Too True

By Christopher Porterfield

SCUMBLER by William Wharton Knopf; 256 pages; $14.95

"Always distrust professed honesty," says Scumbler, an aging, defiantly bohemian American painter in Paris. "It's the ultimate con job." This seems an odd assertion from a character whose narrative is one long profession of emotional candor, sensitivity, creativity and individuality. William Wharton's novel is no con job, however, but something perhaps harder to take: a credo of total, devout and sometimes excruciating sincerity.

Scumbler's name is borrowed from the technical term for texturing over one color with another; usually he shortens it to Scum, for scum of the earth. A self-proclaimed people's painter, he roams the streets on his battered motorcycle, white beard flying, paintbox strapped on his back, searching for subjects. He relishes getting caught up fitfully in the lives of the students, prostitutes, policemen and tourists who gather around his easel. He goes where the flow carries him, down to explore unused tunnels under Paris or off to join some young Americans on an outing in Spain. His paintings, when he manages to sell any, fetch only a few hundred dollars, yet somehow he supports a wife and five children, two of whom attend stateside universities. He is, in fact, an intensely domestic creature, with a compulsion to refurbish old lofts and workshops as a series of "nests."

Old Scum might seem more engaging and colorful if he were not so familiar: another in a long line of romantics who disdain the bourgeois "scramble for outside things like money or status," a lesser descendant of that definitive rogue-genius Gulley Jimson, hero of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. For a man who claims that most of his life has been "a flight from boredom," Scum has an amazing tolerance for bull-session profundities. Scarcely a page goes by without an interpolated haiku-like verse (WE WEAR OURSELVES INSIDE OUT/ TRYING TO BRING THE OUTSIDE IN) or an observation like "The truly most valuable product of this planet is people, loved people."

The pseudonymous William Wharton, author of Birdy, Dad and A Midnight Clear, is himself an American painter who lived many years in Paris, so it is no surprise that his street scenes and descriptions of the painterly process are vividly authentic. His chapter on Scum's attempt to paint a self-portrait that would transport him out of the temporal dimension makes a stirring set piece. But his identification with his character is so complete that the novel seems to be spun from their shared fantasy fulfillment. Difficulties give way before Scum. Whatever he needs comes conveniently to hand, whether building materials, a rich art collector or a nubile girl to tempt his sagging libido.

"I think I hurt people by living," Scum maintains. "My maniacal insistence on living my own life is in itself a terrible violation of everybody else." The reader sees little of such conflict. Insofar as the other characters have any life outside of Scum's ruminations, they are as simple and warm-hearted an assortment of waifs and eccentrics as can be found anywhere this side of William Saroyan.

Indeed, like Saroyan's, Wharton's writing has often seemed like a race between originality and sentimentality. In Scumbler, the sentimentality is way out in front.

--By Christopher Porterfield