Munitions Man

THE SQUARE PEG -- John Masefield-Macmillan ($2.50).

Frampton Mansell munitions manufacturer, art patron, bachelor, a snappy dresser who cultivated his whiskers to bring out his resemblance to Sir Francis Drake. His phobia was ineficiency; his favorite pastime, composing ads for the latest wrinkle in Mansell ma-chine guns: "Mansell's Deadly Death Rose". . . A child can use it . . . Invaluable to all Dictators . . . A Corpse for a Ha'penny. . . .

Mansell buys a dilapidated Tudor country house as a wedding present for his beautiful, sweet-tempered fiancee Margaret. When he fences out the fox hunters because he is sorry for the foxes, he brings the whole countryside down on him. Margaret is killed in an automobile accident the day before the wedding. Mansell sinks his grief into a feud with his neighbors. He hauls trespassers into court, buys up the remaining hunting coverts, announces that he will build a munitions plant, a model community, a machine gun range, a Buddhist temple.

One winter's day a Russian ballet comes to the village. One of the dancers is the spit-&-image of Mansell's dead fiancee, is, in fact, her cousin. Mansell marries her. In 1955, at book's end, he is still a munitionsmaker (interested in ''anything that shortens war and limits the rule of generals in human affairs"), but is more famed for his London ballet theatre, his model garden city of St. Margaret's, which blankets the fields where fox hunters once jumped or fell.

Hard-working John Masefield, Poet Laureate of England, is famed for such narrative poems as The Everlasting Mercy and Reynard the Fox, has written 42 books of poetry, plays and fiction, has never achieved a first-rate novel. His latest attempt is neither satire, souffle nor good red socialist herring, but a baffled British book.

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