Books for the Beach

THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF GENE FOWLER by H. ALLEN SMITH 320 pages. Morrow. $10.

The late Gene Fowler was a thinking man's John Wayne. In half a century behind the typewriter, he built a name as a swashbuckling reporter, a capable novelist, a prosperous Hollywood script doctor and a painstaking biographer of such romantic rascals as John Barrymore (Good Night, Sweet Prince) and Jimmy Walker (Beau James). In the course of his career he became something of a romantic rascal himself, a legendary prodigy in bar and bedroom alike.

Fowler boomed out of Colorado in 1918, a tall, ruggedly handsome frontiersman who had earned his journalistic spurs on the brassy Denver Post. He soon became an ornament on William Randolph Hearst's New York American, along with Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner. Fowler's style was purple but compassionate: when Ruth Brown Snyder and her paramour Judd Gray were electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1928, his account of the execution--reprinted in full in this book--was a bitter indictment of capital punishment.

His career gave Fowler happier opportunities. He accompanied Queen Marie of Rumania across the U.S., apparently to the Queen's great pleasure. Later, in Hollywood, he was said to have been at the top of Mary Astor's list of skilled lovers. His monumental benders were even more famous, escapades that featured highball-to-highball confrontations with such stalwarts as Barrymore, Ben Hecht and Jack Dempsey.

Yet this same Fowler was also a devoted family man who remained married to the same patient and adoring woman all his life and who raised a family that cherished him. When a friend judged his biography of a notorious Denver madam too indelicate, Fowler retrieved the manuscript from an astonished publisher and burned it. When he died in 1960, a convert to Roman Catholicism, Fowler was the friend of countless priests and prelates.

Humorist H. Allen Smith, a longtime friend and fellow jackanapes who died last year, records these contradictions with bemusement and affection. He attempts to separate Fowler facts from Fowler fiction, but it does not really matter. As was Fowler himself, this parting toast is full of warm summertime laughter.

SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY by EVE BABITZ 178 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Imagine trying to be a regional writer in Los Angeles, the world's most celebrated suburb of nowhere. Eve Babitz --Hollywood born and raised--tries and immediately runs into a problem. "In Los Angeles," she writes, "it's hard to tell if you're dealing with the real true illusion or the false one." An author who distinguishes between true and false illusions must be carefully watched. Babitz calls the ten pieces in her book "tales," but they clearly belong to the mode of parafictions: a mix of autobiography, journalism and the techniques of the short story.

Still, as they say in Southern California, one must go with the flow. In Slow Days, Fast Company that flow is generated by Babitz's fresh, distinctive sense of place: "Outside it's turned pink and the jacaranda tree is magenta, and next door the fourteen-year-old Mexican girl has finished her paper route and swung her long California-bred legs off her bike and now throws a Frisbee at her brother's head, expertly."

In her attempts to beat boredom and to understand it, the Babitz-narrator does a lot of casual traveling. She provides a succulent description of grape growing in Bakersfield, the noisy ambience at a Dodgers-Giants' game, the dreadful silences during a bad weekend with the rich at Palm Springs, and a beautiful rock star at the moment when her success begins to smell "like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias." In these and other tales, characters glumly "do" quite a bit of heroin, cocaine, Quaaludes and acid. But the author is also witty. On being a waitress for example: "It's got everything you could ask for--confusion, panic, humility and food." Her style is often derivative of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion but Babitz has the one indispensable quality for her kind of work: true glitz.

THE PROVOKED WIFE by MARY NASH 369 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.

A combination of "vaulting ambition," rare talent and "an almost unerring sense of where power and genius lay" made the actress Susannah Gibber (1714-1766) one of the greatest performers and greatest scandals of her time. She was a protegee of Handel, who wrote and reset parts of The Messiah for her extraordinary, melting voice; David Garrick was her friend and acting partner for 20 years; her brother was Thomas Arne, one of the leading English composers of the Georgian period. But she was also the wife of the "disruptive genius" Theophilus Gibber, actor, theater manager, rascal, who in effect rented her charms to a nobleman named William Sloper. Later Susannah ran away with Sloper and lived with him for 30 years. Trial followed trial as her scapegrace and possibly mad husband tried to win back his wife--and her salary. He was eventually discredited, but only after her name had been besmirched.

For two centuries Susannah Gibber has been known as the rival who stole roles from her colleagues. But Biographer Mary Nash's interpretation is more sympathetic. This lively chronicle not only places the theater in context with political and social events of the day but views Gibber's own story less as scandal than as illustration of the 18th century's disastrous lack of rights for women.

As Nash notes, a year before her death Susannah Gibber fulfilled her greatest wish. On Dec. 5, 1765, she and Garrick gave a command performance before King George III. The play was Vanbrugh's comedy The Provoked Wife.

FULL DISCLOSURE by WILLIAM SAFIRE 525 pages. Doubleday. $10.95.

"He flicked her nipple again, which he had discovered helped him think." Whether it is the nipple or the flick that aids in cerebration is unclear. More important aspects of this first novel are equally blurred. William Safire, New York Times columnist and former Nixon-Agnew speechwriter, is familiar with the corridors of power. Here he fills them with the charismatic presence of President Sven Ericson, who is blinded in an assassination attempt. Should the Chief Executive succumb to the demands of his political foes and resign, or should he tough it out? Across the republic, citizens reach for the 25th Amendment on presidential disability.

Safire wrings considerable tension from his plot, and his characters are a memorable--if chilling--lot. Oddly, it is his prose that gets in the way, obscuring the narrative with hoary word play ("time wounds all heels") and a lofty, self-justifying tone. For despite its disavowal of persons living or dead, Full Disclosure seems an act of vengeance on those folks who contributed to exposing Watergate. Richard Nixon may have been as morally blind as Sven Ericson is literally sightless, implies the columnist, but they are both cut in the heroic mold, victimized by circumstance and a hostile press.

A RUMOR OF WAR by PHILIP CAPUTO 346 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $10.

Viet Nam Veteran Philip Caputo admits to joking grotesquely before a search for Viet Cong. "All the time I had that feeling of watching myself in a film," he writes. "I could hear myself laughing, but it did not sound like my laugh." Throughout, the ex-Marine lieutenant has it both ways--fighting the "living room war" as if he were not only participant but viewer. That bifocal vision obfuscates Caputo's arrest for participating in the killing of two Viet Cong "suspects." (Horrified by the threat of court-martial, he entered a guilty plea and was let off with a reprimand.)

In 1975 Caputo returned to Viet Nam to cover the fall of Saigon as a Chicago Tribune correspondent. The collapse becomes his vehicle for righteous epilogue: "We had believed we were there for a high moral purpose. But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted and the purpose forgotten." Caputo has a cassette-recorder memory, and his sketches of men at war are indelible. But his self-portrait is far too ambiguous: Is he trying to justify his own worth as both a fighting man and an antiwar stereotype? The question evokes recollections of another exMarine, Daniel Ellsberg.

O AMERICA by LUIGI BARZINI 329 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

One August day in 1925 young Luigi Barzini, a bookish 16-year-old, sailed to the New World. It was love at first site. The affection transfigures this memoir and rekindles the Jazz Age. Barzini's description of a Long Island party could qualify as an appendix to The Great Gatsby. The author writes like a You-Can't-Go-Home-Again novelist about the "tang of burning leaves," straw hats and starched collars, Civil War memorials tarnishing on the green, and front doors that were never locked. He asks Ring Lardner how he got to be a famous writer. "By not thinking about it, I guess. By not asking famous writers foolish questions," the Great Man answers. But the Great Man is drunk, and Barzini refuses to believe him. He believes instead that "the United States [has] really discovered new miraculous ways of solving all problems." Then comes 1929.

In hindsight Barzini tries to theorize what went wrong. He delivers the book's only predictable insight: Americans have lived too long on a special kind of credit--"inordinately and prematurely" proud of the future the way other people are proud of their past.

By leaving in 1930, Barzini narrowly escaped the plague of disillusion that followed in the wake of the Depression. To the weary European of 68, the U.S. remains the only place he can still find a special amalgam of innocence and expectation.

CONDOMINIUM by JOHN D. MacDONALD 447 pages. Lippincott. $10.

A mighty and rather moralistic hurricane undoes the tacky works of man--notably, several cheap-Jack old-folks' dwellings built in the Florida Keys. John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee thrillers, does not include his detective hero in this large, motley cast. Pity, McGee's cynicism disguises the passion of an exasperated environmentalist. His mesomorphic Floridian would have collared the dredgers and developers, and punched the crooked county commissioners in the chops.

That satisfying fantasy is sadly absent from Condominium--and so is the author's customary wryness. In its place is a self-righteousness that bombinates at needless length on environmental matters, foolishness and greed.

The novel's construction follows the Arthur Hailey model, in which each of several dozen characters is assembled to await doom. But once that catastrophe appears--in the guise of a natural holocaust--the book is impossible to set aside.

Along the way, the reader can enjoy MacDonald's acid descriptions of the Sunbelt boneyards and debate his bleak editorial: given the depredations of the bulldozer, if there is a golden age in America it is far more likely to be enjoyed in Keokuk than in Fort Lauderdale.

A SEASON IN THE SUN by ROGER KAHN 175 pages. Harper & Row. 8.95.

THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE BAT by ROBERT WHITING 247 pages. Dodd, Mead. $10.

Roger Kahn's Season in the Sun is proof that, pace Thomas Wolfe, you can go home again--when home is a five-sided white plate. Kahn, a sportswriter whose columns appear in TIME, returned to baseball during the summer of 1976 to see how his favorite sport was getting along. From April to October, he traveled--to a town in Arkansas where locals watch college students do or die for old John Brown University; to a seedy ballpark in Pittsfield, Mass., where a minor league team plays to empty stands; to a sun-hammered field in Puerto Rico where children try to emulate the feats of the late Roberto Clemente; to Cincinnati, where a country boy named Johnny Bench has parlayed his skills as a catcher into a million dollars worth of endorsements and franchise arrangements. The resulting collection of interviews and observations is an affectionate, and at times painfully accurate evocation of the game--and its recent erosions.

Robert Whiting's book orients the baseball enthusiast in a different manner. Some 20 years after Admiral Perry revealed Japan to the world, an American university professor taught some of his students how to play baseball. Since then, the nation has been hooked. Each year, some 12 million fans jam its stadiums to eat an American import called the hotto dogu and scream "ganbare" (Let's go) as Japan's twelve professional teams battle each other with the ferocity of a samurai.

As old Asia hand Whiting explains, their enthusiasm is understandable. Managers demand that players perform like warriors both on the field and off. Sadaharu Oh, the 37-year-old first baseman for Tokyo's Yomiuri Giants, practices his swing with a katana, or long sword. Perhaps that is why he has hit more home runs than any man alive --including U.S. record holder Henry Aaron. Unsuccessful managers also behave according to the code of Bushido. None have thus far committed hara-kiri to atone for their teams' losing streaks. But most perform its modern-day equivalent. First they apologize to the players and the fans. Then, they resign.

THE PUSHCART PRIZE II Edited by BILL HENDERSON 527 pages. The Pushcart Press. $12.50.

Inglorious Miltons no longer have to remain mute. If no one else will publish their work, they can crank up a mimeograph machine and start their own magazine. Such shoestring operations often print lamentable literature--but not always, as this second annual anthology of pieces from the nation's small presses demonstrates. Its 72 stories, poems and essays (culled from over 3,000 submissions by 498 chiefly non-commercial publishers) show that plenty of talent is afoot in the land, even when readership is small and the pay is meager.

The collection's chief virtue is its diversity. If schools or dogmas have taken root in the underground, they are invisible here. Established writers like John Ashbery, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz and Italo Calvino mingle with unknowns. Short stories run heavily toward personal reminiscences, but there are also several bits of erotic whimsy and the inevitable pale imitation of Donald Barthelme ("A neighborhood dog is climbing up the side of the house"). The editor has even included a hard-biting essay attacking the generosity of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose funds enable many small presses to survive. Thanks to Government grants, the author argues, "it is virtually impossible, this side of idiocy, for a person not to be published." It is possible to be both gloomy and cheerful at this state of affairs. Much bad writing is being inflicted on the helpless citizenry, but authors also have more opportunities to work well. On the happy evidence of The Pushcart Prize II the glut yields up some things of value.

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