Dleams of Grory

By R.Z. Sheppard

FOREIGN DEVILS by IRVIN FAUST 295 pages. Arbor House. $7.95.

Norris Blake is a flamboyant turn-of-the-century newspaper correspondent in the Herbert Bayard Swope tradition. Sidney Benson is a modest mid-century schoolteacher clarinetist, separated husband and blocked novelist of the 1960s who floats on nostalgia rather than tradition. Blake is a character in Benson's novel-in-progress. Both are characters in Irvin Faust's fourth novel, Foreign Devils, a typically Faustian fiction that generates considerable warmth by rubbing heroic fantasies against drab realities.

In a word, quixotic. Generous of mind and deed, Sid Benson tries to be reconciled with his wife, visits his aging mother at her candy store, and unsuccessfully attempts to comfort a divorcee whom he picked up at a middle-aged singles dance. Benson's is a life lived at half-staff. The flags are high and snapping only in his imagination, a quaint attic of '30s and '40s swing tunes, names and faces from old copies of Photoplay, World War II stories and oddments of history.

Born Losers. Sometimes this clutter gets an enlivening jolt from the real world. For Benson this occurs when President Nixon visits China--when "The Foreign Devil re-enters the Forbidden City. After 72 years." In 1900, the year of the Boxer Rebellion, the foreign devils included everyone from Europe's great powers, the U.S. and Japan, all looking for their piece of the enormous fortune cookie. It is the Boxers, those Chinese Robin Hoods who thought their magic would protect them from Western bullets, who most excite Benson's imagination. By creating Norris Blake, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's old New York World, Benson can indulge his fascinations and own romantic yearnings.

The Boxers are natural material for Author Faust's particular talent: the humane handling of born losers whose illusions run away with them. He does too little with it, however. The book is a loose braiding of Benson's rearguard action against middle age with Blake's daring adventures during the Boxer Rebellion. "Fictionally oriented history" is what Benson calls his Blake novel. Like Faust's own Willy Remembers (1971), in which a 93-year-old veteran re-creates an addled version of the Spanish American War, Sid Benson tries to recapture a simpler, more dashing time.

Faust has always relied on cultural trivia to create atmosphere. In his five-short-story collection, Roar Lion Roar (1965), the artifacts of popular culture actually possessed Faust's characters like real demons. In Foreign Devils, however, the Boxers, Benny Goodman, the basketball fixes of 1951, etc. have sunk to the level of mere nostalgia. One of America's chief natural resources, no doubt, but grossly overexploited at the moment. *R.Z. Sheppard

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