Destination: Hammock

PARIS ORIGINAL (340 pp.)--Alexandra Orme--Houghton Miffliin ($3.50)

DESPERATE SCENERY (302 pp.)--Elliot Paul--Random House ($3.75)

Some books are destined, not for the ages, but for the nearest hammock. Elliot Paul's Desperate Scenery and Alexandra Orme's Paris Original are light summer fare, earmarked for twin hammocks stamped "His" and "Hers." Author Paul who often as not writes about Paris, this time has written an autobiographical boy-faces-life yarn set in the remote reaches of 1910 Idaho and Wyoming. Authoress Orme's novel is a girl-meets-love story set in the feline, high-fashion world of postwar Paris. Each book lightheartedly holds a slightly askew mirror up to human nature and smiles bittersweetly at what it sees.

Yoghurt in Paris. At 32, pretty Kristina Czaykowska, the heroine of Paris Original, is a receptionist in "Maison Deschamps," a Parisian stronghold of haute couture. She feels more like a shopworn beauty than a sleeping one. In the spring of 1947, she is three years away from her native Warsaw and eight years estranged from a husband who opted for the "People's Poland." She lives on yoghurt and corn bread, scurries home each night to her lonely, thimble-sized flat, and keeps telling herself that Paris is wonderful. But the only Paris Kristina knows, the goldfish bowl of the "Maison Deschamps," she hates. Through its ornate rooms dart and swish mannequins, sellers, fitters, designers and spying competitors. To Kristina the whole place is as zany and false as the brassiere on the statue of the sphinx in its show window.

"If you want to stay alive," a friend advises her, "you must fight, not sneer. You might think that this is Paris, a safe capital, but it is like any place--the jungle." More bent on escape than combat, Kristina runs into an old flame, Jas Ostrowski. A few glasses of vodka make Jas talkative. "Now, the good girls differ only in one respect from the bad ones," he says. "You lose a tremendous amount of time on them." Kristina is ready and eager to make up for lost time when her long-gone husband shows up with the same idea. By novel's end. Author Orme shapes this triangle into a shiny, new wedding band for Kristina. Catty, intimate, high-pitched and highly perfumed, Paris Original is a woman's happy hunting ground, but no man's land.

Salon info Saloon. Desperate Scenery is as far from Paris Original as a saloon is from a salon. It is the seventh volume in a series called Items on the Grand Account, 63-year-old Elliot Paul's leisurely recital of his life and times. Paul was 19 and bumming through the Far West on close to his last dime in the summer of 1910, when the Jackson Lake Dam, spanning the Snake River in northwest Wyoming, went out. With an engineering brother in the family and some previous surveying experience of his own, Paul found it easy to land on the payroll of the Reclamation Service and work on the new dam. Desperate Scenery tells the rough-and-rugged story of how a 60-mile wagon road was built over mountain country, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of supplies, plus men and horses, were transported to the dam site before snow blocked the routes, and of how, with temperatures ranging to 55DEG below zero, a crew of 300 put together the new Jackson Lake Dam.

But the stories Paul tells best, as always, are of the japes and high jinks of Elliot Paul and his pals. To his tales of boozing, floozying and just plain horsing around, Paul contributes an uninhibited tongue, a gift for total and Technicolored recall, and a pleasing tendency to sound like a book-length monologue by W. C. Fields.

Desperate Scenery contains rib-tickling accounts of Paul pounding the piano for silent movies, playing shortstop against "The Boston Bloomer Girls," and tousling with an unfriendly Chinese ("I learned for the first time how strong and difficult a small Chinese can be, when apprehensive"). The book climbs to its ribald and humorous peak with a description of the night the brothel burned down in Ashton, Idaho, and "the quick thinkers routed out those who chanced to be relaxing in the bedrooms ..." Happily, sporting life a la Paul never gets quite so outrageous that it cannot be thoroughly enjoyed by hammock-readers of either sex.

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