Dot Ole Davil Voodoo

THE CROSS OF BARON SAMEDI (502 pp.)--Richard Dohrman--Houghton Miff I In ($4.50).

This is a promising first novel that breaks a lot of its promises. It promises a richly informative account of voodoo and the Haitian mind and temper, but much of it is just tom-tommyrot. It promises distinction of thought, but a jungle growth of involuted sentences often chokes meaning in mannerism. It promises a clash between the life of instinct and the life-in-death of inhibition, but the conflict is reduced to a kind of nagging suburbanality about a dissatisfied wife. Still, the tropical scenery is far more fascinating than most suburbs.

Hero Owen Jedd Wiley is a Vermont-born Marine lieutenant stationed in Haiti during the early '30s. He smokes little and drinks less; the tropics wear but do not beat him. On Stateside leave, he meets a Smith girl named Isabel Bogardus, and highbred, high-strung Isabel shocks Owen by bedding down with him amidst the ancestral stones of an old cemetery. They return to Haiti man and wife.

Around the Tepee. That Owen has made a mistake is apparent to all but Owen. At the drop of a skillet, Isabel quotes romantic tag lines from Sir Walter Scott, interspersed with bloodcurdlingly cute dialogue of her own. Sample: "You good husband. I bad wife. I keep ugh tepee." Around the ugh tepee gather subsidiary characters who have the power of total reverie, and pages may pass before a simple question gets a simple answer.

"Gone and gotten myself gravid," announces Isabel one day. For Owen the joy turns to horror as his wife becomes obsessed with the notion that her pregnancy has been forced upon her by the black magic of the land's fierce sensuality. She flees to a sorcerer and dies in abortion. For a year, Owen's "chaste maple syrup soul" is frozen. Then he attends a frenzied voodoo initiation, slips into an illicit affair, takes to drink, and the tropics claim another victim.

The Artist as Undertaker. Novelist Dohrman follows his ostensible theme--that Nature makes men weak--at the expense of his real one, learned too late by Owen: "If we are weak, we are not strong, and what we are, you see, ruins everything." In voodoo lore, Baron Samedi is the chief of the legion of the dead; he is represented by a wooden cross decked out, scarecrow fashion, in a black bowler hat, morning coat and goggles. In an ironic way, the baron is Author Dohrman's severest critic. How much closer can a writer get to the portrait of the artist as an undertaker?

What lends the book its interest, despite shortcomings, is a scattering of mixed-blood, split-level aristocrats, culturally nouveau riche but genealogically ancien regime, and some well-described scenes of a dismal garrison town with bored military wives and senior officers well past their World War I prime. Above all, there is the unusual setting. Despite the fact that Novelist Dohrman, 29, has spent only one week in Haiti, he manages to convey that the jungle to him is partly D. H. Lawrence's "blood-consciousness" and partly O'Neill's "dat ole davil sea."

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