Fulsuric Imagination

FOWLERS END (337 pp.)--Gerald Kersh --Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

Just as products containing poison are required to carry a warning label, this book should be wrapped in a band warning the weak of stomach that the characters, language, incidents and atmosphere are apt to induce acute nausea. Yet for those who can take it, the book provides the grisly fascination which clings to any dissection of rottenness. Fowlers End is a fictional section of London so far gone in vice, filth and despair that its inhabitants seem bent on denying that they are human. Hogarth would have shuddered at the thought of setting foot there. Nevertheless the book is a comedy, its gruesome humor capable of starting up belly laughs that guiltily stop in the throat.

Bite the Dusk. Daniel Laverock is a stout-bodied chap in his 20s, of good family and a surpassing ugliness. When he finds himself jobless in the Depression '30s, he gets a job as manager of the Pantheon, a wretched Fowlers End movie-vaudeville house owned by Sam Yudenow. It is Sam who dominates the book, a grasping, greedy, devious monster whose hilariously disarranged speech makes the best lines attributed to Sam Goldwyn read like decorous bits from Fowler's Modern English Usage. He is a devoted movie fan, particularly of westerns: "Bing, bash, bosh--another foreskin bites the dusk!" Sam informs his new manager that he will have to use his nishertive as well as clever tictacs to hold his own among citizens who are given to throwing fulsuric acid and include not a few sexual regenerates. They will steal even the light bulbs in the laventry and often must be subdued by a copper's rubber cruncheon. As for the women, even when they look like cherumbs. "you get first of all a dose, an' afterwards bad public relations.''

Manager Laverock must also be prepared to take the stage when the vaudeville acts fail to show, throw out unruly customers ("A pioneer be, but leave no marks") and assume a host of other duties, i.e., "Frinstance, the Ladies' gets stopped up, don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and put your 'ands into 'em. A little bit soap, a little bit water, everything's gone and forgotten. For dead babies, inform the police." The plot, such as it is, concerns two wars. One is fought between Sam Yudenow and a neighborhood storekeeper named Godbolt from whom he rents his movie theater (formerly a church); Sam hates Godbolt for no better reason than that he cheated him. The other war is fought by Daniel and his ally--a contemptuous cockney handyman--against Sam himself. Anything goes in those battles, from the hurling of dead dogs to the shrewd manipulation of greed to defeat greed.

Ex-Bouncer. Author Gerald (Night and the City) Kersh, 47, is just the man to have written Fowlers End. He was once a bouncer in a London night club, an unsuccessful wrestler, a private during World War II in the Coldstream Guards. His favorite party trick is bending dimes with his teeth, and with his powerful frame and truculent black beard he looks as if he could police Fowlers End singlehanded. Kersh boasts that he dictates but "No rewrite, never touch the bloody stuff later, never look at it." And that may be what is wrong with Fowlers End. It is as shapeless and effervescent as Sam Yudenow's speech, and full of sententious cliches. But few authors now writing could summon the fulsuric imagination or the rubber-cruncheon force to equal it.

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