Books

Along toward the end of his morbidly engrossing and brilliantly written novel, A Walk on the Wild Side (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, $4.50), author Nelson Algren says of his characters, "Hardly a stone so small but was big enough to trip them up and when they fell they fell all the way ... They slept only with women whose troubles were worse than their own. In jail or out, they were forever shaking somebody else's jolt, copping somebody else's plea, serving somebody else's time ... Lovers, secfiends, bugs in flight, the tricked, the maimed, the tortured, the terribly fallen and the sly. All those who are wired to nobody, and for whom nobody prays."

When they fell they fell all the way, but none of them had far to fall. From Dove, the illiterate stud who showed off his prowess for pay, to the double amputee who was his nemesis, every character in this picaresque novel of depression horrors is a gone goose from the start. But one must deny that no one prays for them: Algren does -- which is the saving grace of this seamy excursion into New Orleans' lower depths. In following his tragi-comic hero, Dove, in his flight from nothing to nowhere, Algren's passionate pity shines through the murk of flop houses, bagnios, jails, hobo jungles and box cars like a beacon, not of hope -- Algren is a realist -- but of true-seeing anger. And what's he mad at? Primarily, middle-class hypocrisy, smugness, a blindly selfish world which fine-grinds the already pulverized. The book is pungent medicine for the small of heart.

We, like Omar, have long wondered what the vintners could possibly buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell. The answer is not in Philip Wagner's American Wines and Wine Making (Knopf, $4.50), but just about every other bit of U. S. wine lore is. The book is a combination history, buyer's tip sheet, do-it-yourselfer and paean to the Yankee grape (with French roots). You'll be happy to hear, as we were, that commercial wine production in California alone has zoomed to 150,000,000 gallons of the jeweled juice a year, and that making wine in your own pad is about as simple as boiling water and twice as much fun. A thorough digestion of this volume, coupled with Alexis Lichine's tight little classic, Wines of France (Knopf, $4), will probably tag you the wisest winophile in the neighborhood.

The world of Ring Lardner spanned more than the geography of his travels from his birthplace, Niles, Michigan, to his final home on Long Island. It encompassed the peace and solid contentment of upper-middle-class life at the turn of the century; the ripsnorting heyday of Chicago newspapering, high life and high jinx with the gilded darlings of the Twenties; and final culmination, at 48, during the chaos of the Thirties.

Ring's was a varied and highly productive life. As humorist, columnist, sports reporter, he set styles in writing and created a baseball mythology which still exerts powerful influences on today's writers. All this, plus his excursions into play writing, his marriage, his happy home life, his triumphs -- and then his troubles (liquor, TB) are lovingly and painstakingly recreated by a biographer who grew up in Lardner's home town of Niles. It will take more than a casual interest, however, to tempt one to plow through the 400-odd pages of Donald Elder's Ring Lardner (Doubleday, $4.75). The prose is too measured, the details too detailed, the view too adulatory to make the author of You Know Me, Al come to life, though the facts are doubtless all there.

What Aubrey Menen started with The Abode of Love (Playboy After Hours, July, 1956), Cyril Pearl has finished with his fetchingly-titled treatise, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat (Bobbs-Merrill, $3.75). Both books -- but particularly Pearl's -- do a great job of exploding, with considerable charm and wit, "the flimsy but enduring legend of Victorian virtue." Our starchy impression of Victorian England is not supported by facts, says prober Pearl: it was promulgated by the Victorian novel, "a formalized, sentimental parody of life, purged of all passion and flesh." He paints his own picture of 19th Century England: a racy picture of prostitutes, pornography, nude mixed bathing on public beaches and a surprisingly earthy, near-Elizabethan attitude toward sex. The girl with the swansdown seat? Well, it's not quite what you're thinking: the girl was known as Skittles, she was a whore of immense popularity, and among the myriad attractions of her sumptuous house was a beautiful john. The seat of same was padded -- with swansdown.

Summa Cum Laughter (Waldorf, $3) is a collection of jokes and cartoons, some funny, some not so funny, culled from college humor magazines during the last two years. The undergraduates exhibit a zestful -- but sometimes soggy -- enthusiasm for their work. Example: "She criticized my apartment, so I knocked her flat." Another cartoon compendium, this one spoofing the trials of travel, is Happy Holiday (Dodd, Mead, $3.50). Most of the gags are as tired as a tourist, but the book is joyfully saved by the witty, whimsical writings of such guys as Benchley, Leacock, Perelman and Ogden Nash. Benchley's French for Americans and Perelman's Rancors Aweigh are particularly quick cures for deck-chair doldrums or a couple of howling feet.