Bookends: Oct. 13, 1986

PECKHAM’S MARBLES

by Peter De Vries

Putnam; 253 pages; $17.95

Earl Peckham is the serious author of The Sorry Scheme of Things Entire and The Ghastly Dinner Party, “an unsparing delineation of the worm-eaten psyche of modern man as exemplified in the subcutaneous motivations propelling the social lives of urban people whose surfaces are rotten enough.” Sorry Scheme sold three copies. Earl’s girlfriend Poppy McCloud writes best-selling romances like Break Slowly, Dawn and commands $2 million advances. What do these vastly different writers have in common, besides a publisher named Dogwinkle? Well, there is sex, which the pun-loving Peter De Vries, 76, might call the great leveler. There are also the usual convoy of country-club dreadnoughts and assortment of foibles and venal sinning that go into the makings of De Vries’ unusual comic novels. Peckham needs Poppy’s financial support, and she yearns for his intellectual tutelage. What ensues is a zesty tale of patron and patronizer in which the student learns her lessons so well that she gains a highbrow reputation, while Peckham’s next novel is thought to be derivative of Poppy’s daring new style. De Vries’ freewheeling manner remains unmistakably his own and a durable delight.

WANDERLUST

by Danielle Steel

Delacorte; 382 pages; $17.95

Occupied Manchuria, 1934. Wealthy American Tourist Audrey Driscoll should head home. Instead she stays to shelter 19 tiny orphans and deliver the baby of a dying 14-year-old girl. When the smoke clears, she takes the infant home to San Francisco, then spurns a marriage proposal from the only man she will ever truly love in order to nurse her feeble grandfather through his final days. A saint? No, only a Danielle Steel heroine, traveling through life with a stiff moral code and a wardrobe of backless satin dresses. Throughout her 20th book, the author honors the great Late Show tradition: in Dodsworth (1936) Walter Huston sighed to Ruth Chatterton, “Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?” In Casablanca (1942), as the Nazis marched on Paris, Bergman asked Bogart, “Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?” Driscoll tells her lover, “It could never be as beautiful as this again. I want to remember it just as it is now . . . in my mind . . . in my heart.” The screenwriters had actors to give their bromides life. Steel has millions of fans. They are obviously the same sort of folks who like to go into a musical whistling the tunes.

BRIDESHEAD BENIGHTED

by Auberon Waugh

Little, Brown; 221 pages; $16.95

Putting the names Brideshead and Waugh on the same dust jacket may be inspired marketing. But Auberon is Evelyn’s son, and this book has nothing to do with nostalgic memories of aristocrats toting Teddy bears. Brideshead Benighted offers, instead, roughly a decade’s worth of the author’s columns for the Spectator, a British weekly magazine. Waugh does not admire most of his countrymen, including union leaders (“oafs”) and contemporary youth (“a lost generation without even the resources to amuse themselves”). He also takes potshots at the Archbishop of Canterbury, Princess Anne and a long line of politicians. Readers in the U.S. may not always recognize the sources of Waugh’s displeasure, but they are likely to find the invective amusing. The author even has it in for Santa Claus: “a filthy foreign importation.” Britain may indeed be declining and falling, but this book proves that crankiness still reigns.

THE GENTLEMAN FROM

MARYLAND by Robert Bauman

Arbor House; 276 pages; $17.95

After Representative Robert Bauman, a Maryland Republican, was arrested in 1980 on charges of soliciting sex from a teenage male prostitute, his world fell apart. He lost his seat in Congress. His marriage broke up. His faith, Roman Catholicism, demanded a repentance that he did not feel. And his conservative colleagues disowned him while his former enemies on the left showed compassion. This realization, which inspired a newfound fervor for civil rights, forms the centerpiece of his disorganized but surprisingly poignant autobiography. Bauman’s dilemma was that being gay was incompatible with political life. So he wed and started a family but went on cruising for boys, for which he shows scant contrition. He asserts that homosexuals number at least nine nameless other members of Congress and key aides to President Reagan. But other closet gays do not rattle the door quite so clumsily. Bauman was so indiscreet — stopping at notorious pickup spots in a car bearing congressional license plates — that it is hard to understand why he was not seized sooner.