And You, James Joyce

BAXTER BERNSTEIN (239 pp.)--Stephen Seley--Scribner ($3).

"Baxter, tingting, looked, tingting, at tingting, the tingting, clock, ting-ting." Random thoughts churned around in Baxter's stream of consciousness like rampaging underwear in an electric washing machine. "Goddamn you, Archibald Mac-Leish!" he thought: "And you, Dos Passes ... So Hitler must be stopped? . . . Oh, but--and--oh, but--what're yuh doin'? . . . Oh, the lousy lousy lousy LOUSY mess! Why isn't it 1922 instead of 1942? And I--twenty-two, walking through the Tuiler-o-o-o with a copy of Ulysses . . ." And where was Lisa, murmuring with her "pink-lipped, delible pout"? In her place was a "dolled-up drab" named Inez, upon whose knee Baxter laid "a pitying hand." She squealed: "Oh, sugar, we're sure gonna have a time!"

The reader is sure gonna have one, too, if he plunges any deeper into this indiscriminate flood of words. Baxter Bernstein recounts the anguish of a not-so-young Yank who, on the eve of World War II, feels bound to make a confession: although he has always meant to write a book that "would be reviewed by Edmund

Wilson," he has instead hidden his light under a bale of mistresses and drowned his talent in gallons of Canadian Club. Through almost the whole of this novel, Hero Baxter is at odds with himself, is in constant danger of being unable to keep his seat on a barstool, or is busy escaping the hot clutches of girl friends and trollops. Through it all, Baxter permits the reader to share his every picayune thought and gesture, e.g., "He dropped the match. It fell--thhhh--into the cuspidor."

It is now 24 years since James Joyce gave the world, in Ulysses, his great experiment in stream-of-consciousness writing. Baxter Bernstein not only recalls the horde of little streamlets that bubbled up in the master's wake but proves once & for all that though the great original is still alive and glowing, its imitations are only fit to be dropped thhhh into the cuspidor.

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