Eagle & X-er

THE BIBLE SALESMAN (257 pp.)--Alma Stone--Doubleday ($3.95).

Every so often a book appears that celebrates the charm of scruffiness, the gaiety of the seedy, the high-held honor of those who fish about in trash barrels.

Saroyan wrote this sort of ragpickers' polka, and so, in a quieter tempo, does Novelist Alma Stone. Her poor are the people of Manhattan's upper Broadway--watery-eyed men propped on their elbows in old. moneylosing bars, solitary old ladies who roost on park benches and share their tuna sandwiches with cats.

The author is so ruthlessly imaginative that she does not need pity; she knows, for instance, that the old men in the bars keep themselves happy betting on the number of pregnant women who pass by, or clocking the trips a college girl on a date will take to the ladies' room. The old ladies are all charmingly indomitable; they perk up their spirits by writing letters to Adlai Stevenson, or by shocking the sensibilities of stuffy sons who want them to come and live in Darien. Novelist Stone believes firmly in the outlandishness of the usual. An eagle grounds itself in disgust after colliding with a construction workers' crane, and the locals try to fly the bird on a leash. The "X-er"--the man whose job it is to paint big Xs on the windows of condemned buildings--feels himself the personification of doom, gets so worked up over X-ing out so many Fifth Avenue mansions and pleasant brownstones that he has a nervous breakdown. The most helpless, indomitable. charming ragamuffin of the lot is Leroy, a young Negro boy who plays tunes on glass bowls, sells Bibles, and talks to God.

When he learns of a no-good who spends all his family's relief money on booze, he solves the situation by supplying the man with liquor obtained drop by drop from empties rescued from a bar's trash barrel.

Novelist Stone's merry misery is touching and frequently funny, but it is also disquieting in a way that the author cannot have intended. The trouble is that, wrongly or not, today's readers are not schooled to accept the gift of charm graciously. Charm seems false, because reality--so runs the sophisticated dictum --is unpleasant. Actually, it is a matter of distance from the subject: from afar the faces of the poor (or of the rich) have no features; at a middle distance, they can be charmingly picaresque; at close quarters their skin is seamed with dirt.

There is some truth to be seen from each vantage, even though the current prejudice is to see only what is visible under the magnifying lens. The Bible Salesman hangs uneasily between success and failure because its author, choosing the middle distance, is never quite able to do what a dealer in the picaresque must: make her readers forget momentarily that there are important truths that can be seen only from the other perspectives.

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