Kiss the Donkey

THE MAN WHO LIVED BACKWARD (461 pp.) -- Malcolm Ross -- Farrar, Straus ($3.50).

In the first fine shuffle of the New Deal, Writer Malcolm Ross was one of the bright young Ivy Leaguers who went to Washington to take a hand. Yaleman Ross sat to the left of the dealer and played his cards ably. Soon he was publicity chief of the NLRB and a mover & shaker in U.S. labor policy. After a rough ride as chairman of the controversial FEPC, "Mike" Ross quit government in 1946, moved to Florida and went back to writing books.

To judge by The Man Who Lived Backward, the Florida sun has reduced Author Ross's butter-pat leftism to a soft, liberal mush. He spreads it thick on every page of the novel. Yet, at the same time, Ross clearly feels a futility in the brand of liberalism he professes. In this confusion of feelings, he apparently could not decide whether to satirize or eulogize his intellectual liberal hero; so he did both. The result is a hectic sort of politico-literary game of tail-the-donkey, combining some elements of post office. What rescues the book from total muddlement is his ironic conception of the intellectual liberal as "the man who lived backward."

Second Guesses. Ross's liberal, Mark Selby, was born in 1940, a bad year fof men of good will, with worse to come. Something in his being felt "a reluctance to face the future," a reluctance "which I am forced to believe my life must represent." In a physiological panic, he began to live backward in time.

On the way back toward the 19th Century, Mark missed Roosevelt; he was only seven when a golden age of U.S. liberalism ended (for him) in 1933. But he was 17 when he first saw Wilson, and was soon as fervent a disciple as any other liberal of his years. To make a living, Mark had to sacrifice progressive principles for profiteer practice. He suffered liberally, but lived royally by his ability to second-guess the stock market. He also discovered that helping people didn't pay. For trying to save a ship which went down, he got only abuse.

Last Rush. To salve his conscience as he grew older and the calendar ran m reverse, he joined the pickets in the bloody Homestead steel strike of 1892, and actually went so far as to jostle a Pinkerton. After that, Mark devoted the rest of his life to visiting Walt Whitman, dressing French wounds in the Franco-Prussian War and preaching Wilsonian democracy on park benches to young men who weren't even ready for Grover Cleveland.

Mark died at last in 1865, shot by a guard in the alley back of Ford's Theater when he tried to rush in to stop the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

If Author Ross had been satisfied merely to pin the tail on his pseudo-liberal donkey, his book might have been a very witty one. As it is, he all too often confuses the silly ass with some of the hard-headed heroes of U.S. history, and starts throwing him political kisses. A man can look mighty foolish kissing a donkey.

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