warring street gangs of New York's Washington Heights. Now in Didman, Speicher's second novel, an alcoholic publishing executive loses himself in a black-militant plan to attack the New York Stock Exchange.

What makes Joe Didman's plight so relevant is that he finally recognizes his own historical irrelevance. Didman's liberal conscience originally made him an outcast among fellow Yale graduates who, in the Silent '50s, sought the maximum security of suburbia while Didman chose a deteriorating New York City, hoping to forward his progressive ideas through publishing. Instead, he finds himself powerless to prevent Government agencies from using his publishing house as a propaganda mill.

He also feels betrayed by the angry poor who now mock his social concern: "He had used it to distinguish himself from the slobs of an earlier decade.

. . . Strange that he should see his liberalism become younger men's Babbittry." He has fallen prey to the schizoid confusion that comes from trying to see both sides of any issue, instead of reacting instinctively.

As the book opens, Didman's private world is collapsing along with his sense of proportion. His wife has divorced him. He has resigned his job and gone to live in the addict-infested slums of the Lower East Side. Tormented by the thought that his options were at best illusory, he becomes a 39-year-old Ginger Man, filled with rage and a ravening sexual lust in a city he wildly envisions as a racial prison camp.

Part victim, part protagonist, Didman drinks and fornicates his way through perversely comic and dreadful, nightmarish scenes, drifting toward a vision of his final destiny: he must become a self-willed pawn of the black-power movement. "Generals, politicians, princes_they killed in quest of power" he maunders to himself. "Why shouldn't an editor? Why shouldn't a middle-class family man?"

In an explosive, fragmented style, Author Speicher documents his man's decline and fall with a furious blend of sardonic humor, and steamy, seamy scene setting in the slums. Speicher's assaults on the folly of both the self-enchanted and the disenchanted are a literary achievement, the transformation of social outrage into art.

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