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SWEET THURSDAY (273 pp.)--John Steinbeck--Viking ($3.50).

John Steinbeck respects the underdog, but he melts uncontrollably before a no-good, boozed-up bum. His sentimental eulogies of riffraff began with his first successful book. Tortilla Flat (1935), continued in Cannery Row (1945), and appear again in Sweet Thursday, which is really a return visit to Cannery Row. It reads like stuff that has been salvaged from the wastebasket. All the characters in Sweet Thursday (who live in Monterey, Calif., Steinbeck's home territory) have a lot in common: rotgut whisky in their bellies, leather in their hides, gold in their hearts and bats in their belfries.

In the cast which peoples Steinbeck's skid row are the following weirdies:

P: A madam called Fauna who runs the Bear Flag and once masterminded a flourishing South American export trade in shrunken human heads. She keeps a former competitor's noggin in a desk drawer to remind her of the good old days.

P: A homosexual cook at the Bear Flag who is writing a novel called The Pi Root of Oedipus.

P: A middle-aged Ph.D. named Doc, previously characterized in Cannery Row by Steinbeck as "half Christ and half satyr," who spends a lot of his nondrinking time stimulating a tankful of octopuses into apoplexy, for research purposes.

P: A beachcombing seer who lives on sea lettuce and stolen candy bars.

P: A Los Angeles hoodlum named Joseph and Mary Rivas, who graduated from "switch knives, snap guns . . . and, for the very poor, socks loaded with sand" to ownership of the Lee Chong Grocery, and now keeps busy trying to figure out a way to cheat at chess.

P:Hazel, a male deadbeat, who owes his name to a remarkably unobservant mother. He lives with other deadbeats at the Palace Flophouse and is deeply disturbed by his horoscope, which indicates that he is destined to be President of the U.S.

Plot? Yes, there is one, of sorts. Scholarly Doc is in the middle-aged dumps. Hazel, Fauna and the rest of Cannery Row decide that he needs a woman, perhaps even a wife. While guzzling a liquid killer called "Old Tennis Shoes," they pick the girl, a scrappy newcomer at the Bear Flag named Suzy. Suzy is unsure of herself. It seems that she was rejected as a child. As she tells it to her friend Hazel:

"Once, when I was a kid. I made an ashtray for my old man and old lady . . ."

"They like it?"

"They didn't need no ashtray."

With her ashtray complex working overtime, Suzy makes a bachelor girl's flat out of an abandoned 16-ft. boiler and starts slinging ham & eggs at the local hash house. Just when the matchmaking plans appear to be spiked. Cannery Row focuses its cloudy mind long enough to bring the two lovers together by an action as silly as it is surprising.

Sweet Thursday is a turkey with visibly Saroyanesque stuffings. But where Saroyan might have clothed the book's characters and incidents with comic reality, Steinbeck merely comic-strips them of all reality and even of very much interest.

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