Actor as Writer

THE FRONTIERS OF THE SEA by Peter Ustinov. 247 pages. Atlanfic-Littleff/e, Brown. $4.95.

Peter Ustinov, an actor who writes, prefers to be known as a writer who acts. "Acting is the quickest way of making a living," he says. "Writing is a longer-term thing. It is also--from the purely day-to-day angle--a kind of insurance policy."

If he is really seeking an insurance shelter, it seems clear that at 45, Ustinov has few worries. Successful as actor, director, composer, mimic and raconteur, he has also established himself as an author of respectable talent and prodigious output. Besides 16 plays (including The Love of Four Colonels and Romanoff and Juliet), he has tooled a better-than-average novel, The Loser, a collection of short stories, Add a Dash of Pity, and two volumes of better-than-average caricatures.

What Ustinov has done, though, is dissipate his talents to the point where his prose fails for lack of discipline. This new volume of nine short stories is an example. Ustinov sometimes draws his characters so broadly that they are not entirely believable on the printed page. In Dreams of Papua, a tale of high policymaking in Washington, there is a good deal of wry satire, but it deteriorates into dispirited burlesque, though given the proper setting and makeup, Ustinov could probably make something hilariously funny of it.

Nevertheless, the stories on balance are often captivating, and two of them alone make the book well worth reading. The best is the title story, which tells of the deep friendship between a testy old Spanish fisherman and an Albanian sailor, neither of whom ever learns to speak the other's language. In Life Is an Operetta, Ustinov uses his expertise to write a deceptively simple account of a Hungarian singer who will linger in memory as the quintessential Hungarian female on the make.

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