Notable

A FAIRY TALE OF NEW YORK

by J.P. DONLEAVY

341 pages. Delacorte. $7.95.

From The Ginger Man on, J.P. Donleavy's novels have been simultaneously cruel, sentimental, repetitive and sporadically funny. Donleavy heroes are ridiculous figures who wallow in self-pity behind their mannered fronts and anesthetize deep personal hurts with sex and alcohol. Like Cornelius Treacle Christian, the errant knight in tweed armor of A Fairy Tale of New York, Donleavy's people move around a lot--"Moving all the time," says Christian, "hoping for a master stroke of solace somewhere."

Treacle Christian (the name alone too obviously signals Donleavy's intent) is a penniless, Bronx-born expatriate who returns to New York from Europe where he has been highly schooled and polished. The inadvisability of his return is made quite evident at the beginning when his wife, a delicate hot-house beauty, dies during the ocean crossing. The implication is that rare and fine things do not travel well, especially to New York.

Christian's New York is alternately tempting and repulsive, "one monstrous insult to the delicate spirit." A funeral director gladly offers to forget the bill for burying Christian's wife if he will come to work as a front man at the mortuary. An industrialist thinks he can use a little class in the jingle department.

All these opportunities come to bad ends because Christian's outrage keeps breaking through his overcourteous exterior. He tells off brand-new widows who complain about their dead husbands' makeup. He is too quick with his fists, which are surprisingly effective. Yet Donleavy's New Yorkers are thorough professionals, blunt and disturbingly honest about their own illusions. Unfortunately, Donleavy is rather slippery about his own illusions. The city, he seems to be saying (especially when he pumps his prose full of Celtic twilight), is no place for a wandering Christian.

THE TANGO BRIEFING

by ADAM HALL

277 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

With four speedy, intricate spy novels behind him, Adam (The Quiller Memorandum) Hall is a small luminary in the genre. In this latest case, Superagent Quiller applies his spectacular professional skills toward the saving of Britain's face in the Middle East. The plot is Hall's most extravagant yet; Quiller takes on two enemy spy groups, the North African desert and a tactical nuclear device. He inhales nerve gas, makes two parachute jumps, and gets pecked by vultures.

Indeed, Hall seems to have forsaken the mysterious side of espionage, at least partly, in favor of technological high jinks. In the course of the novel, the careful reader will learn about the physical properties of telescopic rifles, soaring, nighttime airborne dead reckoning with a computer assist, and highspeed driving. Hall is also expansive on the techniques of clandestine radio communication.

Hall's characters are forgettable, but as a stylist the author seems to be working toward a new kind of thriller rhetoric. His best trick is the no-transition paragraph that picks up not where the action left off but two paragraphs of conventional narration later. The reader has to guess what happened in between, and the overall effect makes him feel that he is the one out there in the desert with the vultures.

SEARCHES & SEIZURES

by STANLEY ELKIN

304 pages. Random House. $6.95.

In Boswell, A Bad Man and The Dick Gibson Show, Stanley Elkin demonstrated lavish verbal and comic gifts, a generosity of spirit and a talent for staging extravaganzas of the absurd. If his plots lurched and his ideas went off like random flares, Elkin's characters commanded attention because of the manic way they acted out their necessities.

In Searches & Seizures, a collection of three novellas, each Elkin hero obeys his needs with results that vary from the bitterly funny to the preposterous and pathetic. Alexander Main of The Bail-bondsman is a kind of clawlike extension of the law's arm--a bondsman who pursues his work with outrageous devotion. A typical Elkin creation, Main promotes himself to legendary status, invoking history, philosophy and myth until he seems like a burlesque Mephistopheles to petty criminals.

Brewster Ashenden, hero of The Making of Ashenden, is quite the opposite. One of the world's richest and most civilized men, he hungers after refinement. Ashenden does not, like Main, take life by the throat. It grabs him. Specifically, he is raped by a bear--a ridiculous fate but one that seems appropriate to break through the charmed circle of Ashenden's life.

In The Condominium, necessity takes a sad and more familiar form. Phil Preminger is a 37-year-old unpromising academic and a heart patient. Like Saul Bellow's famous character, Preminger is a dangling man. But he also gets a chance to seize the day. When his father dies, he seems driven by some homing instinct to move into the dead man's condominium apartment in Chicago. It is a terrible mistake. The young man finds himself disastrously enmeshed in the crotchets and suffocating propriety of the older residents. The story proves that Elkin, one of America's most inventive comic writers, is also adept at old-fashioned realism.

THE MAKING OF GONE WITH THE WIND

by GAVIN LAMBERT

238 pages.Atlantic-Little, Brown. $7.95.

Margaret Mitchell toyed with the idea of calling it Tote the Weary Load. Her heroine at one time was named Pansy O'Hara. Vivien Leigh got the part in the movie only after David O. Selznick had already burned down the massive sets from King Kong and The Garden of Allah to effect the destruction of Atlanta. Selznick's brother Myron, slightly drunk, pulled up to the glowing ruins and triumphantly presented the young English actress: "I want you to meet your Scarlett O'Hara." Leigh remembered that when she got into Scarlett's costume for the test, it was still warm from the previous candidate.

Screenwriter-Novelist Gavin Lambert tells this short history of Gone With the Wind in a level, intelligent prose that contrasts nicely with his extravagant subject. He concentrates upon Selznick, an obsessive perfectionist who brought off the film in spite of the collective industry opinion that regarded it as "Selznick's Folly." Sometimes his conferences would last 48 hours, nonstop. He went through four directors and scriptwriters like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ben Hecht. When the Screen Extras Guild produced only 1,500 bodies to represent the Confederate wounded at the Atlanta Railroad Station, Selznick violated union rules by ordering up 1,000 dummies to swell the crowd.

Selznick never again matched this success. If for nothing else he deserves credit for fighting back the Hays Office on the subject of Rhett Butler's famous "I don't give a damn" exit line. After months of negotiation, the censors agreed that Rhett did not have to tell Scarlett: "Frankly, my dear, I don't care."

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