Ode to the Expatriate Dead

THE MALEFACTORS (312 pp.)--Caroline Gordon--Horcourt, Brace ($3.95).

The spiritual hangover of the Lost Generation has gone on for a quarter of a century now, and the pain is beginning to settle in the neck of the reader. Novelist Caroline Gordon, 60, a onetime expatriate (class of '29-'30) varies the familiar symptoms slightly by making hers a lost-and-found generation novel. In the pages of The Malefactors, the mourning after the big Paris binge becomes a kind of purgatory on the road to religious serenity. In keeping with its semi-autobiographic overtones (Author Gordon and her poet-critic-novelist husband, Alien Tate, are recent Roman Catholic converts), this book is one of those Mary McCarthy-like exercises in intellectual cattiness in which one claws one's literary coterie in public.

The novel's hero, Tom Claiborne, is a burnt-out Southern poet who keeps trying to fire up the clinkers of his talent with alcohol. His wife Vera is a moneybags and a ninny with whom he has been out of love for a decade or more. While Vera breeds Red Poll bulls on their Bucks County, Pa., farm, Tom holds a running bull session with, 1) the spirit of his rakehell father, 2) the voice of his moral and artistic conscience (it speaks in italics), 3) the bittersweet memories of expatriate days centering around a Dionysian, suicide-bent poet named Home Watts, who is clearly modeled on the late Hart Crane.

Cocktail Houri. Bobbing and weaving about the premises are a passel of New York glitterati. There is a highbrow editor of a popular magazine who is keen on starting a new literary journal and wants Tom to round up a staff of "topnotchers" and decorated veterans from the little magazine wars ("You did publish Holloway's first stuff in Spectra, didn't you?"). There is Tom's cousin George, a would-be painter turned psychoanalyst, and George's wife, whose mind is an ambush out of which Freud continually jumps ("Can't the Cross be a phallic symbol?"). All the "malefactors" are somewhat mystified by one of their hellcat playmates from the old Paris days, who has dropped their cultish enthusiasms, become a Roman Catholic, and is running a kind of cooperative flophouse hostel for Bowery bums. Tom pooh-poohs this project and is much more susceptible to a cocktail houri and budding lady poet named Cynthia Vail, who shows him a few of her lines.

Before Cynthia is through with Tom, he realizes that she is a literary climber who plans to use the prone bodies of her name-brand intellectual lovers as social steppingstones. By that time, Vera has joined the flophouse choir of ministering angels, and Tom, in an uncharacteristically humble mood, is ready to see the light of salvation. He sees it in a piece of transcendent silliness and highly dubious analogizing by a nun who tells Tom that his fellow poet's drunkenness, homosexuality and suicide were simply signs of his perfervid search for God, roughly comparable to the quest and anguish of St. Catherine of Siena. At novel's end, Tom goes off to enlist in the growing army of flophouse saints.

Gertrude or P.T.? Apart from such embarrassment as it may cause the author's immediate friends, the moral and intellectual striptease is a legitimate novelistic device for baring some universal truth. In The Malefactors, it becomes an end in itself, exposing only cliquish gossip. Written with sensibility, if debatable sense, the novel inadvertently reveals that the Lost Generation may not have been lost at all, just born to be led astray and taken in. Was its christener, Gertrude Stein, its patron saint after all, or was it P. T. Barnum?

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