Lions & Cubs

THE THIN RED LINE (495 pp.)--James Jones--Scribners ($5.95).

BIG SUR (241 pp.)--Jack Kerouac--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.50).

America's once promising crop of young postwar writers has so far shown no knack at all for growing old great-fully. Critics, casting about for the causes of failed promise, justly note a complex of external factors: the loss of old, stable values once held in common between readers and writer; the absence of a society sufficiently established to provide the potential novel ist with a rich background of mores and customs for his characters. But much of the trouble is internal. So few younger novelists age well these days because so many of them have difficulty in growing up at all.

No sadder cases in point can be cited than James (From Here to Eternity) Jones and Jack (On the Road) Kerouac.

Each was once hailed, with a certain jus tice, as a literary lion cub whose full-throated roar might one day echo through the sparse jungle of contemporary U.S.

fiction. Yet today, four books and some 2,700 pages later. James Jones, at 42. looks more and more like a one-shot author. And irrepressible Jack Kerouac, 40. twelve volumes and some 2,200 pages from his first success, seems a confirmed one-vein literary minor.

Dirty Deal. Philosophically, Jones has always been that most tiresome of fel lows, a proudly ignorant cynic who is convinced that the inscrutably stacked deck of the universe will always produce a dirty deal. But as a writer, at least in Eternity, he had rare storytelling power. Prizes (the 1952 National Book Award) and plenty of cash (mainly from Hollywood) gave Jones a mobility he might have used to grow beyond his army themes. Unhappily his latest book. The Thin Red Line, like those preceding it, has not reached out to new subjects or ideas. Instead, it turns back again to the army--still, apparently, the only world Jones knows--to document the complete experience of his infantry company in the U.S. battle for Guadalcanal in 1942.

Ex-Private Jones's long, hard-written effort to be the Marcel Proust of C-for-Charlie Company's baptism of fire is not without virtues. His narrative of the company's action switches focus from soldier to soldier, skillfully managing to re-create a steadily developing, complex assault on a pair of Japanese-held hills. Without seeming to interrupt, it examines each individual's reactions to his own private world of pride and fear. But much of what Jones tells of the men--their need to prove their manhood, the revival meeting frenzy that carries them forward, the nearly insane numbness that battle finally brings them--has been touched on often before.

Locked into his peculiarly American narrative style (it might well be called "feces on the barroom floor realism"), Jones ends by piling grisly detail upon grisly detail without being wise or eloquent enough to give the accumulation shape or meaning. He exposes nothing even vaguely profound about the company's inner experience, and most of the time seems hardly more articulate about emotions than the poor numbed soldiers whose traumatic anguish he once shared.

Perpetual Movie. No stacked-deck determinist. Jack Kerouac has been a happily adoring pantheist who regards the world and man as set and characters in a perpetual movie that God, a heavenly Darryl F. Zanuck. enjoys making and watching. Nobody was planning to give Kerouac the Nobel Prize for On the Road, The Dharma Bums or the string of other books about himself (under the fictional name Jack Duluoz) that cheerfully celebrate the joys of bed. bumming and Zen Buddhism. But he had a rollicking, coin-as-you-go poetic style that recreated a direct, personal, uniquely American experience. He seemed secure as a perpetual adolescent--free of thought, full of feeling, blessedly zooming back and forth across the country.

Alas, a cruel thought has intruded upon Kerouac's world. Though he has managed to write a book about this fell experience, it is clear that things will never be the same again--"like those pathetic five highschool kids," he explains, "who came to my door one night wearing jackets that said 'Dharma Bums' on them, all expecting me to be 25 years old ... and here I am old enough to be their father."

What can a beat do when he is too old to go on the road? He can go on the sauce. In Big Sur Jack does. But swilling bourbon and ginger ale doesn't seem to help. As a last straw, Jack makes it down to a lonely cabin on Big Sur, the scenic headland below Monterey where Ur-Beat Henry Miller has found his haven. He communes with nature: a bug he tenderly rescues from drowning, an old mule who looks at him with "Garden-of-Eden eyes."

Eatless Days. Soon he is off again, back to five eatless days on the sauce, back to his San Francisco pals, back to a skinny but accommodating fashion model. "I want us to get married," she urges him, "and settle down to a sensible understanding about eternal things." But the King of the Beats is not fooled. "I see it all raving before me," he mumbles, "the end less yakking kitchen mouthings of life, the long dark grave of tomby talks under midnight kitchen bulbs." In the end he settles for a howling emotional crisis --which on a grown-up would look very much like the DTs.

A child's first touch of cold mortality --even when it occurs in a man of 41 -- may seem ridiculous, and is certainly pathetic.

In Kerouac's case, though, there may be compensations. Think of the books, man, a whole new series: The Dharma Bums Grow Up, The Dharma Bums on Wall Street. Who Knows, maybe even The Dharma Bums in the White House?

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