Books: Tired Traveler

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME (438 pp.)—Elliot Paul—Random House ($3.75).

Roving, rotund Elliot Paul has focused his shrewd eyes on a good many different communities in his 58 years. What he saw in the doomed Balaeric village of Santa Eulalia made moving reading in The Life and Death of a Spanish Town. One short street on the Left Bank furnished material for a bawdy but penetrating look at pre-war France in The Last Time I Saw Paris.

A few years ago Author Paul shifted his gaze to his homeland, started a multivolumed story of his life. In My Old Kentucky Home he takes a look at the third U.S. community on the Paul autobiographical itinerary: Louisville.*

The carryings-on centering around Mrs. Kirby’s boardinghouse on West Chestnut Street, where 18-year-old Elliot Paul lived for seven months in 1909, are as lurid and complex as the plot of a Faulkner novel, and though they are reported as unembellished fact, considerably less convincing. Scattered among accounts of excursions to local bars and bordellos, political picnics, Shriners conventions and early jazz sessions, are the tragedies of boardinghouse friends such as Donna Guillermina, a wandering Spanish aristocrat who died of eating too much burgoo at a political rally. Minor Paul characters are shot by suspicion-crazed alcoholic spinsters, held under the water in bordello bathtubs, driven half-mad by ghostly apparitions, slashed from cheekbone to chin by jealous wives.

To make his memoir consistently interesting, Author Paul would have had to present himself as a compelling personality, or his characters as three-dimensional realities. Readers will give him low marks on both counts. Eighteen-year-old Elliot appears only as a set of eyes & ears collecting gossip about the people around him; and the people themselves are named, framed with an anecdote or two, then written off in a few pat parenthetical paragraphs. With a long way to go before his peripatetic life story is brought up to date, Author Paul already sounds a little weary of the whole project.

* First two: Linden, Mass., Trembles, Mont.